Los Angeles voters will get a chance this fall to fundamentally restructure the way their government is organized, a rare opportunity to reconsider how communities are represented and services are delivered. They may blow it.
Interestingly, the government whose structure may change is not the one at City Hall, where reform has been a perennial issue for decades, but rather at the County Hall of Administration. It’s there that a five-member board of supervisors has presided over county operations for more than a century, during which time Los Angeles has gone from an agricultural hamlet to a booming, diverse and complex county of some 10 million people.
It is, as highly regarded Los Angeles historian Raphe Sonenshein noted in a recent essay, a "cow county no more."
For all its size and power, Los Angeles County government is often an afterthought for many residents and voters, whose political attention tends to focus on the city and its mayor, Karen Bass, rather than on the supervisors and their work. City reform efforts over the years have included restructurings of the power and oversight of the LAPD and a retooling of the city charter in the late 1990s.
The county, meanwhile, has ambled along, growing more immense and yet governed by a structure designed for smaller, simpler times. The five supervisors combine legislative and administrative responsibilities, gathering weekly to vote on policy matters and effectively overseeing services in their vast districts, which cover enormous stretches of land and have more than twice the population of the average Congressional district.
That could change this November. To the surprise of some, three supervisors voted last month to put a reform measure on the ballot that would expand the board to nine members and create an elected office for a county chief executive, providing the county with a mayor, in essence, for the first time in its history.
So far, most of the analysis has fixated on the power dynamics: More supervisors means less power for each, and thus it’s surprising to see a majority of the board behind the proposal.
That’s true, but it’s only a small part of the ballot measure’s significance. The real implications come in the form of accountability and representation.
Through the narrow lens of racial and ethnic politics, some communities stand to gain if the measure passes, while others could lose influence. Today’s board includes one overwhelmingly Latino area, District 1; one historically Black area, District 4, and three areas that include mixtures of wealthy, suburban and rural white residents on the Westside, the San Fernando Valley and the vast district that reaches as far north as Palmdale and Lancaster. That’s how a five-district map breaks down.
The county board today is made up entirely of women, one Black, one Latina and three white.
With almost twice as many seats — and depending on how lines were drawn — the projected new board could foreseeably include at least three predominantly Latino districts and one predominantly Asian American district. That means those communities would likely gain representation.
Black Angelenos, by contrast, could see their political influence wane, holding on to one seat, but now seeing that reduced to one of nine rather than one of five. White voters, similarly, would probably hold sway in two to four seats, but again, that would be on a larger board.
Voter approval won’t be easy
That’s just the beginning of the representation issue. More significant, Sonenshein explained this week, is the way the expansion — combined with the creation of a countywide executive — is intended to reshape the work and mission of the board.
Under the proposal, the new executive would become the county’s elected administrator, responsible for running the government in the fashion that Bass oversees the city of Los Angeles (or, say, Gavin Newsom oversees the state). That would — or at least, could — strip from the board its executive responsibilities and transform it into a body that was more legislative and more constituent-directed. Supervisors might be expected to listen more carefully to constituents and respond to their needs.
"Cutting in half the size of the districts," Sonenshein said, "means changing the role of the supervisors."
Meanwhile, the new county executive, an elected official, would be answerable to voters for carrying out the policies and goals that he or she campaigned on — as well as those approved by the board. Just as Bass, for instance, has staked her political reputation on her vow to alleviate homelessness in the city of Los Angeles, her new county counterpart would answerable to voters directly, to "have a ton of bricks fall," as Sonenshein put it, if he or she fell short.
"That’s what we call accountability," he added.
All that sounds appealing. Who doesn’t support improved representation and better accountability? But approval of this measure is not a given.
Sonenshein begged off a discussion of the politics surrounding the fall measure, but anyone who’s been around government reform for a while has seen good-government measures turned away by voters. Opponents of these ideas often fight them quietly — no one likes to be known as the adversary of government reform — but they can be conspicuous by their silence.
Organized labor, for one, historically has viewed government restructuring with suspicion. And no wonder. Many elected officials have been put in office with labor’s support, and the relationships are solid and settled. More campaigns means more money and more effort, and that threatens to upset a status quo that’s working for labor.
At the same time, Republicans may be wary of the current reform package, which is the work of the Democratic board and which, by creating more seats in an overwhelmingly Democratic county, offers more chances for Democrats to run and win. Republicans like to run against more government, and this offers an inviting target.
Which brings us to the difficulty of messaging. Board expansion, like proposals to expand the Los Angeles City Council, rests on convincing voters first that there is a problem with government serious enough to warrant restructuring, and then persuading those unhappy voters that the solution is to double the number of officials who are making them mad.
That dissonance is what tanked City Council expansion in the 1990s. It may be enough to doom this effort, too, even if it offers a chance for Los Angeles to be a cow county no more.
Jim Newton, CalMatters
