Molina, Ridley-Thomas offer second Latino district

Supervisors Gloria Molina and Mark Ridley-Thomas shook up the Board of Supervisors redistricting poker game by separately proposing new maps just before this afternoon's filing deadline. They both wrapped in two districts that have a high abundance of Latino voters; the pending county map tends to aggregate Latinos into a single district. It sounds as if Molina created her second Latino district by shifting her own base toward the San Gabriel Valley and moving Zev Yaroslavsky toward Downtown and beyond to East Los Angeles. Ridley-Thomas, in maps backed by an African American coalition, would reinvent Don Knabe's district as a favorably Latino voting area and shift some 3.5 million county voters into new boundaries. Now let the dealing begin.