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SY: Were there other things that, while you were serving Torrance, that you were particularly proud of?

GN: One is the graffiti. That started to pop up in the city. And I happened to be walking a precinct and this lady worked in city of Manhattan Beach, and they have an actual graffiti removal program in Manhattan Beach and so she asked me, "Why can't we have one in Torrance?" And so that gave me the idea of initiating something in the city of Torrance as the way to, an organized way of removing graffiti. So the way it's done is that the police will get a photograph of the graffiti so that you don't just take the graffiti off by painting over it and not knowing what kind of graffiti it is, and the police need to get involved because it could very well be gang related graffiti and the police are the ones that are knowledgeable about following certain patterns and words occurring and those kind of things. And so in the beginning, when we initiated the program, it would take about two weeks before the graffiti is removed, and I think now it's done within twenty-four hours. The policy is that you allow the, if it's on a private property you allow the people to remove it themselves, but if they don't do it within seven days then the city will come and do it anyway, and so that's how the program works.

SY: So that must have been a very popular program, then, at that time.

GN: It was. And then the other thing was in 1991, when they did the redistricting. That year the legislature did not do the redistricting because the Democrats and Republicans couldn't agree on doing the redistricting, and so what happened was, well, you had a, you had a Democratic majority in the legislature and then you had a Republican government. So the Democrats would have control over the redistricting, but usually what happens is that they will have some agreement with the Republican legislature on how the lines were redrawn, but in that year they couldn't agree and so what happened was it went to the California Supreme Court. The law is that when there's, when you can't have that kind of agreement it will go to the California Supreme Court, and the California Supreme Court appointed special masters to draw up the district, and the special masters, when they did the district the assembly district was split in half in Torrance, along 190th Street. And what I saw in doing that was that, from the ethnic standpoint, you have a high concentration of Japanese Americans in north Torrance and they were being combined with the fifty-first assembly district, which would be Lawndale, which is immediately north of Torrance there, and they had very little in common and it was violating the community of interest as I saw it, which is part of their federal voting rights. And so, and I was already working with the Coalition of Asian Pacific Americans for Federal Reapportionment, which was part of the Asian Pacific American Legal Center, and the reason why I was already working with them is because at that time, in 1991, Asians constituted ten percent of the state population and yet there was not a single Asian in state legislature. Because what would happen is that whenever some district is drawn up, not just one district, but if you had a concentrated area of Asians it would be divided up into, like, three different districts, so you minimize their viability instead of all that Asian population being in one district. And so that is what I saw.

SY: So what were you --

GN: It was a dilution, and so I talked to the attorneys from CAPAFRA and they agreed with me, and so they worked on the legal brief. And there was a person at UCLA that had the software for redistricting, so he was working with our group as well, and so precinct by precinct I worked with him as to which, what we should do. And that is first you combine Torrance, and then you need to know how much of the population that constituted and that would determine how much we have to give up to the fifty-first assembly district so that it would be even. And then at the same time you want to minimize any impact or change in the African American population as well as the Latino population. So the area that I picked was Westchester, and so we went precinct by precinct and put together a whole new district between the fifty-first and the fifty-third and then presented the legal brief that the attorneys put together. So that year you had, the governor had his proposal for change, you had the Democratic party, they had a proposal for how they would like the district being changed to -- this is after the special master had already done the redistricting -- the Republican party, same thing, NAACP had their proposal, CAPAFRA, which is the Asian group, also had their proposal for the statewide version, and MALDIF had their proposal. And then we had this one proposal for Torrance. Well, I so happened to be watching California channel and they were having the hearing before the California Supreme Court on all these different proposals, and the only one that the justices had any questions was the one regarding Torrance. All the other ones, they listened to their testimony but they had no questions, so I thought that was a good sign. Well, sure enough, that proposal was the only one they approved, so now Torrance was in one district, the assembly district.

SY: Wow. And that's, that's a big accomplishment for just one city council, the Torrance city council. You had that kind of impact, right, on the whole state.

GN: It was because I was involved with the Asian Pacific American Legal Center in their quest for reapportionment, especially where you have an Asian population that's always being divided up into several different districts.

SY: I see.

GN: And so I became very knowledgeable about the elements of the Federal Voting Rights Act, what needs to be adhered to.

SY: Wow. That's an amazing thing. And so consequently there's --

GN: Yeah, nobody else in the city proposed anything, nothing. They just complained about being split. And so I took it upon myself to do something about it.

SY: And that resulted, probably, in a lot of elections of, in subsequent years, of Asians. Would you say that that's...

GN: And at that time I had no idea that I would be running for that seat at one time.

SY: [Laughs] Well that's good. It wasn't self interest.

GN: Debra Bowen ran, Debra Bowen ran in '92, but historically -- and the district was, had three percent advantage in the Democratic registration over the Republican registration -- historically, if a Democrat wanted to win they had to have at least twelve percent registration advantage over the Republicans. And they only had three. But Debra, Debra ran and that was the year of the woman, I think, and so she won and Jane Harmon won her congressional seat that same year.

SY: And so when you decided to run for state assembly...

GN: That was in '98 after Debra Bowen termed out.

SY: Termed out, so that was the reason that you decided to run, Debra Bowen?

GN: No, because my city council seat, I was in my fourth term, but they had instituted a two term limit for city council members and so I got affected by that after I had already served two terms on the city council. So I was in my fourth term and I would not be able to run for city council again, so it was in the middle of my fourth term that Debra Bowen termed out of the state assembly, so I decided to run for the assembly in '98.

SY: I see.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.