ESCONDIDO: Latinos, labor union sue city over elections

ESCONDIDO: Latinos, labor union sue city over electionsBy DAVID GARRICK dgarrick@nctimes.comNorth County Times | Posted: Tuesday, December 20, 2011 8:00 pm

Seeking to increase the political power of Latinos in Escondido, five city residents and a labor union filed a lawsuit Wednesday demanding that the city immediately switch from at-large elections to having City Council members elected by smaller geographic districts.

The suit, filed in Vista Superior Court by a group of San Francisco attorneys, says allowing each council member to be elected citywide violates state and federal voting rights laws by making it extremely difficult for Latinos to win.

The suit says Escondido should help Latinos get elected by creating one or two districts in the center of the city, the area with the largest concentration of Latino residents.

"This at-large system discriminates against Latino voters and impairs their ability to participate in the political process, to elect candidates of their choice and to influence the outcome of elections," attorney James Finberg said during a Wednesday morning City Hall press conference announcing the suit.

Finberg is part of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, a coalition of attorneys that has successfully forced several cities and school districts to adopt geographic districts in recent years, but he said the coalition was not formally involved in the Escondido case.

The suit follows through on a Dec. 7 threat made during a council meeting by Finberg and the state's Building and Construction Trades Council.

City leaders vowed that night, and again on Wednesday, to fight any such lawsuits despite the cost to taxpayers. Modesto, a city in Central California, spent nearly $3 million fighting a similar lawsuit and was still forced to adopt districts.

And leaders of the Escondido Union High School District recently decided to create geographic voting districts based on the threat of lawsuits.

However, Mayor Sam Abed said Wednesday that Escondido was in a strong position to successfully defend itself, primarily because Latina Olga Diaz was elected to the council in 2008.

While Escondido's population is 49 percent Latino, about 20 percent of the city's registered voters ---- 10,619 out of 53,781 ---- are Latino, according to an estimate by the registrar of voters office. Population analysts attribute the disparity to a greater percentage of Latinos being too young to vote than other ethnic groups, and to adult Latinos being less likely to become registered voters.

"Latinos are one-fifth of the voters and they have one council member out of five," said Abed, referring to Diaz. "I see our council as an accurate representation of the community."

Two Latinos since 1888
But the lawsuit points out that Diaz is only the second Latino elected to the council in Escondido's 123-year history, and it contends that such consistent lack of representation has hurt the city's Latino community for decades.

The suit says that when Latinos and whites are compared in Escondido, Latinos have higher poverty rates, are much less likely to have college degrees and are less likely to have health insurance.

In addition, the suit says Escondido's council has pursued anti-Latino policies in recent years. Those include a failed attempt in 2006 to prohibit landlords from renting to illegal immigrants, a day-labor ordinance proposed in 2008 but never adopted, and an abandoned effort to restrict parking in inner-city neighborhoods where many Latino families share houses and apartments.

"The conduct of the city has been so outrageous for the last five or six years that we have to do something," said Bill Flores, a longtime advocate for local Latinos. He was among roughly 60 people who attended Wednesday's press conference to show support for the lawsuit.

Flores said he was pleased that someone with adequate resources, the Building and Construction Trades Council, had stepped in to fight the council's recent policies.

Union vs. city
The union, which says it represents 300,000 construction workers across the state and roughly 1,500 in Escondido, has never before sued a city over voting or elections. But Bob Balgenorth, the union's statewide president, said Wednesday that Escondido's policies in recent years had frustrated the union.

"If you look at what this city has done against Latinos, it just seemed like the ideal place to make a stand," he said. between the city and the union has escalated this fall because the city is pursuing a "charter city" amendment that would exempt the city from a state requirement to pay union wages for construction work.

The five residents who are plaintiffs in the suit are members of the union. They are Demetrio Gomez, Oscar Gomez, Mateo Salvidar, Samuel Salvidar and Giovanni Campos.

Demetrio Gomez, who has lived in Escondido since the late 1960s, said at Wednesday's press conference that the city's council members have no concept of the Latino experience, nor any understanding of the issues Latinos struggle with.

"The council does not address the concerns of Escondido's Latino citizens," he said.
But Abed said the city has spent far more money in recent decades on Latino neighborhoods than other parts of the city, adding parks and infrastructure such as streetlights and sidewalks.

And he said Latinos would fare worse with districts, because council members would focus only on projects benefiting their geographic area, which would divide the city's financial resources more evenly.
Finberg, the lead attorney on the suit, said he hopes to resolve the case quickly enough to have districts in place for the November 2012 election. He said he might ask for a summary judgment, which would forgo a trial and force a judge to rule based on opinions from experts.

That would expedite the process and limit the city's financial risk by reducing the attorney fees for the case. The California Voting Rights Act of 2001 forces the losing side in legal cases to pay the attorney fees of the winning side. That allowed the Modesto case to cost that city nearly $3 million, but that case involved both a trial and an appeal.

Escondido would be the first city in North County to adopt geographic voting districts.
In 2003, the Justice Department investigated whether Vista's at-large system undermined minority representation and voter turnout, but dropped the case.

San Diego is the only city of the 18 in this county with such districts. Only about 30 of California's 482 cities elect council members by district, according to the League of California Cities.
Call staff writer David Garrick at 760-740-5468




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