Best Option: Vote

One irony of the federal voting-rights case against Santa Paula is this:

If the Justice Department succeeds in forcing the city to begin electing City Council members by district, Latino residents could be virtually guaranteed two seats on the five-member board.

If it fails--and if the Latino community organizes to register and motivate its superior numbers to vote--they could elect all five.

After investigating for two years, the U.S. Department of Justice last week sued Santa Paula, alleging that its at-large voting system has perpetuated racial discrimination by preventing Latino candidates from being elected to the City Council.

We agree that Latino residents historically have been underrepresented on the council. Certainly the complexion of Santa Paula’s current City Council--four whites and one Latina--does not reflect the city’s ethnic balance, which is two-thirds Latino. Subtracting noncitizens and those too young or otherwise ineligible to vote, the ethnic balance is estimated at about 50-50.

But we believe the best solution is not to gerrymander the town into five districts--an unusual measure for a city of just 27,000 people--but to educate and encourage all residents to make full use of the political clout they already possess. Even Latino leaders in Santa Paula concede that too many residents are not engaged in the political process and that a strong effort is needed to get more people--especially young people--registered and involved.

Yet both of Santa Paula’s school boards not only have Latino members, they have Latino majorities. That’s the case even though those districts include unincorporated areas that theoretically should dilute the Latino vote even further. If some residents choose to vote in school board elections and not in City Council elections, does that phenomenon demand a legal remedy?

Officials in Ventura County’s least-wealthy city are faced with two lousy options: Spend tens of thousands of scarce public dollars to challenge the federal government’s lawsuit, or give in and create districts that won’t address the real problem.

We firmly believe in equal opportunity for all citizens to participate in their local governments--as voters, as candidates and as elected officials. We applaud the trend of increased Latino voter registration in Santa Paula, where in 1998 44% of registered voters were Latino compared with 31% a decade before, according to city figures.

Such growing numbers guarantee that candidates of all ethnicities will need to pay more and more attention to the needs and interests of Latino voters in the years ahead.

We believe the long-range goal, in Santa Paula and elsewhere, should be a political system in which ethnicity matters far less than the ideas, talents and programs of each candidate. Urging all citizens to register and vote would be a good step in that direction; chopping Santa Paula into districts based on ethnic living patterns would be the opposite.