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Federal voting rights trial set to begin in Irving

06:53 AM CST on Tuesday, February 17, 2009
By BRANDON FORMBY / The Dallas Morning News


Hispanics make up the largest single racial or ethnic group in Irving. But creating a new City Council district where a majority of voters are Hispanic is virtually impossible, city attorneys argue in federal court filings.

Their reasoning: About 60 percent of Irving Hispanics who are old enough to vote aren't citizens and thus can't cast ballots.

That argument, based on Census Bureau estimates, is part of the city's defense in a federal voting rights trial that begins Tuesday. Irving resident Manuel Benavides is suing the city, alleging that its at-large voting method for City Council effectively denies representation to the city's Hispanics.

"You've got to have enough voters for the minorities to control the district," city attorney Charles Anderson said. "It makes it very difficult when you have a high percentage of noncitizens."

But Bill Brewer, who is representing Benavides, called the city's claims "silly." Brewer said city officials are ignoring data, including reports from experts who identified ways to draw single-member districts that contain a majority of Hispanic citizens of voting age.

"Notice Irving doesn't defend its case by pretending that the system is fair or its time for a change hasn't come," Brewer said.

Irving's mayor and eight council members are all white even though whites make up only about 35.6 percent of the city's population, according to 2007 American Community Survey estimates. Hispanics make up 40.6 percent of the population, according to the same estimate.

Benavides' suit requests that a U.S. district court declare that the city's at-large method violates the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It also asks that the city be ordered to disband at-large voting and develop a new system of electing council members.

In court filings, Benavides' attorneys say Irving's Hispanic voters have overwhelmingly cast their ballots for Hispanic candidates in recent council elections. And they argue that none of those candidates won because non-Hispanic voters, who typically cast more than 90 percent of ballots in the elections, overwhelmingly supported Hispanic candidates' opponents.

Benavides, who has twice run unsuccessfully for the Irving school board, is also suing the school district over its at-large voting system for trustees. That case has yet to go before a judge.

A suit against Farmers Branch's at-large voting system was dismissed by a federal judge last year. The plaintiffs in that case are appealing.

Karl Eschbach, Texas' state demographer, said it is not uncommon for a majority of Hispanics in Texas cities to be noncitizens. But determining the percentage of legal and illegal noncitizens in a particular city is difficult.

Census surveys and estimates don't track the legality of people's residency. Homeland Security has derived statewide estimates for how many Hispanics are in Texas illegally, but Eschbach said it would be statistically irresponsible to apply those estimates to a single city the size of Irving.

Meanwhile, Irving is also facing two other pushes for single-member districts. Five of nine charter review committee members voted last week to recommend that the City Council develop a single-member system. The committee left specifics up to the council.

"I can't say that it is helpful at all to the City Council," committee member Joe Putnam said of the committee's recommendation.

Putnam, a former Irving mayor, is also part of a group collecting signatures to force a ballot measure that would allow residents to decide whether Irving should have at least some single-member districts.

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