Los Angeles municipal districts could be radically reshaped by a state investigation

Three years ago, a prominent Latino civil rights group proposed a plan to increase Latino electoral 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 significant numbers of eligible Latino voters. MALDEF’s proposal, put forward as part of a once-a-decade redistricting process, would have required this painful changes except for a handful of districts.

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

Well, California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta has begun pushing the city to begin a new mapping process, raising the prospect of the very upheaval the City Council had been trying to avoid.

The Times reported last week that after a two-year investigation, Bonta’s office had raised serious concerns about Latino voter turnout in some parts of the city. If the City Council refuses to comply with his demand to draw a new map in time for the 2026 primary election, Bonta could begin a lengthy legal battle against the city.

On the other hand, drawing a new map would set off a potentially divisive battle over political representation — one that, while offering a new examination of Latino voting strength, could unsettle the established political order at City Hall.

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

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

Increasing the number of districts with significant shares of Latino voters would likely require tearing apart and then reconfiguring several districts, said redistricting expert Paul Mitchell. It could be that multiple council members are vying for the same seat.

“It would be very likely that there would be districts that had two or three incumbents 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 was not surprising that council members created maps in a way that benefited themselves. But he said the entire purpose of redistricting is to revise legislative plans to reflect population changes.

For decades, districts in L.A. and elsewhere were incentivized to preserve the power of white voters at the expense of nonwhite voters, Saenz said. Without big changes, these types of inequalities would not have been remedied, he said.

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

Council members have not publicly stated whether they intend to push back on Bonta’s efforts. Meanwhile, some political observers who closely followed the 2021 redistricting process say they, too, were concerned that the final map would dilute Latino voting power.

“NO. 1 we could have won more Latino seats,” said political science professor Fernando Guerra, director of the Center for the Study of LA at Loyola Marymount University. “NO. 2, we could have made the seats that were identified as having Latin American influence stronger.”

The redistricting process typically occurs once per decade after the U.S. Census data is released. When establishing new boundaries, legislatures must create districts with equal populations that are both compact and contiguous.

Additionally, the maps must comply with federal voting rights law, which is designed to ensure that underrepresented groups such as Black and Latino voters have the opportunity to vote for the candidates of their choice.

The city’s most recent map creation process took several months. Civic leaders, neighborhood groups and civil rights activists fought for position in long meetings that debated boundary lines and how best to represent particular communities.

MALDEF’s plan was one of many proposed during deliberations of the city’s Citizens Redistricting Commission. That 21-member panel ultimately sent the City Council a proposed map that would have created a third heavily Latino district in the western San Fernando Valley, where Latinos make up the majority of the population.

The council rejected that idea after concluding that it would have led to significant changes in the districts represented by council members Bob Blumenfield, Paul Krekorian, Nury Martinez and Nithya Raman.

At the time, Councilwoman Monica Rodriguez rejected a series 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 in it [the map] “did not fulfill the intent of the Voting Rights Act,” she said.

Rodriguez declined to discuss Bonta’s call for a new map, saying she could not comment on issues that were covered in confidential, closed-door discussions.

Stuart Waldman, president of the Valley Industry and Commerce Assn., warned that trying to create an additional Latino district in the Valley would require the exodus of some Latino voters from two other districts – those represented by Rodriguez and Councilwoman Imelda Padilla will be represented.

Such a move would likely erode Latino voter strength in those two districts, said Waldman, who has closely followed city and state redistricting since 2001.

“You can’t move that many people without it affecting other counties,” he said.

Councilman Kevin de León, who represents part of the Eastside, appeared to leave open the possibility of redrawing the boundaries. He declined to discuss the council’s closed discussions. But he argued that in a city where Latinos make up about half the population, the council is “not an accurate reflection” of the people it represents.

“We know that Latinos are underrepresented, period,” he said. “We should honestly and transparently examine all options available to us to provide the critical representation everyone deserves.”

According to the American Community Survey, Los Angeles is about 48% Latino, 12% Asian, 9% Black and 28% White. A third of council members are Latino, while a fifth – or three in 15 – are black.

Councilman Paul Krekorian defended the 2021 rezoning plan last week, saying in a statement that it had been “carefully reviewed” by attorneys and rezoning experts and concluded that it was “fully compliant.”

“None of the many citizen groups and civic associations that participated in the redistricting process have filed legal challenges to the current district code [district] cards,” he said.

Bonta, who appeared in downtown Los Angeles on Friday to speak about voting rights and the upcoming election, declined to respond to Krekorian’s claims, saying he was bound by confidentiality restrictions. But he promised that his investigation into redistricting would be “fair, thorough and comprehensive.”

Bonta initiated the investigation in response to a secretly recorded conversation about the map-making process. In that audio recording, punctuated by crude or racist remarks, De León, two other council members and a senior union leader discussed strategies for changing the proposed district maps.

De León was politically hurt by the scandal, which led to the resignation of City Council President Nury Martinez. He now faces an aggressive challenge from tenants’ rights attorney Ysabel Jurado, who hopes to become the council’s first Filipino-American member and represent Boyle Heights, El Sereno, Eagle Rock and other neighborhoods.

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

De León, who is of Mexican, Guatemalan and Chinese descent, called Jurado’s claims “despicable” and said he has long fought for Latinos and underrepresented communities at large. He disputed the idea that he worked to reduce Black voting power, pointing out that the three districts represented by Black council members remained almost entirely unchanged in the last redistricting.

The claim that the politicians implicated in the audio leak scandal were working to undermine black representation has been made repeatedly by De León’s critics.

Sara Sadhwani, a politics professor at Pomona College, said Bonta’s focus on increasing Latino voter strength “dismantles” that narrative.

“Those tapes sounded terrible,” Sadhwani, who was a member of the state’s Citizens Redistribution Commission, said in an interview. “But at the end of the day, the approved maps never disenfranchised Black voters. In fact, there may have even been an overrepresentation of black voters in the city of Los Angeles given its demographic size.”

Curren Price, one of the council’s black members, has won three straight elections in his South Los Angeles district, whose population is four-fifths Latino. Price, through a spokesman, declined to comment on Bonta’s investigation.

Another district in South Los Angeles, stretching from Koreatown to the Crenshaw Corridor, is sometimes referred to as the Coalition District. In the 2021 draw, a third of the eligible voting population — those who are citizens and 18 years of age or older — were Black. Another third were Latino.

This district is represented by Council Member Heather Hutt, who is Black. A Hutt representative did not immediately respond to an inquiry about Bonta’s investigation.

Attorney Dermot Givens, who served on the Los Angeles Unified School District’s 2012 redistricting commission, said he fears that any attempt by Bonta to boost Latino voting power in one part of the city will weaken the power of black voters in another .

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

“No matter what they say, it’s going to have an impact on South LA,” Givens said. “There is no way around it. It just has to be.”