Monday, March 12, 2007

Port Chester Shuns Justice Dept

The New York suburb of Port Chester is making news and not in a good light these days. The town is a mixed town of affluent residents in the north and immigrants in the south. Despite a burgeoning hispanic population, the town's board has no representation from the south side. The Justice Dept told them to re-write their election laws after a resident filed a complaint, but the town government is refusing to acknowledge the federal involvement into the matter.

From Reuters:


Although they make up 46 percent of Port Chester's population, no Hispanic has been elected to the board governing the town of 28,000 people. The Justice Department sued Port Chester in December, after a complaint by Cesar Ruiz, a Hispanic who made an unsuccessful bid to be a trustee in 2001.

Unlike the turbulent 1950s and 1960s, there are no water cannons or dogs unleashed on protesters, no federal troops. The judge who halted the March 20 election called his action an "extraordinary remedy" that "should not be routinely granted."

(snip)

U.S. District Judge Stephen Robinson then suspended the March 20 election for two trustee spots, pending a trial on the merits of the Justice Department's recommendation.

Robinson found the government was likely to win at trial, but the board still declined to settle.

"We've never had a problem with our elections or anything else. Now all of a sudden we have the federal government coming here, dictating to us they want us to have districts," said Port Chester Mayor Gerald Logan.

"There's such greater issues that the federal government could be working on, like what we are doing with our borders," he said, a reference the influx of immigrants -- many of them Spanish speakers from Latin America -- into the United States.

The defiance of the town's government is extraordinary. Instead of worrying about fair representation in the town, the fear of immigrants (btw we are a nation of immigrants) has led to ethnocentric policies that hurt nearly half of the town's residents. If the judge in the case went to extreme of halting the election, you know that Port Chester is in need of some serious help. The issue at hand may not be as serious as the turbulent times of the 1950s and 60s, but the matter is still important and must be remedied. If the current trustees continue to defy the federal government, they will find themselves in a heap of trouble.