Latinos Seek New Community College District : Education: The board is urged to redraw areas to increase minority voting in Oxnard, El Rio and Nyeland Acres.

Leaders of a Latino voting-rights coalition urged the Ventura County Community College District board on Tuesday to create a new district that would increase minority voting strength.

Under the proposed plan, nearly 59% of the people in board President Pete Tafoya’s district would be Latino if the map were redrawn to include Oxnard, El Rio and Nyeland Acres.

The district now includes Oxnard, Port Hueneme and Point Mugu, with Latinos making up about 55% of the population.

“The proposed district is compact, is of equal population to other districts and does not illegally fragment the Latino community,” said Marco Antonio Abarca, spokesman for the Ventura County Coalition on Redistricting and Reapportionment.

The trustees decided to wait until next month to take up the issue again since member Timothy Hirschberg was not at the meeting.

For 10 months, the trustees have been mulling over the new boundaries for the five voting areas that make up the Community College District, as required by law. Districts must be redrawn by March based on 1990 Census figures.

So far, they have come up with five options, including one that places Oxnard and El Rio in the same area while placing parts of Port Hueneme and Point Mugu in a district with Thousand Oaks. All the options include shrinking the size of the Simi Valley district by about 15,000 people because the population in the area has grown larger than the other districts in the county.

The trustees still have not agreed whether they will redraw the boundaries themselves or leave the remapping decision to an independent council. But Abarca and fellow coalition member Karl Lawson said they want to make sure that the Latino vote is made as strong as possible in the Oxnard district.

“In the past our community has been deliberately split up,” said Abarca. “We want to try to make our voices heard.”

In September, Abarca and Lawson were instrumental in persuading the County Board of Supervisors to adopt a plan that added thousands of Latinos to Supervisor John K. Flynn’s Oxnard-area district, making it the only supervisorial district in the county where the majority of voting-age residents are Latino.

“We were very heartened by the action taken by the County Board of Supervisors,” Lawson said. “We believe it would be beneficial if the college district followed suit.”

Tafoya said he supports the remapping plan that places El Rio and Oxnard in one area, although he would lose Point Mugu and part of Port Hueneme from his district.

“That is some of the give-and-take that has to come about in maintaining areas of interest,” Tafoya said before the meeting. “I don’t have any major objections.”

However, Trustee Gregory Cole, who represents the Thousand Oaks area, said before the meeting that he objects to the plan and called it gerrymandering.

“As far as my district, it makes the least sense,” said Cole, adding that the plan strips him of the Santa Rosa Valley while giving him the coastal areas. “If we are drawing lines, I don’t think it should have anything to do with ethnic (numbers). It should have to do with population, boundaries and common sense.”

Cole said he had reservations about the board redrawing the district. He said it would be more appropriate for an outside committee to decide the boundaries.

“We shouldn’t have board members redrawing their own lines for reelection,” he said. “An independent body should draw the district lines.”