Coalition Attempts to Boost Latino Election Wins

Activists with a long history of involvement in redistricting battles are mounting a four-pronged push to give Latino candidates a better chance to win local offices in the Los Angeles area.

The group, known as the Los Angeles City/County Latino Redistricting Coalition, is simultaneously urging the expansion of county, city, school district and community college governing bodies, as well as a change from at-large to smaller district elections of community college board members.

The coalition’s primary audience consists of City Charter reform commissions and the state Legislature, which control the various electoral schemes. The City Charter sets the size of the City Council and of the Los Angeles school board. And the state Legislature is considering proposals to place a question about the size of the county Board of Supervisors before voters, as well as legislation to expand the Los Angeles Community College District Board of Trustees.

The redistricting coalition’s chairman, Marshall Diaz, a Medi-Cal analyst for the state Department of Health Services who has been deeply involved for 25 years in efforts aimed at electing more Latinos to office, said the latest efforts are distinguished by their timing, which seeks to take advantage of recent Latino electoral gains.

“We think we’ve got a little more political muscle,” he said, referring to the increasing number of Latinos in the state Legislature.

Members of the coalition recently took part in a community forum on the impact of Valley secession on Latinos, and strongly suggested the breakaway movement may hurt Latinos’ growing political clout.

Under the group’s plan to add 10 seats to the Los Angeles City Council, bringing the total to 25, the Valley would have eight districts entirely within its borders--including two with clear Latino majorities.

“We’re concerned the secession movement would take away that political power we have been gaining,” Diaz told the audience.

On the issue of expanding the Board of Supervisors, state Sen. Richard Polanco (D-Los Angeles) has taken the lead, introducing legislation to place it before county voters.

They have defeated three previous efforts to increase the number of supervisors, each of whom now represents nearly 2 million residents. Most recently, voters rejected a 1992 ballot measure that would have raised the number of supervisors from five to nine.

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But coalition representatives said that a still-building surge of Latino voting in recent elections leads them to believe that voters might be ready to approve an expansion.

Alan Clayton, the research chair of Diaz’s group and director of equal employment opportunity for the Los Angeles County Chicano Employees Assn., said Latinos could double their supervisorial seats--from one to two--with an expansion to either a seven- or nine-member board. No number is specified in Polanco’s proposal.

The Legislature is also the focus of the group’s efforts to expand the seven-member board of the Los Angeles Community College District.

Assemblyman Tony Cardenas (D-Sylmar) has introduced legislation to enlarge the board to nine members and to change the method of their election.

Board members currently run at large in the district of 5 million residents--a method that critics say makes them overly dependent on endorsements and on raising money from the only organized entities with systemwide concerns, the same employee unions with whom board members also negotiate labor contracts.

Because most candidates for the community college board find it too costly to communicate by mail with potential voters in such a large district, most of them remain relative unknowns, campaigning by purchasing spots on political slate mailers.

That kind of campaigning runs contrary to “the whole idea of a community college that it is supposed to be of and for the community,” said Diaz, in explaining why he favors a change to elections within districts that, for the most part, could be tailored to areas around each of the nine community college campuses.

Diaz’s group is also seeking expansion of the Los Angeles school board from seven to 11 members, arguing that the current districts of 625,000 residents are too large for school board members to represent properly.

School board expansion has already been rejected as too costly by the elected charter commission, while a second charter panel appointed mainly by the City Council has endorsed a relatively modest expansion to nine members.

A conference committee that is trying to come up with a proposal acceptable to both commissions has tentatively recommended adopting the elected commission proposal for no change.

If this is adopted, Clayton and Diaz said, they plan to appeal to the City Council, which must approve any appointed charter panel position before it can go to voters.

With 11 school board members, Clayton said, there could be two African American and four Latino-dominated seats, rather than the current one apiece. Expansion thus would create a potential for minority control of the school board for the first time in a district in which nine out of 10 students are members of minority groups.

Another Latino organization that has long taken an active role in redistricting matters, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, has opposed the plan to expand the school board and disagrees with the coalition over the best size for an expanded City Council.

Anthony Chavez, an attorney for MALDEF, said his organization favors appointing a separate commission to take an in-depth look at school board governance questions that are in the legal domain of both the City Charter and the Legislature, including questions such as whether each school should have its own board.

MALDEF has also proposed sticking with the current City Council size of 15 or expanding to 19.

By 2001, Chavez said, he expects Latino representation on the council to increase from its present three to four on a 15-member council and to five on a 19-member council.

Either way, that would mean Latinos would control 26% of the seats.

“From a purely Latino standpoint, the results from 15 and 19 would be the same,” Chavez said. “We are indifferent between 15 and 19. But more often than not we hear a preference for 15 from African American communities [which have a likelihood of retaining at most three seats under either model] so we weigh that heavily,” Chavez said.

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The coalition led by Diaz and Clayton favors a City Council expansion to 25 members, which it asserts would result, at least initially, in six Latino-dominated seats and four African American seats. By 2005, Clayton said, Latinos could control as many as eight seats.

By then, however, if there is no expansion, African Americans probably would be left with only two seats. “For that reason we believe the 25 plan is better for the African American community,” Clayton said.

The disagreement between the two Latino groups on optimal council size rests mainly on differing assessments of how many Latino citizens and Latino registered voters in a district make for a safe Latino seat. The Diaz-Clayton group is using lower numbers of Latino citizens and registered voters in a district than MALDEF feels comfortable with in making its projections.

The two charter commissions, meanwhile, are split on the best size for the City Council. The appointed charter commission has tentatively decided to recommend an expansion to 21 seats, while the elected commission has tentatively decided to offer voters two choices--preserving the status quo or expanding to 25.

A conference committee, meanwhile, has recommended that the appointed commission embrace the elected’s approach of offering voters a choice between 15 and 25.