Panel Endorses Redistricting Plan

A county committee Wednesday recommended just one redistricting plan, rather than three or four, to the Board of Supervisors, which has until Aug. 28 to select new boundaries for its members.

The plan, submitted to the panel this week by the offices of supervisors Tom Wilson and Todd Spitzer, is a modification of a one introduced by the League of United Latin American Citizens.

“I’m happy with the committee’s recommendation,” redistricting committee Chairman James Campbell said. “This is our recommendation. This is what we think the board ought to use as their basis of discussion.”

The board will discuss the plan at a special meeting Tuesday at 2 p.m. District boundary lines are adjusted every 10 years based on census figures. The five supervisors have the authority to accept the recommendation, modify it or reject it and create their own.

Wilson said the LULAC plan was carefully thought out. As submitted, LULAC’s idea would have put parts of the county’s ethnic core, including Garden Grove, Orange and Santa Ana, all in the 1st District.

LULAC’s plan also called for redrawing the 1st District’s boundary southward to include the closed El Toro Marine base and a portion of Irvine, so that a second district in north Orange County could be carved to help minority supervisorial candidates.

Figures from the 2000 census show that whites are no longer the majority in 10 of the county’s cities. That was true of only one city, Santa Ana, in 1990.

But Wilson expressed concern that LULAC’s plan splits as many as 13 cities, four of which were divided into three districts.

“We thought the LULAC map was a good map, but I was concerned about splitting the cities, and I was looking for more compact districts,” he said. “I was particularly concerned about Irvine being in the same district as Santa Ana and also La Habra being in the same district as Irvine.”

The committee, which began hearing ideas in October, was required to keep cities with similar demographics--called “communities of interest”--in the same district, Campbell said. The committee also needed to even out the districts’ populations. The process was a balancing act, he added.

About 22 plans were submitted by groups and individuals throughout the county. The idea was to recommend three or four, but the committee later changed its mind.

The Wilson-Spitzer plan keeps Santa Ana in one district, which LULAC had urged to preserve the city’s ethnically diverse population, increasing the chances of a Latino being elected to the Board of Supervisors. Currently, Santa Ana is split among three districts.

Unlike other plans that attempted to keep cities whole, such as the League of Women Voters’, the recommended plan splits four cities: Anaheim, Brea, Garden Grove and Mission Viejo.

The current boundaries split seven cities. Because of a tremendous shift in population growth, Wilson’s 5th District in South County had become a “super district” with 635,770 residents, compared with 522,056 in the 2nd District.

Under the plan, the supervisor most affected is board Chairwoman Cynthia P. Coad, who would lose huge portions of Anaheim and Orange, considered her political power base. She would pick up Fullerton, Brea and La Habra.