Charting the Future of County : Remap a Momentous Task for Professor

With multicolored felt-tip pens, a computer on overtime and dozens of maps, Leobardo Estrada has redrawn the political boundaries of Los Angeles County--and helped to reshape local politics forever.

Political empires may fall, legislative careers may end. But for Estrada, an urban planning professor at UCLA, the momentous task could be boiled down to months of tedious number- crunching, experimental map-drawing and an unwavering, simple goal of giving Latinos a greater voice in the leadership of Los Angeles.

The result was a reapportionment plan that draws new districts for the five-member Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. Sponsored by civil rights groups who won a landmark voting rights lawsuit against Los Angeles County, the new map was approved by a federal judge Friday--over the objections of the Board of Supervisors’ conservative majority, which plans to appeal.

Estrada’s map, chosen by U.S. District Judge David V. Kenyon from an array of alternatives, is expected to realign political representation in the nation’s most populous county and could shift the balance of power on the influential board for the first time in decades.

It all began for Estrada when attorneys from the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund in 1988 handed him the mission of showing where Los Angeles’ Latinos live, proving that a Latino-dominated district could be created and, finally, drawing a new map.

Using the tools of a demographer and the expertise of a political scientist, Estrada would spend the next long days and weeks juggling census tracts, talking to a map-generating computer and making historic decisions about how to carve up the 4,079 square miles and 8.5 million people that are Los Angeles County.

“It was not easy,” said Estrada, a Texas-born educator on the staff of the UCLA Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning. “There were some decisions that had to be made. Real difficult decisions.”

One such decision was made early and firmly: Boundaries for a Latino district should not be drawn in a way that would dilute black voting power.

Estrada, a soft-spoken, slightly built statistician well known in intellectual and Mexican-American political circles, took data on voter registration and ethnic residency patterns and drew a predominantly Latino 1st District: It stretches from El Sereno through downtown Los Angeles east to Irwindale and southeast to Santa Fe Springs. Latinos would compose 51% of the new district’s registered voters.

Then, Estrada added predominantly black Compton to a 2nd District that already encompassed Watts and Inglewood.

This alone took two weeks, with care given to just where the line that borders between the 1st and 2nd districts would be drawn. Every shift of the line, Estrada said, made a dramatic difference in the number of Latinos in each district, and where downtown would fall.

“We made an early decision to establish a Latino district that wouldn’t harm the African American district,” Estrada said. “By keeping it consistent, I think we impressed on the judge that it was an idea that was well thought-out and worth sustaining.”

The Latino and black districts, Estrada said, were like “two islands fixed in the middle of the county”; everything else grew from there and the task essentially became a matter of drawing additional lines to form the remaining three districts.

But that would take constant trial and error. At least 40 more maps with a variety of configurations would be drawn, considered and eliminated, Estrada said.

Their “hands dirty with data,” as Estrada put it, he and three colleagues retreated for seemingly endless sessions of map-making in a sort of strategic command center at the MALDEF offices near downtown.

From Playa del Rey to Pomona, all census tracts were registered in a computer: population, ethnic breakdown, voter registration data. The computer then produced maps that showed different ways to divide the county.

Estrada, who once worked for the U.S. Census Bureau, and his colleagues would place on top of the maps plastic overlays that illustrated still other demographic patterns, such as concentrations of Latinos and Asians, or city lines. They would use colored felt-tip pens to draw different boundaries until finally coming up with the ones that seemed to work best.

“Washable (ink), for obvious reasons,” Estrada said.

The computer would keep them on track, telling them where to add a community to a district or take one away, in order to maintain a constant population size. But throughout, there were other, more delicate decisions:

Individual cities should be kept intact where possible. The affinity of one community for another should count for something. An incumbent’s domain had to be considered.

Should we draw a line through the middle of Burbank, Estrada would ask. No, that didn’t make much sense. Should you split Bellflower from Bell Gardens? Whittier from Claremont?

What about Westchester? Draw a line one way, and it could fit simply into the predominantly black district. But would it be more “appropriate” to place mostly white Westchester with Santa Monica and Venice? That, Estrada said, is where it finally ended up.

“We constantly had to ask ourselves these questions,” Estrada said. “We had to struggle with (maintaining) a sense of community.”

Like putting together pieces of a puzzle, drawing the new L.A. county map was a painstaking, even tedious, process, one of constant repetition.

“There were many iterations,” Estrada said, reverting to the language of demographers.

“Every time, we would learn something,” he continued. “Occasionally, we made the same mistake twice. But generally, we were able to keep a collective memory of our successive attempts.”

One decision was still being debated up to the last minute. Where to put Glendora, home to Sarah Flores and Gregory O’Brien, the two candidates for supervisor in the old 1st District? Estrada’s plan took Glendora out of the 1st District and put it into the 5th District, which is represented by Supervisor Mike Antonovich.

Fearing Judge Kenyon might require that the candidates’ homes be included in the district they have been running in, Estrada--the night before Kenyon made his decision--drew up another alternative version that would have kept Glendora in the newly drawn 1st District.

But it was not necessary. The judge did not make such a stipulation and, in throwing out the June primary that sent Flores and O’Brien to a runoff scheduled for November, waived residency requirements for the 1st District race. Any candidate living within the bounds of the old 1st District or the new 1st District is eligible to run for supervisor Nov. 6.

Among other shifts, East Los Angeles moves from Supervisor Ed Edelman’s current 3rd District to the new Latino 1st District, but Edelman picks up Santa Monica and Malibu from Supervisor Deane Dana’s 4th District. Dana’s district, meanwhile, extends farther north into the San Gabriel Valley to take in Downey and Diamond Bar.