ORANGE COUNTY PERSPECTIVE : Important Voice for Ethnic Harmony

When the Orange County Board of Supervisors established the county Human Relations Commission more than 20 years ago, its primary mandate was to investigate complaints about housing discrimination. The commission still provides that valuable service, but over the years it has added other tasks to its portfolio, such as compiling an annual list of hate crimes.

Because of the commission’s important role in the community, the supervisors were right last week to vote to give it scarce county funds for at least one more year. Compared to the overall county budget, now more than $3 billion, the $106,000 given to the Human Relations Commission is not much. But it is a mark of the effect the bankruptcy has had on county officials that even relatively small sums are receiving close scrutiny. That is wise; after all, the county-run investment pool lost $1.7 billion.

The need for the commission was underscored only days before the supervisors voted. Fountain Valley police said that for months two 17-year-old boys, both white, had been driving by a Latina housekeeper almost every day while she waited at a bus stop en route to work and had thrown hot coffee, pennies, cans, tomatoes and rocks at the woman.

The housekeeper does not speak English and said she did not understand most of what the youths yelled at her. But police said the teen-agers admitted they had yelled racial epithets. The woman went to police only after being struck below the eye by a rock allegedly thrown by one of the youths. Undercover officers staked out the bus stop and arrested the two after they threw pennies at the housekeeper, authorities said.

The Human Relations Commission has tried to stop such incidents by going into high schools in Orange County and getting people to talk to each other. It has also run a worthwhile program of honoring students who lead efforts to promote an atmosphere of tolerance in their schools.

The commission works elsewhere in the community as well. One man urging the supervisors to continue funding the commission was Ted Heisser, an African American who told of finding a burning cross outside his home several years ago. He said commission members had helped him deal with the incident.

Orange County has grown increasingly diverse in recent years. The mutual jostling of men and women of different races, religions and sexual orientations has sometimes erupted into violence. We need to get people to talk with and understand each other, not hurl insults or stones. The supervisors’ recognition of that goal and the Human Relations Commission’s role in attaining it was welcome.