Panel Report Seen as Impetus in U.S. Voting Rights Suit

The sentence was buried on the 37th page of a technically worded government document, but its message was unmistakable.

“The Los Angeles City Council has demonstrated over the last two decades that it is unwilling to include the public interest of the city’s Hispanic population in its apportionment of council districts.”

Starting with those words in November, 1983, the California advisory committee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission proceeded to deliver a stinging indictment of the 1982 redistricting plan that set the city’s political boundaries. The committee accused city officials of intentionally splintering the growing influence of Latino voters in forming the 15 council districts and suggested that the practice was illegal.

For two years, no formal action was taken on the findings.

But two weeks ago, the U.S. Justice Department stunned city officials by filing a lawsuit charging Mayor Tom Bradley, City Council members and the city clerk with violating the federal Voting Rights Act when they adopted the redistricting plan.

Echoes Findings

Although it is uncertain that the committee report directly triggered it--Justice Department officials would say only that it is a result of a lengthy investigation--the suit echoes many of the committee’s findings, and there is little doubt that the findings provided a major impetus to the federal investigation. Its scathing criticism of the redistricting plan contains as well many of the arguments that federal lawyers are likely to make in the courtroom.

The civil complaint blames “a history of official discrimination” for the absence of any Latinos on the council, and notes that only one Latino council member has been elected over the last century. The suit further argues that the council flouted its announced guidelines of “drawing compact districts that respect communities of interests,” and, instead, dispersed the Latino population among seven of the city’s 15 council districts.

In asking the court to order Los Angeles to redraw its district lines, Justice Department officials said they would not interfere with Tuesday’s special election in the 14th Council District, which is coincidentally expected to result in a Latino’s election, but would ask the court to block future city elections unless a new plan is adopted.

The suit by the Reagan Administration, which itself has drawn considerable criticism for its civil rights policies, surprised both elected officials, who denounced the complaint, and Latino activists, who welcomed it. It also left an air of uncertainty at City Hall over whether to contest it.

After meeting in a closed-door session last week, council members emerged only to report that they would seek more time beyond the Dec. 16 court date for a formal response.

“We agreed to let the city attorney file for an extension of time. We need more time,” said Council President Pat Russell, who chaired the Charter and Elections Committee during the reapportionment battle.

But if the next city step is an iffy one, the trail that led to the suit can be traced back to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission’s state advisory committee. That 32-member committee was chosen by the commission to represent a cross-section of state interests.

The committee, which heard testimony from council members, academicians and representatives of the Latino community, had reviewed the city’s 1982 reapportionment plan as a follow-up to a similar investigation of the 1972 redistricting effort by an earlier panel. The 1972 plan was unsuccessfully challenged in a private suit, but the federal government was not involved.

The council is required by law to reapportion its districts every 10 years, based on shifts in population patterns shown by the federal census. By the time of the 1982 redistricting plan, there were nearly 3 million people in Los Angeles, and the Latino population had jumped from 18% in 1970 to 27% a decade later.

Despite that sharp increase, there remained no Latinos on the City Council. And the committee reached a conclusion close to the one produced by the earlier committee.

“The council failed to incorporate recommendations by the Hispanic community into this plan in order to increase the opportunity for a Hispanic to be elected,” the committee said. “This had also happened in 1972.”

Helen Hernandez, who chaired the 1982 committee, said last week that members were appalled to find that “little or nothing had changed” in the intervening years. It was obvious, she said, that council members had a single priority.

‘To Save Incumbents’

“Their biggest concern was to save incumbents. That was their bottom line,” Hernandez said. “The officials wanted to keep their seats safe.”

Hernandez said council members rejected proposals that would have created districts with large Latino populations after it was clear that some incumbents would be forced to run against each other and others could lose key precincts. To avoid that, and to attract the votes needed to pass the plan, according to Hernandez and the committee, the City Council scattered the concentrations of Latinos over several districts.

Those conclusions, which drew headlines when published two years ago, were soundly rejected by city officials and then apparently fell into what one member called “the black hole of the bureaucracy.” The Civil Rights Commission in Washington, meanwhile, refused to endorse the recommendations after its lawyers questioned the adequacy and “legal sufficiency” of the committee report.

But with the recent filing of the Justice Department suit, committee members, staffers and Latino activists who had accused the council members of “racial gerrymandering” feel vindicated.

‘A Victory Already’

“It’s a victory already,” said Richard Santillan, an associate professor at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, and one of those who had sought for years to change the district lines. “We warned the city council this would happen, and they ignored us.”

In contending that there was a pattern of racial discrimination in the city’s redistricting policy, the Justice Department claims that council members “fragmented and fractured” a concentrated core of Latino voters in the central and northeastern parts of the city.

This core area is apportioned among seven districts. They include 8th, 9th and 10th districts in the Central City area; the 4th District, which moves westerly from downtown; the 13th, which stretches into Hollywood; the 2nd, which sprawls north of downtown and into the San Fernando Valley, and the 14th district, which encompasses the city’s Eastside.

If the council had drawn lines on “a non-racial basis,” the Justice Department says, some of those districts would have included higher percentages of Latinos, enhancing the possibility that a Latino would be elected.

Latinos 2nd Largest Group

Although Latinos are the largest single ethnic group behind Anglos, Los Angeles remains a city without Latino elected officials. In comparison, blacks, who make up 17% of the city’s population--300,000 fewer than Latinos--can point to three black council members and a black mayor.

Referring to those discrepancies, the suit seeks to prove that the city’s reapportionment plan violates the rights of Latinos under the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment and the voting rights provisions of the 15th Amendment.

It also cites the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which prohibits practices that cause members of minority groups to have “less opportunity than other members of the electorate to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice.”

A Justice Department spokesman in Washington, John Wilson, said the suit’s goal is simply to force the city to come up with a more equitable plan.

“That’s the whole purpose of the lawsuit, to prevent the discrimination from continuing,” he said. “If you have another (regularly scheduled) election under this plan, it would continue what we believe is shortchanging the Hispanic population.”

He said department officials believe that the discrimination was purposeful, although the Voting Rights Act was amended in 1982 so that plaintiffs do not have to prove intentional racial discrimination to void election districts. During the investigation, Wilson said, department officials spoke with city attorneys, “but no formal negotiations were held as such.”

Wilson declined to comment on the suit’s specifics, but others who are keenly watching the case said it could prove to be a protracted legal fight.

“It all depends on the strength of the evidence,” said Rolando Rios, an attorney with the Southwestern Voter Registration and Education Project, a San Antonio-based group that has been involved in more than 80 voting rights suits. “But if you can’t prove that the community votes along racial lines a lot of the time, it will be difficult to prove that gerrymandering hurt.”

3 Major Arguments

In trying to show that a voting rights violation has occurred, Rios said the Justice Department will probably make some of these arguments:

- That a history of official discrimination has affected the rights of Latinos to register, vote or otherwise participate in elections and, in effect, has excluded them from the electoral process. At issue could be impediments to Latino voters such as language barriers, literacy tests and poll taxes, even if those restrictions were struck down later by the courts.

- That voting in the city is racially polarized. Rios said if it can be shown that voters are casting ballots largely along racial and ethnic lines, then the argument can be made that diluting the impact of Latino voters has harmed the electoral chances of Latino candidates.

- That Latinos are vastly underrepresented in public office. In a city with more than 815,000 Spanish-surnamed residents, or more than a fourth of the population, only one Latino, Edward R. Roybal, who left City Council office in 1962 and is a congressman, has served on the council in this century.

That the Justice Department can point to such a statistic is significant, said Rios and other critics of the city plan.

“If there had been just one Latino council member on the council, I don’t think the Justice Department would have filed this suit,” one Latino activist said.

Ironically, in Tuesday’s special election, a Latino is expected to win the 14th District council seat vacated by Arthur K. Snyder, an Anglo who stepped down after serving 18 years in the predominantly Latino Eastside. Snyder’s tenure may be raised by the city as evidence that a Latino district does not guarantee an ethnic council member. But lawsuit backers say Snyder survived a 1983 reelection bid, against a Latino opponent, by only four votes.

The suit also puts Bradley and other city officials on the defensive over another touchy civil rights issue.

Indeed, the Administration’s timing and filing of the suit have raised questions, especially considering that the committee also extensively criticized the county and state reapportionment plans. Some believe that the suit against the city also has political overtones because Bradley, a Democrat, is expected to mount another challenge next year to Republican Gov. George Deukmejian.

“By vigorously pursuing this lawsuit, the Republicans will be able to capitalize and showcase the drubbing the Democrats handed Hispanics,” one Latino federal official said. “Don’t think this will be lost on the Republicans with the Democratic mayor of Los Angeles running against a Republican next year.”

Other Latino activists said Republicans can be expected to subtly point out that it was the Democrats, still the party of choice for large numbers of Latinos and usually the party of Latino elected officials, who fashioned the district lines.

Bradley, who approved the 1982 plan, said last week that he found “absolutely nothing wrong” with it. “I think the council action on that redistricting was fair. It gave the best chance for the election of a Hispanic in the 14th District.”

Wilson denied any political connections. “No one should read any political implications into this because there are none,” he said, adding that the suit was “investigated by and prepared by career attorneys in the civil rights division who are not political appointees.”

Chicago, New York Cases

In similar voting rights cases, the Justice Department has intervened in a private suit in Chicago that alleged discrimination against Latinos, he said. The department also challenged a New York redistricting plan on grounds that it deprived blacks and Latinos of proper representation, although it did not file suit in the case, Wilson added.

The department is taking a different tack in a voting rights case involving the North Carolina Legislature. In that case, civil rights lawyers have claimed that the state had diluted black voting power in drawing legislative districts. But in arguments last week before the U.S. Supreme Court, Administration lawyers said “minority voters have no right to the creation of safe electoral districts merely because they could feasibly be drawn.”

Citing that North Carolina case as a reason for concern, Linda Wong, an attorney with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said the group intends to intervene in the Los Angeles suit to ensure that it is “prosecuted vigorously and aggressively.”

But whatever the Administration’s motivation, most Latino activists are elated that the suit has been filed. And they warn city officials who may want to vigorously challenge it.

“I think it would be a mistake,” said Steven Uranga, a reapportionment plan opponent who nonetheless said he was a “strong supporter of Bradley and many of those council members. They shouldn’t underestimate how much this means to the Latino community.”