Remap Plan May Shift State Balance of Power : Politics: Lines drawn by Supreme Court panel spell trouble for incumbents, improve Latinos’ prospects.

The state Supreme Court on Monday released a plan for new California congressional and legislative districts that portends electoral disaster for incumbents of both parties and could shift the balance of power in the Legislature to the Republican Party.

The tentative maps would improve prospects for Latinos in the Los Angeles Basin, but would not go as far as Latino political groups have demanded.

At least four of the state’s seven new congressional seats would be placed in Southern California under the plan.

The proposed new district maps for 80 Assembly seats, 40 state Senate districts and 52 congressional seats were drawn by a panel of three retired judges appointed by the court after Republican Gov. Pete Wilson and the Democratic-dominated Legislature could not agree on a bipartisan reapportionment plan.

The special masters, as the court’s appointees are known, rejected plans submitted to the court by legislators, the governor and outside interest groups in favor of drawing their own lines.

The high court justices scheduled oral arguments in the case for Jan. 13 and indicated that they will adopt final district lines--incorporating any adjustments to Monday’s lines--by Jan. 28. Those district lines will govern the state’s elections from 1992 through the end of the century unless the Legislature beats the court’s deadline by passing a plan that is signed by the governor--or musters the votes to override a veto.

Release of the court’s tentative lines might prompt legislators from both parties to resume negotiations because so many incumbents would be displaced. In some cases, the court’s masters placed two or three incumbents in a single district.

Previously, the Senate had reached a bipartisan agreement that was close to winning the governor’s signature, but similar negotiations in the Assembly broke down after the Democratic Speaker, Willie Brown of San Francisco, said Republicans and the governor would settle for nothing less than a guaranteed shift of power to their party.

Senate Leader David A. Roberti (D-Los Angeles) said the panel’s maps looked “like scrambled eggs.” He said he could not tell from his first look where he would be running for reelection.

Said Assemblyman Ross Johnson of La Habra, a former Assembly Republican Leader, as he gazed at the wall maps in a Supreme Court conference room: “Individual legislators, Democrats and Republicans, are not going to be too happy with the impact on themselves and their reelection prospects.”

But it appeared that more Democrats than Republicans would be complaining once their experts take the court’s nonpartisan demographic information and run it through the Legislature’s computers, which will tabulate how many registered voters of each party are in every district. The numbers are expected to be available today.

“We think we like it--just looking at the lines,” said Joe Shumate, a political consultant who works for Wilson and other Republicans.

The panel’s first step was to abandon the old districts that favored Democrats, and draw new districts that keep ethnic minority communities together. The masters also appeared to try to keep cities, counties and geographic regions intact.

This differs markedly from the partisan strategy employed nine years ago when Democrats drew the plans to meet incumbent desires and lame-duck Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr. signed them into law just before leaving office.

The effect of the new method can be most easily seen in the congressional districts for West Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley. In those areas, the court plan appears to have just two Democratic-leaning congressional districts where party leaders had hoped to place four. One district would stretch from Santa Monica to Los Feliz, taking in parts of areas now represented by Democrats Mel Levine, Henry Waxman, Anthony Beilenson and Howard Berman.

Levine is running for the U.S. Senate, and Berman would probably run for a San Fernando Valley seat that the plan would create. But Waxman and Beilenson would be forced to run against each other, move to more Republican districts nearby or retire.

Similar disruptions would occur throughout the state. Assembly districts in West Los Angeles that are now heavily Democratic were stretched north and east into more Republican areas. In Orange County, conservative Republicans Gil Ferguson and Nolan Frizzelle might have to battle each other to stay in office.

Two Bay Area Democrats in the Assembly--Jackie Speier and Ted Lempert--appear to be in a single district, as do Sacramento Democrats Phillip Isenberg and Lloyd Connelly.

In Congress, a Democratic delegation leader--Vic Fazio of West Sacramento--would see his district pulled to the north and made much more Republican.

Rep. C. Christopher Cox, a Newport Beach Republican, said the congressional districts looked as if they had been “put in the Cuisinart.”

“The district I now represent has been cut up four ways,” Cox said.

The court plan would also return to the practice abandoned by the Legislature 10 years ago of forming each state Senate seat by combining two Assembly districts. In the process, one Democratic expert said, it appeared that Democrats would lose two or three seats in the Legislature’s upper house.

The plan appears to create one new Latino congressional seat in central Los Angeles, an additional Latino Senate seat and one or two more in the Assembly. Black lawmakers appear to be left with their current numbers, or might be at risk of losing a seat.

Asian-American voters are not in sufficient concentration anywhere in the state to assure them a seat of their own, but a San Francisco Assembly district would have a population that is 35% Asian.

The plan falls short of the standards demanded by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and others. The special masters said they rejected a MALDEF proposal for uniting Latino voters because it jumped too many geographic boundaries and split too many cities and counties.

The masters said they rejected three alternative Assembly and congressional plans submitted by the Legislature because of many “misshapen districts which bypass contiguous populated territory to join distant areas of population together.”

The masters praised a plan presented by a bipartisan panel appointed by Wilson but said it failed to adequately address the political needs of ethnic minorities that are protected by the federal Voting Rights Act.

Times staff writers Ralph Frammolino and Mark Gladstone contributed to this story.

BACKGROUND

The federal and state constitutions require that election districts be redrawn to have roughly even populations, based on shifts detected every 10 years in the U.S. Census. The responsibility for redistricting falls to the state Legislature. This year, the state Supreme Court took over the job after Republican Gov. Pete Wilson vetoed three alternatives submitted by the Democrat-dominated Legislature. The court appointed three “special masters” to draw new districts for the Assembly, state Senate, Board of Equalization and U.S. House of Representatives. Their maps were released Monday. The high court intends to adopt the masters’ boundaries, possibly with minor modifications, by Jan. 28 unless the Legislature and governor agree on a plan of their own by then.