Pasadena voting case goes to judge

Armed officers guarded a closed-door committee meeting. Discriminatory comments surfaced at City Hall. Latino-backed council members were hustled from chambers by police.

The accounts of perceived intimidation and back-door dealings were detailed during testimony in a closely watched seven-day trial of a federal voting rights lawsuit that wrapped up Friday in a Houston courtroom.

Now, U.S. District Judge Lee H. Rosenthal will decide if Pasadena violated the federal Voting Rights Act by reconfiguring its city election system, a ruling that is expected in time for February filing deadlines for May elections in which city council seats and the mayor’s job are up for grabs.

A group of Latino voters filed the federal lawsuit, saying city leaders changed the structure of council elections in a deliberate attempt to quell the Hispanic vote.

“The city moved to dilute voting strength just as Latinos were starting to exercise it,” said Nina Perales, lead attorney in the suit for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, in her closing arguments to the court.

City attorneys argued that leaders did not set out to diminish Hispanic representation by presenting an option to voters to change the city election systems. The growing Latino population has an equal chance to participate in the political process to elect their candidate of choice, said C. Robert Heath, a veteran attorney who specializes in voting rights and election law.

“No one said, ‘Vote yes (on the ballot measure) to diminish Hispanic representation,’ ” he said.

Horrified by comment

The city’s election system was changed to eliminate two of the eight singlemember district seats and add two at-large council seats. The lawsuit says the change violates the Voting Rights Act by making it harder for Latino-backed candidates to get elected and leading to unfair allocation of resources.

The revisions came in the aftermath of Shelby v. Holder, a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that eliminated the requirement for cities to get advance clearance from the Justice Department before they altered their method of holding elections.

Two days after the ruling, Pasadena’s mayor, Johnny Isbell — who held the tiebreaking vote in all disputed matters — began drafting a proposal to reconfigure the election system, and it was approved by voters in 2013.

Witnesses testified that the mayor and his backers funneled money and resources to the mostly white, south side of town and tapped into those communities for support. The largely Hispanic north side, however, did not get similar resources.

A Hispanic Republican testified that she attended a meeting where a supporter of the charter change warned a restaurant full of white voters they should back the changes or city government might “turn blue.” She said she was horrified by the comment because “blue” was code for Hispanic, since local Hispanics skew Democratic.

On the north side, however, residents faced battered sidewalks, pockmarked roads and backed-up toilets from flooding, Perales said.

Heath argued that the new election system did not dilute the Latino vote, offering expert testimony and copious demographic and election data to support the city’s position.

Committee rejects

Under the old system with eight single-member districts, Latino voters had four preferred candidates on council and non-Latino voters had four.

But MALDEF argued that when one seat looked like it might tilt toward the Latinos’ choice, the mayor feared he would lose control of the council.

Isbell then called for formation of a committee, which initially was billed as a bond committee but soon turned to revising the city charter.

The charter committee held a closed meeting with police at the door. One committee member, who testified under subpoena, said the committee voted 10-1 to reject the charter amendment, yet the mayor brought it before the city council anyway.

When the issue came up for a vote, one council member was removed from the council meeting after violating a new rule that limited members to two minutes of speaking time. Three of her colleagues marched out behind her and the remaining five votes put the charter proposal on the ballot. At another meeting, a council member was ejected for objecting to the mayor’s position.

During the election, the measure passed by 79 votes.