Deadline for 1st District Race Passes With No Surprises

The deadline to enter the supervisorial race for Los Angeles County’s new 1st District passed Friday and, with no new major candidates emerging, it now appears certain that the election, as intended, will place a Latino on the five-member board.

As expected, county lawyers on Friday petitioned U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor to postpone the Jan. 22 election.

State Sen. Charles Calderon (D-Whittier), Sarah Flores, a former aide to Supervisor Pete Schabarum, Los Angeles City Councilwoman Gloria Molina and state Sen. Art Torres (D-Los Angeles) have filed papers needed to compete in the 53-day campaign. They are widely considered the leading contenders.

Also in the race are a number of lesser-known candidates: Joe Chavez, a computer analyst for the county; Louis Anthony Chitty III, an educator; Khalil Khalil, a county engineer; Jim Mihalka, a paramedic, and Gonzalo Molina, a three-time supervisorial candidate who is no relation to Councilwoman Molina.

Four of the current candidates, including Flores, ran last June to represent the old 1st District. Superior Court Judge Gregory O’Brien, who forced Flores into a runoff in that now invalidated race, did not enter the competition for the new district.

Schabarum, who currently represents the 1st District, is retiring.

The Friday 5 p.m. deadline for filing candidacy papers produced only one bit of drama: state Sen. Charles Calderon’s scramble to overcome a last-minute snafu involving his petitions.

About half an hour before the deadline, Calderon’s campaign manager, Dina Huniu, showed up at the county elections office in Commerce lamenting, “I forgot Chuck’s signature on the form.”

She called Calderon on his car phone, arranging to meet him at a nearby intersection, where he signed the papers. She returned to the elections office and filed the papers at 4:47 p.m.

The election was called last month by a federal judge, who found that the all-white Board of Supervisors intentionally discriminated against Latinos in drawing district boundaries. Judge David V. Kenyon carved out a new, heavily Latino 1st District designed to give the county board its first Latino in 115 years.

The race is important to all 8 1/2 million county residents because it could tip the balance of power on the powerful county board, controlled for a decade by conservatives.

The new 1st District stretches from El Sereno and Lincoln Heights east to Irwindale and La Puente and southeast to Santa Fe Springs. Latinos account for 51% of the registered voters and 71% of the population. Democrats outnumber Republicans 66% to 23%.

The absence of a well-known Anglo candidate virtually assures the election of a Latino to the powerful five-member board, unless the board’s conservative majority succeeds in its last-minute appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court to postpone the election and review the county’s landmark voting rights case.

An assistant to county lawyers flew to Washington Thursday night to file the 15-page application for a stay when the Supreme Court opened Friday morning. There is no statutory deadline for O’Connor to act, according to county attorneys.

“As a matter of equity,” the county argues in its court papers, “a stay is appropriate because each day that goes by without a stay in place will force the county and the candidates to spend money, time and effort on a special election utilizing district boundaries . . . that ultimately may be invalidated by the Supreme Court.”

The county’s argument relies heavily on the opinion written by Alex Kozinski, a conservative judge on the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. Kozinski, a member of the three-judge panel that upheld Kenyon’s ruling, agreed that supervisors discriminated against Latinos, but objected to the way in which the new boundaries were drawn.

To qualify for the ballot, candidates had to collect 20 voters’ signatures and pay $943.33, or gather 3,774 signatures. If no candidate receives a majority of the vote Jan. 22, the top two vote-getters will face off Feb. 19.