Plans for Latino Voting District Would Carve Up Valley : Supervisors: Proposals for expanding the board call for combining the Pacoima and San Fernando areas with communities 25 miles to the south.

Maps of two competing proposals to increase the number of seats on the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors hinge on an intricate dissection of the San Fernando Valley.

The proposed plans, to be considered by the supervisors Tuesday, show an anvil-shaped section of the minority-dominated northeast Valley tied by a narrow, snaking swath of land to downtown Los Angeles and Latino enclaves more than 25 miles to the south. Designated in both plans as the new 1st District, Pacoima, part of Lake View Terrace and the city of San Fernando would be linked to Vernon, Maywood and, in the case of one plan, Huntington Park.

The proposals, which would expand the five-member board to either seven or nine members, are to be placed on the November ballot after being reviewed by the U. S. Department of Justice. If one of the expansion plans is ultimately approved by a majority of voters, the additional supervisors would be elected in 1994.

The plans’ architects--who include attorneys, political consultants and community activists--say that to achieve their goal of crafting a second Latino district, they had to connect the large number of Latinos in the northeast Valley with Latino neighborhoods elsewhere.

In the process, they say, they bound the Valley’s poorest residents with people who have similar concerns and goals, meaning that the interests of those residents could be well-represented by a single supervisor.

The first Latino district emerged from a 1990 voters rights lawsuit and is now represented by Supervisor Gloria Molina.

With Latinos making up 40% of the county’s population, supporters of the proposed boundaries say creating another such district is more than justified.

But detractors say the plans pluck communities from their surroundings and are an example of gerrymandering at its most absurd.

Imploring his colleagues to reconsider when they took their first vote two weeks ago, Supervisor Mike Antonovich said either version “shatters . . . the San Fernando Valley.” The plans were backed by a 3-2 margin in the supervisors’ first vote, but require a second vote for final approval.

Under the two proposals, other areas of the northern part of the county would also be divided in ways that ignore geography.

* In the seven-district plan, the remainder of the Valley is split, with most of it hitched to the Westside and Beverly Hills areas. The nine-district plan leaves the Valley largely intact, although still tied with some of the Westside, including Malibu and Santa Monica.

* In the nine-district plan, the Santa Clarita Valley would be split between a district located largely in the San Fernando Valley and one that includes the Antelope Valley. The seven-district plan attaches the Santa Clarita Valley to the Antelope Valley--as it is under present district boundaries.

Interviews with dozens of northeast Valley leaders and other residents found sharp differences of opinion about the proposals, ranging from enthusiasm to anger.

Those who support the county proposals say the new supervisorial district boundaries would be no more absurd than the existing districts, which many feel were drawn to intentionally dilute the Latino vote. While acknowledging that a more compact Valley-oriented district might have had some advantages for residents, they say similarities--both economic and ethnic--between the northeast Valley and southeast Los Angeles also exist.

“If you really look at the areas closely, I think you would find there aren’t that many differences,” said Ruben Rodriguez, a Mission Hills resident and chairman of the Latino Coalition for Fair Redistricting of the San Fernando Valley. “They both probably follow a railroad track; housing is probably late ‘40s, ‘50s vintage; there are some industrial sectors intertwined there, and the economic situation is similar.”

Pressing issues in the areas at the proposed 1st District’s northern and southern extremes undoubtedly include bilingual education, health care for the poor and job training, Rodriguez and others said.

But Maywood City Councilman Bill Hamilton said that the same is true of much of the county and that tying his city to San Fernando--a place he has rarely ventured--seemed silly.

“I’m not really sure that there’s too many spots in Los Angeles that aren’t the same in those ways,” Hamilton said. “If you’re going to have a new district, why not block it off where you can do something with it. . . ? A long, drawn-out, stretched-out piece of map just doesn’t seem quite equitable.”

Maywood, Vernon and areas around downtown Los Angeles are more industrial and crowded than the northeast Valley, other opponents agreed.

The northeast Valley, while increasingly urban, is still “more countrified” in many ways, said Sylmar resident Sam Cordova, Antonovich’s appointee to the Boundary Review Committee. Cordova quit the committee last fall, saying he was disgusted by the emerging proposals.

Cordova and other opponents said that if the new districts are approved, northeast Valley residents will be separated from their neighbors and grouped with people who resemble them only ethnically. They fear that their needs would be ignored by a representative who also had to attend to the urban problems of the inner city and southeast Los Angeles.

Blacks outnumber Latinos 2-to-1 in the parts of the northeast Valley included in the proposed 1st District. But black leaders said the proposed district would weaken their deep political roots in the area by grouping them with communities where there are few if any blacks. Under either proposal, blacks would represent no more than 5% of the registered voters in the proposed 1st District.

“It would almost cause African-Americans up here not to even be noticeable,” said Jose De Sosa, president of the San Fernando Valley branch of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People.

In fact, De Sosa said, only an expansion of the Board of Supervisors to 11 members would benefit blacks by allowing them to have significant numbers in at least two districts. Otherwise, he said, the status quo would be better than either of the proposals.

Fred Taylor, a Panorama City resident who owns a religious bookstore in Pacoima, agreed with De Sosa that the proposed expansions are ludicrous, but disagreed that a further increase in the size of the board would be better.

“If you go to 11, it’s going to be a madhouse down there,” Taylor said. “That’s what’s wrong with the City Council; there’s too many people to get anything done.”

When pressed, even the maps’ architects acknowledge that they did not use sociological considerations or other issues in deciding to join the two far-flung areas. Instead, they said, it came down to pure numbers and the strictest possible interpretation of a court ruling.

In 1990, the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational Fund won a voting rights lawsuit against the county, which resulted in the first Latino-majority supervisorial district. MALDEF maintains that new districts must come close to not only the 72% Latino population of that district, now represented by Molina, but also to its 48% Latino voter registration.

Forming two Latino districts under that interpretation would have been impossible without capturing the large ethnic population of the northeast Valley, said Dennis Luna, a Brentwood real estate attorney and one of Supervisor Ed Edelman’s appointees on the boundary committee.

“If you eliminate that neck, it would be impossible from a legal standpoint,” Luna said, referring to the narrow strip of land that characterizes the proposed district. “Everybody would have liked to have drawn a more compact district, but the law sort of mandates this look.”

Under the two proposals, the second Latino district--the 7th--would incorporate East Los Angeles and parts of the San Gabriel Valley.

MALDEF prefers the nine-district plan because Latinos fare slightly better. If there were nine districts, Latinos would constitute 72.5% of the population and 47% of the registered voters in both the 1st and 7th districts.

If there were seven districts, Latinos would account for 72% of the population and 42% of the registered voters in the new 1st District and 63% of the residents and 42% of the registered voters in the 7th District.

“We did not have enough voter registration in the northeast San Fernando Valley to realistically think we could get a Latino elected in the next eight years or so” from there, Rodriguez said. “We need to gain representation now.”

Supervisorial District Proposals

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors has endorsed two redistricting proposals-one that would expand the five-member board to seven and one that would expand it to nine. Before either becomes final they must be approved by the U.S. Department of Justice as well as by voters in November. The plans connect Latino areas in the San Fernando Valley with downtown Los Angeles and communities as far south as Vernon and Maywood. Map shows only Valley-area districts.