Latino voting right activists—and long-time colleagues—disagree about land-use initiative.

Joaquin Avila has been championing voting rights for the Latino community since 1974. Locally, he’s well known for a series of legal cases in the 1990s that reshaped Monterey County’s judiciary. He’s also the attorney who persuaded a judge to pull the General Plan initiative and the Rancho San Juan referenda off the June ballot because neither were circulated in Spanish.

On Thursday, May 18, Avila will talk about voting’s rights in Monterey County at a luncheon meeting of La Raza Lawyers Association and the Monterey County Bar Association. “What I want to do is give the Latino community an assessment of what we’ve been through, where we’re at now and where we’re going,” he says.

Avila says the goal is to “eliminate any election system that has any discriminatory effect, and make the system more accessible, so that people feel their lack of English knowledge won’t be a hindrance. If you’re a citizen and you’re an eligible voter you should have complete access.”

The Padilla case, in which Avila served as co-counsel, and the two local lawsuits aimed at keeping anti-sprawl measures off of the ballot because they were only circulated in English, are important steps in moving towards a more just system, Avila says.

But at least one local Latino activist, whom Avila has represented twice in Voting Rights Act lawsuits against Monterey County, says this most recent effort to squash land-use planning at the ballot box is wrong.

Bill Melendez, a retired teacher and former state director of League of United Latin American Citizens, is a plaintiff in the lawsuit that seeks to put the General Plan Initiative back on the ballot. In the late ‘90s, he was represented by Avila in a Voting Rights Act case that ultimately went to the US Supreme Court, and another against Monterey County in 2003. Both won.

Melendez says these two most recent Voting Rights Act cases, however, are “disingenuous.”

He says initiative supporters met with folks all around the county, ensuring them that Spanish-speaking interpreters were available.

“The voting rights community was co-opted by moneyed interests in the county that saw that as a loophole to drive the General Plan Initiative off the books,” Melendez says.

“My view is that they attempted to scuttle all the work that had been done by bringing the initiative to the Latino voters.”

Avila disagrees.

“I don’t think the clients that I represent feel that way,” he says. “The primary purpose of the litigation is to have an expansion of [Voting Rights Act Section] 203 to the initiative process. I don’t see how you can argue against that by saying that people who are linguistically limited shouldn’t have access to these materials.”

Melendez came to California from New York in 1969, and moved to Salinas in the 1970s to work as a teacher. He saw first-hand the need for affordable housing. “I invested in CHISPA to ensure that farmworkers’ families were getting good, habitable places that were affordable and well managed,” he says. He was also a founding member of the Center for Community Advocacy, a nonprofit that provides outreach to low-income families.

He was involved with Literacy Volunteers of America for more than 15 years, and helped start the first Spanish literacy program in Salinas. Most recently, he’s working to promote dual language classrooms.

“Affordable housing and empowerment of the Latino community is foremost in my mind,” he says. “Over the past 35 years, I have been very much involved in ensuring the empowerment of Latinos, and I thought that what LandWatch had done was precisely that—to empower the Líderes Communitarios de Salinas. So this lawsuit [that bumped the General Plan initiative off the June ballot] comes as a surprise to me.”

Melendez says it angers him when people say that Latinos don’t care about the environment. “This is a beautiful place to live in and we should make every attempt to guard this special place and stop out-of-control building, which has not stopped out-of-control housing prices.

“Now, what does this have to do with voting rights? It has everything to do with voting rights. Voting rights, in the past, was only accessible to certain people.” Melendez says that if people don’t protect Monterey County, through land-use policies like the General Plan initiative, it might become only accessible to certain people, too.

THE LUNCHEON FEATURING AVILA WILL BEGIN AT 11:30AM, THURSDAY, MAY 18, AT THE NATIONAL STEINBECK CENTER, ONE MAIN ST., SALINAS. $30. CALL FOR AVAILABILITY 422-0302.