Flynn Assails Plan to Put Rival Back in His District : Politics: Other Oxnard residents besides Mayor Nao Takasugi want to be included but aren’t getting the chance, the supervisor says.

Ventura County Supervisor John K. Flynn charged Monday that a vote by the Board of Supervisors to put Flynn’s chief political rival back into his district would be “gerrymandering at its worst.”

Flynn, who has accused two supervisors of conspiring to defeat him in the spring election, said that a board vote scheduled for today to move the home of Oxnard Mayor Nao Takasugi back into Flynn’s district would amount to political favoritism.

Other Oxnard residents want to be included in Flynn’s new district, but their desires have not been considered by the board, Flynn said in a news release distributed late Monday.

“We should not have preferred and least-preferred status for anyone,” Flynn said. “No one person is more important than another.”

Flynn said he would not vote on the proposed realignment today, and would instead probably leave the hearing room because he does not want to be a part of the discussion.

Most other supervisors have said they are inclined to honor Takasugi’s request for a minor boundary adjustment because the mayor’s home was accidentally cut out of Flynn’s Oxnard-based 5th District.

“Mr. Flynn has indicated that it was inadvertent,” Chairwoman Maggie Erickson Kildee said. “So if there’s no reason to have him out, let’s put him back in.”

Supervisor Maria VanderKolk is proposing a boundary change that would move parts of five streets from her 2nd District back into Flynn’s district. Exactly 587 people would be affected, she said.

“I did this solely because I knew this was an issue we needed to deal with,” VanderKolk said. “John had asked me if I minded putting the mayor back into his district. Then he changed his mind. . . . It was just a simple error, and it needs to be corrected.”

Takasugi is the only one of the county’s 10 mayors cut out of his supervisorial district during a three-month reapportionment that ended Oct. 1.

Flynn has said he had nothing to do with excluding Takasugi, and county administrators who drew the new boundaries have agreed.

Takasugi, who is considering a run against Flynn in the spring, has asked the full board to move the 5th District boundaries two blocks. Flynn had pledged to make the change, the mayor said, then suddenly switched positions three weeks ago.

Flynn confirmed that he told Takasugi that he would ask the board to place the mayor’s home back in the 5th District, instead of leaving it in the 2nd District, which is centered in Thousand Oaks.

But Flynn said he changed his mind because so many other people called him who were upset that they had been excluded from the 5th District--and no one was asking that they be put back in.

Phone calls from his former constituents were prompted, the supervisor said, by a newspaper report that an angry Takasugi would ask supervisors for a boundary adjustment and, if that failed, consider moving to another house so that he would be eligible to run against Flynn next year.

Two weeks ago, after most supervisors said they were inclined to honor Takasugi’s request, Flynn charged that VanderKolk, Erickson Kildee and Supervisor Vicky Howard had violated the state’s open-meeting law by allegedly agreeing among themselves to go along with Takasugi’s request.

Flynn also accused Erickson Kildee and Howard of conspiring with Takasugi and former supervisorial candidate Carolyn Leavens to defeat him in the spring election.

Howard, Leavens, Takasugi and Erickson Kildee all said they had no idea what Flynn was talking about. They said they had never discussed Flynn’s political future with each other.

Flynn said Monday that he is not backing away from those charges, but that he did not want to discuss them further right then.

“It doesn’t mean anything about the prior statements,” Flynn said. “I only want to focus on the narrow issue of the mayor of the city of Oxnard . . . the issue of changing the district lines.”