Polanco Urges Expansion of Board of Supervisors

An influential state legislator moved to shake Los Angeles’ power structure Friday when his office announced that he would seek a ballot initiative next year to expand the five-member county Board of Supervisors.

Three previous attempts to increase the number of elected supervisors in Los Angeles have been roundly defeated at the polls. Advocates unsuccessfully argued that the increasing the board from five supervisors would make county government more representative and more accessible. Currently, each of the supervisors represents nearly 2 million constituents.

But a top aide to state Sen. Richard Polanco (D-Los Angeles) said Friday that next year is the right time to try again, with the 2000 census on the horizon and, with it, the redrawing of boundaries for supervisorial districts.

“It’s the smart time to do it,” said Bill Mabie, Polanco’s chief of staff, noting that the current supervisors represent constituencies the size of three congressional districts. “I think people recognize that there’s a correlation between the ratio of representatives to the population and the quality of representation.”

Supervisors greeted the news with mixed reactions, and Mabie said Polanco has yet to consult with any other lawmakers. But Mabie said Polanco plans to meet with community groups before proposing the precise number of seats by which he believes the board should expand.

Polanco’s mechanism for the change is a novel one--he would seek state legislation to place the issue before Los Angeles County voters. It also comes as at least one of two commissions plans to place proposals before voters next year to expand the Los Angeles City Council.

Observers said the county effort, if it is not overshadowed by a proposal to expand the City Council, has a long-shot chance at altering the way local government is run.

“It almost inevitably would increase Latino representation and produce better public policy and change the culture of the board,” said Fernando Guerra, a professor at Loyola Marymount University. “When you have so few people [on the board] it tends to be more about the relationships between people and not about politics and policy.”

But relationships were the subtext of Polanco’s move. Polanco and other Eastside lawmakers in Sacramento have been stung by the Board of Supervisors’ decision to scale down County-USC Medical Center, by its backing of former Sheriff Sherman Block over Sheriff-elect Lee Baca and by some supervisors’ support for a ballot initiative ending the use of sales tax revenues for subway construction.

Polanco will also be pushed out of his Senate seat in four years by term limits and there was widespread speculation that he would run for any new seat on the board.

Mabie denied that the action was retribution for the senator’s disagreements with the current supervisors. As for whether Polanco would run for a new supervisorial seat, he added, “Who knows?”

Supervisor Mike Antonovich seized on Polanco’s expected interest in the seat to attack the proposal.

“The voters have continued to reject that because increasing the size of government is not the answer,” Antonovich said. “In this case it also appears that Richard wants to make a job for himself.”

But Board Chairwoman Yvonne Brathwaite Burke said an expansion push during the regular redistricting was a “great idea. . . . The districts are too large.”

“One-million, eight-hundred-thousand people,” Burke said, referring to the number of constituents each supervisor is estimated to represent, “is really too many people. You can’t really provide local government.”

Supervisor Don Knabe was cautiously supportive of a small expansion, but worried that too much of an increase would derail efficiency.

“You count to three and you can do virtually anything here,” he said, referring to the few votes needed for a majority on the five-member board.

Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, whose leadership of a recent local measure to ban subway construction on the Eastside--among other places--angered Polanco, would not comment. Supervisor Gloria Molina could not be reached for comment.

When Molina took her seat eight years ago after a discrimination lawsuit required the county to create a Latino majority district, she pledged to expand the board.

But her efforts ran into obstacles that could still derail any new expansion efforts, and no politician has seriously tackled board expansion since the idea died at the polls in the early 1990s. Efforts in the two previous decades were also defeated.

The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund in 1992 actually opposed a small expansion to seven board members, saying that it would dilute Latino voting power. MALDEF supported a more dramatic expansion to nine members, which the board unanimously put before the voters in 1992.

Two-thirds of the voters rejected that plan, and a smaller majority also rejected an effort to create an elected executive office for the board.

Tony Chavez, an attorney at MALDEF, said it was unclear whether demographic changes over recent years would still leave a seven-member board with a single Latino representative.

But Alan Clayton, a redistricting expert for Latino lawmakers who has regularly advocated board expansion, says his analysis shows that seven seats now would add at least one additional Latino-majority district.

Clayton cited a bumper crop of newly elected Latinos in Sacramento as evidence that Latino voting power has risen dramatically in the last six years.

“It’s become the winning edge in major elections,” said Clayton, who has spoken to Polanco’s office about board expansion.

Dennis Luna, an attorney who was former Supervisor Ed Edelman’s appointee to a commission to study expansion in the early 1990s, said that effort died at the polls because of “a sense of apathy” in the political establishment.

On Friday, he said he hoped the new expansion efforts could prevail--but, he said, “it would require a campaign.”