U.S. Accuses Agency of Diluting Latino Votes

Federal authorities are suing a San Gabriel Valley water district, alleging that it has illegally diluted the voting strength of Latinos by configuring its boundaries to favor other sectors of the community, officials said Monday.

Though Latinos make up nearly half of the 791,000 voters in the Upper San Gabriel Valley Municipal Water District, no Latino candidate has been elected to the five-member board in the district’s 40-year history, the U.S. Justice Department said.

The department’s lawsuit, filed Friday in federal court in Los Angeles, blames the way district lines were drawn under a 1992 redistricting plan.

None of the nine Latinos who have run for the board has won--in part, the lawsuit alleges, because Latino voters don’t constitute a majority in any of the district’s five divisions. If the lines were redrawn to reflect the community’s actual numbers and geography, voting-age Latinos would make up majorities in two divisions, the U.S. says.

“The Voting Rights Act guarantees that minority citizens have the opportunity for meaningful participation in the democratic process,” Bill Lann Lee, acting assistant attorney general for civil rights, said Monday. “We feel [the] lawsuit will help bring down the barriers preventing the Upper District’s Hispanic citizens from having an equal opportunity to elect representatives. . . .”

Board member Marvin Cichy said he had not seen the lawsuit Tuesday, but did not understand why authorities would sue so long after the last district lines were drawn--and when new 2000 census information could change the districts again soon.

He said three of the five districts, including his own, have Latino majorities.

“I assume it’s about political pressure to get people elected this November,” he said.

But Larry Walton, a Latino candidate, said the lawsuit is overdue. “I felt for years there has been no minority representation,” he said. “The water industry has always been an old-boy network.”

Federal authorities tried in recent months to negotiate a solution with water district officials but decided to file suit after talks reached an impasse, officials said.

This is the second voting district in Southern California to be hit with a federal lawsuit under the Voting Rights Act in recent months.

In April, the Justice Department filed suit against the city of Santa Paula in Ventura County, alleging that its at-large voting system perpetuated racial discrimination against Latinos. That lawsuit is still pending, as are about a dozen others brought by the Justice Department elsewhere, officials said.

Justice Department officials said they remain open to negotiating a compromise plan with San Gabriel water district officials, and they hope to resolve the issue before November, when elections will be held for three of five district seats.

Based on the most recent census data, the water district--encompassing 22 cities and two unincorporated areas within Los Angeles County--is made up of 46.5% Latinos, 34.8% whites, 15.2% Asians, and 3% blacks.

Historically, the lawsuit maintains, water board elections have been “racially polarized.” Latinos consistently vote for Latino candidates, but non-Latinos vote “sufficiently as a bloc to usually defeat the Hispanic voters’ candidates of choice,” the lawsuit says.

Unlike some Voting Rights Act lawsuits, “there are no allegations that this was intentional,” a Justice Department official said.

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Times staff writer Joe Mozingo contributed to this report.