L.A. council districts could be radically reshaped by state probe

California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta announces a lawsuit to protect voter rights at a news conference

Oct. 7, 2024 3 AM PT

Three years ago, a prominent Latino civil rights group offered up a plan to strengthen Latino voting power by dramatically redrawing Los Angeles City Council district boundaries.

The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund wanted to ensure that eight of the council’s 15 districts had a significant number of voting-age Latinos. MALDEF’s proposal, submitted during a once-a-decade redistricting process, would have required wrenching changes to all but a handful of districts.

City Council members ultimately pursued a different strategy, approving maps that largely reflected the status quo and kept their districts mostly intact.

Now, California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta has begun pressing the city to conduct a new map-making process, raising the prospect of precisely the upheaval the council had worked to avoid.

The Times reported last week that Bonta’s office, after a two-year investigation, has expressed serious concerns about Latino voting representation in some parts of the city. If the council refuses to comply with his demand to draw a new map in time for the 2026 primary election, Bonta could launch a protracted legal battle against the city.

Drawing a new map, on the other hand, would trigger a potentially divisive fight over political representation — one that, although offering a fresh examination of Latino voting strength, could throw the established political order at City Hall into disarray.

The draft legal document prepared by Bonta’s office, a copy of which was reviewed by The Times, would bar council members from considering their own political fortunes when approving a new map. If the map were drawn by an advisory commission, council members could reject it only if they believed it violated the law, according to the document.

Two sources previously told The Times that Bonta’s team has discussed the possibility of creating an additional “Latino” district in the San Fernando Valley, and raised concerns about whether Latino voters on the city’s Eastside have the opportunity to elect the candidate of their choice.

To expand the number of districts with a significant percentage of Latino voters, multiple districts probably would have to be pulled apart and then reconfigured, redistricting expert Paul Mitchell said. Several council members could find themselves fighting over the same seat.

“It would be very likely that you would end up with districts where two or three incumbents are put in the same district,” said Mitchell, whose Sacramento-based firm advised the city’s citizen redistricting commission in 2021.

Thomas A. Saenz, MALDEF’s president and general counsel, said it’s not surprising that council members drew maps in ways that benefited themselves. But he said the whole purpose of redistricting is to rework legislative maps to accommodate population changes.

For decades, districts in L.A. and elsewhere were drawn to preserve the power of white voters at the expense of nonwhite ones, Saenz said. Without big changes, those types of inequities would not have been addressed, he said.

“That’s the nature of redistricting. It’s always going to be disruptive,” he said. “In fact, it’s designed to be somewhat disruptive.”

Council members have not publicly indicated whether they intend to push back on Bonta’s efforts. Meanwhile, some political observers who closely tracked the 2021 redistricting say they too were concerned that the final map diluted Latino voting strength.

“No. 1, we could have drawn more Latino seats,” said political science professor Fernando Guerra, director of the Center for the Study of L.A. at Loyola Marymount University. “No. 2, we could have made the seats that were identified as Latino-influence seats stronger.”

The redistricting process typically occurs once per decade, following the release of U.S. census data. When drawing new lines, legislative bodies must create districts with equal populations that are both compact and contiguous.

In addition, the maps must comply with the federal Voting Rights Act, which is designed to ensure that underrepresented groups, such as Black and Latino voters, have the ability to elect the candidates of their choice.

The city’s last map-making process lasted several months. Civic leaders, neighborhood groups and civil rights advocates jockeyed for position in lengthy meetings featuring debates over boundary lines and how best to represent particular communities.

MALDEF’s plan was one of many offered during the deliberations of the city’s citizen redistricting commission. That 21-member panel eventually sent the City Council a proposed map that would have created a third heavily Latino district in the west San Fernando Valley, with Latinos making up a majority of the population.

The council rejected that idea after concluding it would have resulted in major changes to districts represented by Councilmembers Bob Blumenfield, Paul Krekorian, Nury Martinez and Nithya Raman.

At the time, Councilmember Monica Rodriguez pushed back on a number of changes her colleagues made to the final map. On Friday, she told The Times that she did so, in part, out of concern that the new Valley “Latino” district had been eliminated.

“I voted against every single amendment because I believed [the map] was not fulfilling the intent of the Voting Rights Act,” she said.

Rodriguez declined to discuss Bonta’s demand for a new map, saying she could not comment on matters taken up during confidential closed-session discussions.

Stuart Waldman, president of the Valley Industry and Commerce Assn., warned that attempting to create an additional Latino district in the Valley would require shifting some Latino voters out of two other districts — those represented by Rodriguez and by Councilmember Imelda Padilla.

Such a move probably would undermine Latino voting strength in those two districts, said Waldman, who has closely tracked city and state redistricting since 2001.

“You can’t move that many people without impacting the other districts,” he said.

Councilmember Kevin de León, who represents part of the Eastside, seemed to leave the door open to redrawing the lines. He declined to talk about the council’s closed-door deliberations. But he argued that, in a city where Latinos make up about half of the population, the council “is not an accurate reflection” of the people it represents.

“We know Latinos are underrepresented, period,” he said. “We should take an honest and transparent look at every opportunity available to us to provide the critical representation that everyone deserves.”

Los Angeles is about 48% Latino,12% Asian, 9% Black and 28% white, according to the American Community Survey. One-third of council members are Latino, while one-fifth — or 3 out of 15 — are Black.

Krekorian offered a defense of the 2021 redistricting map last week, saying in a statement that it was “carefully reviewed” by lawyers and redistricting experts, who concluded that it was “fully compliant with the law.”

“Not one of the many citizens groups and civic associations who participated in the redistricting process has made any legal challenge to the current [district] maps,” he said.

Bonta, appearing in downtown Los Angeles on Friday to discuss voting rights and the upcoming election, declined to respond to Krekorian’s assertions, saying he is bound by confidentiality restrictions. However, he promised that his investigation into the redistricting will be “fair, thorough and comprehensive.”

Bonta launched the investigation in response to a secretly recorded conversation about the map-making process. On that audio, which was punctuated by crude or racist remarks, De León, two other council members and a high-level labor leader discussed strategies for changing the proposed district maps.

De León was wounded politically by the scandal, which resulted in the resignation of City Council President Martinez. He now faces an aggressive challenge from tenant rights attorney Ysabel Jurado, who is hoping to become the council’s first Filipina American member, representing Boyle Heights, El Sereno, Eagle Rock and other neighborhoods.

Jurado, in a news release last week, seized on the news of Bonta’s investigation, saying that De León and his colleagues “actively disenfranchised Latino voters to enrich their own political power.” At the same time, her campaign said the audio leak scandal showed that De León was “conspiring to gerrymander districts to dilute Black voting power.”

De León, who is of Mexican, Guatemalan and Chinese descent, called Jurado’s assertions “despicable,” saying he has a lengthy record of fighting for Latinos and underrepresented communities overall. He disputed the idea that he worked to diminish Black voting strength, noting that the three districts represented by Black council members were left almost entirely unchanged during the last redistricting.

The claim that the politicians caught up in the audio leak scandal were working to undermine Black representation has been repeatedly lodged by De León’s critics.

Pomona College politics professor Sara Sadhwani said Bonta’s focus on bolstering Latino voting strength “blows apart” that narrative.

“Those tapes sounded horrible,” Sadhwani, who served on the state’s citizen redistricting commission, said in an interview. “But at the end of the day, the maps that were approved never disenfranchised Black voters. In fact, there was perhaps even an over-representation of Black voters, given their demographic size within the city of Los Angeles.”

Curren Price, one of the council’s Black members, has won three consecutive elections in his South L.A. district, whose population is four-fifths Latino. Price, through a spokesperson, declined to comment on Bonta’s investigation.

Another South L.A. district, which stretches from Koreatown to the Crenshaw Corridor, has sometimes been referred to as a coalition district. When it was drawn in 2021, one third of its voting-eligible population — those who are citizens and 18 or older — was Black. Another third was Latino.

That district is represented by Councilmember Heather Hutt, who is Black. An aide to Hutt did not immediately respond to an inquiry about Bonta’s investigation.

Attorney Dermot Givens, who served on the redistricting commission for the Los Angeles Unified School District in 2012, said he fears that any effort by Bonta to shore up Latino voting strength in one part of the city will weaken Black voter power in another.

Even if the focus is only on the Valley, he predicted there would be repercussions in South Los Angeles, which has the highest concentration of Black voters.

“No matter what they say, it will have to impact South L.A.,” Givens said. “There’s no way around that. It just has to.”