THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, July 8, 1994 TAG: 9407080605
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B3 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY JEFF HOOTEN, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: CHESAPEAKE LENGTH: Medium: 74 lines
Cost could be the deciding factor in whether the City Council chooses to take on the Justice Department in a bid to hold at-large School Board elections.
No one really knows how high the legal tab could run, but as council members consider their options this weekend at a retreat in White Stone, Va., they might want to think about what happened in Norfolk.
There, taxpayers wound up spending more than $1.5 million for eight years of litigation only to be forced at the end to adopt ward elections for their City Council.
That kind of money could buy Chesapeake a new school gymnasium or an addition to a library.
The Chesapeake City Council voted in November to hold at-large School Board elections. The council's black members, Mayor William E. Ward and then-Councilman Lionell Spruill Sr., voted against the plan. Last month, the city received a letter from the Justice Department refusing the request for such elections, saying they would not give black School Board candidates a fair chance at being elected.
City Attorney Ronald S. Hallman said he will brief the council members on their options during the retreat, which begins this evening and runs through Sunday morning. He said he would wait to learn what the council members wanted to do before making any recommendations.
Many of the council's new Republican majority strongly support an at-large system. They say the Justice Department ruling is a mistake, but they're hesitant to declare war on the federal government.
Councilman W. Joe Newman, who favors fighting, said he realizes that it would be difficult to win.
``It may be easier to get Congress to change the law than it would be to get the courts to rule against the Justice Department,'' he said.
Councilman Robert T. Nance Jr. said that before taking any legal action he would ask the Justice Department to reconsider its decision.
``Any time a municipality fights the Justice Department, they know that it could cost millions of taxpayers' dollars,'' Nance said, ``and that weighs heavily on the minds of council members.
``They usually end up caving in, because they don't want to fight the bureaucracy.''
Justice officials said they had analyzed past Chesapeake council elections - which are held at-large - and found ``persistent and severe polarization along racial lines.''
Taking on the Justice Department is not only costly, it is typically a losing proposition, according to experts in voting rights law. ``These cases are very expensive. They involve complex federal litigation and the cities almost always lose,'' said Frank R. Parker, a law professor at the District of Columbia Law School who helped dismantle Norfolk's at-large council elections.
Parker was lead counsel in the lawsuit that forced Norfolk to abandon its 72-year-old at-large election system. The case went through several appeals before the plaintiffs eventually won the suit in 1990 when the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the city's appeal.
``Norfolk was hard-core,'' Parker said. ``They resisted going to wards through eight years of litigation, and they still lost.''
The city was forced to pay for its own lawyers as well as the legal cost incurred by those fighting for the ward system. And the $1.5 million total doesn't include the time spent on the suit by city staffers.
Pamela Karlan, a law professor at the University of Virginia, said that Chesapeake has two options: try to prove in U.S. District Court that an at-large system would be fair, or come up with an alternative that passes muster with the Justice Department.
The best way to do that, Karlan said, is to draw up districts, or wards, that allow minority communities to elect some of the candidates they prefer.
``If the city tries to get approval of an at-large system - based on the past - the odds of success are low,'' Karlan said. by CNB