Supervisors Told to Vote Again on Funds Denied AIDS Group

A Los Angeles Superior Court judge Tuesday ordered the Board of Supervisors to recast a controversial vote that blocked a $20,000 federal AIDS education grant to a private organization working in Los Angeles’ minority communities.

Judge Ricardo A. Torres, after reading aloud from a transcript of the board’s April 28 meeting, held that Supervisors Pete Schabarum and Mike Antonovich abused their legal discretion in voting against using the federal money for Minority AIDS Project in Los Angeles County. Torres said the record was clear that Schabarum and Antonovich improperly blocked the contract in retaliation for the private firm’s participation in a lawsuit against the county a month earlier.

Saying he could not direct its outcome, Torres ordered a new vote within 30 days. American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Mark Rosenbaum, who had sought the new vote, said that in light of the judge’s comments, he would be “astonished” if the supervisors failed a second time to approve the Minority AIDS Project contract.

Informed of the ruling, however, Schabarum said he will vote again as he did before “for the same reason. I do not historically recognize or reward folks that like to kick you in the head,” he said. Antonovich, meanwhile, said he will not comment on the ruling until briefed by the county counsel.

Despite his ruling on the blocked contract, Torres was not so sympathetic to Rosenbaum’s wider assertion that the county generally had not provided a sufficient level of AIDS education to minorities. Torres said the ACLU so far had not demonstrated that county health officials had been negligent in their efforts to fight the acquired immune deficiency syndrome epidemic in the black and Latino communities.

While tentatively dismissing major portions of a lawsuit calling for a stronger minority AIDS education effort, Torres gave Rosenbaum a month to come up with sufficient evidence against the county. In addition to the Minority AIDS Project, other plaintiffs in the suit against the county are the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People.

The ACLU had challenged the April 28 vote in which Schabarum and Antonovich successfully blocked a $20,000 grant from the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta that county Health Director Robert Gates said should go to the Minority AIDS Project. Voting for the contract were Supervisors Deane Dana and Ed Edelman. Ailing Supervisor Kenneth Hahn, who could have cast the deciding vote, was absent.

In discussing the contract at the time, Schabarum said he could not understand how Gates could recommend that the grant go to the Minority AIDS Project after it had joined in the lawsuit asserting that the county had failed to provide enough money for AIDS education.

“For God’s sakes, it’s a big love affair around here with everybody trying to kick our brains in,” said Schabarum, referring to the lawsuit. “I guess you guys (Dana and Edelman) like it having them just keep slugging you. . . . Keep it up . . . . It feels good.”

But Edelman and Dana, noting that the Minority AIDS Project was virtually the only organized educational effort to reach the minority population’s high-risk groups, said the county should not pass up the opportunity to funnel the money to the group. No county money was involved. The Rev. Carl Bean, director of the Minority AIDS Project, said the disputed money would fund six community-based forums on AIDS aimed at the black and Latino communities.

“Right now, today, a majority of blacks and Latinos still think AIDS is a gay, white phenomenon,” said Bean, who also serves as chairman of the National AIDS Coalition. In court documents, the plaintiffs said that while 60% of the country’s AIDS victims are white, nearly 75% of the female AIDS victims are black or Latino. In Los Angeles County, all of the reported children AIDS victims have been minority, the documents added.

Bean said that last year his organization received $13,000 from the county, about one-seventh of the funds that Minority AIDS Project received for its outreach programs.