I’ve occasionally fantasized that if I wanted an elective office that afforded untrammeled political power, with a huge mandate and nobody to answer to, I wouldn’t pick governor or U.S. senator. Maybe not even president. I’d choose to be a Los Angeles County supervisor.
I’d be one of five people charged with running a county of nearly 10 million people, representing a district with almost 2 million residents, too big for them to keep effective watch on what I was doing. Our appointed county executive would have no authority other than what my four legislative colleagues and I chose to give them. In the absence of an independent, elected executive, we five would have full jurisdiction over public health, parks, libraries, family services, roads, hospitals and a great deal more. We’d have quasi-judicial authority to rule in myriad administrative hearings. In short, I would be loose in an immense political candy store.
Los Angeles County is a behemoth in every sense of the word, roughly twice as large as the next most populous county in America. It has about a quarter of the residents of the entire state of California, more people than live in 40 of the 50 states. It contains more than 100 unincorporated areas that contain a million people and have scarcely any other local government to interfere with the wishes of the supervisors. The county has an annual budget of $45 billion and 100,000 employees.
It has a plethora of administrative departments, but they can’t do much of importance without three votes on the board. Los Angeles County government sometimes veers alarmingly close to anarchy. As one of the supervisors said last year, “When five people are in charge, no one is in charge.”
The county supervisors took a further hit to their image, as did just about everyone in Southern California government, given the devastating wildfires in January. The most conspicuous thing the county did was send out false evacuation warnings to thousands of residents.
This state of affairs is finally set to change — rather slowly, but it will change. Last November, 51 percent of the county’s voters opted in a referendum to expand the Board of Supervisors to nine members and create an elected county executive. The larger board doesn’t mean that much, but the executive does. He or she will have the power to make decisions that the board can’t simply ignore. The executive would be the rough equivalent of a metropolitan mayor.
You may laugh when you hear the schedule for these reforms: The new executive won’t be elected until 2028. The expansion of the board won’t happen until 2030. But within a few years, Los Angeles County will be a much different animal than the creature it has been for more than a century. In addition to an independent executive with strong administrative powers, it will be getting an open budgeting process, an ethics board and a nonpartisan legislative analyst, making it more like the state legislature than the more or less secretive entity it has long been.
The system had survived countless efforts to reform it, protected in part by public employee unions that get much of what they want under the existing regime. Four ballot measures were defeated since 1962 alone. So why is it changing now? There are a few good reasons for that.
One is the current makeup of the board. Three supervisors agreed the time for change had finally come. Another was a series of well-publicized management failures, notably the dereliction of the huge Martin Luther King Jr. public hospital, which was shut down by the federal government in 2007 and succeeded by a community hospital that is in perilous shape. “There was no risk to us politically,” one of the supervisors said after the shutdown, “because there was no one person who was politically accountable to the people of L.A. County. … No business would run that way. No state would run that way. Our country doesn’t run that way.”
Finally, there was the scandal at the Los Angeles City Council in 2022, in which councilmembers were recorded making blatantly racist remarks. The City Council is a totally separate entity from the county board, but its disgrace led to a widespread sentiment that the area’s local governments in general needed serious overhaul. Even so, the referendum calling for change won with only a bare majority, testimony to the extent of inertia and the influence of some skeptical unions.
It’s pretty much unarguable that an unchecked five-person oligarchy is a lousy system for managing a county of 10 million people. But what is the right size government for a huge metropolitan area? There’s no easy answer to that question.
Some of the other big counties in America don’t do a whole lot better when it comes to competence or efficiency. Cook County, the jurisdiction encompassing Chicago, is the next most populous county in the country, although it’s only about half the size of L.A. Cook County’s board has 17 members and a portfolio roughly similar to the governing body in Los Angeles, not an ideal arrangement either. But it does have a chief executive with a fairly broad array of powers. For much of its history, it has been an adjunct to the Democratic machine in Chicago, giving it a semblance of orderly government, if not a consistently honest one.
Harris County in Texas, America’s third-largest county, includes the city of Houston plus about 1.8 million residents of unincorporated territory. It too is responsible for enacting a budget (currently about $2.7 billion); setting tax rates; calling for bond elections; building and maintaining roads and bridges; overseeing jails, libraries and parks; and quite a bit more. It has only four commissioners, seemingly another recipe for trouble, although it does have a county judge executive who is able to exercise a fair amount of authority.
When a county’s districts each comprise a million people or more, one’s first thought might be to create many more of them and make them much smaller. But that isn’t very practical, either. To shrink L.A. County’s districts down to manageable size, you’d have to have a huge number — several dozen, at least, whose members would have parochial priorities. That might be a prescription for even more chaos than exists at present. So it probably isn’t a very good idea.
Another solution might be to get rid of the districts altogether, electing all of the supervisors at large and presumably giving them greater concern for the entire county. The difficulty there is that at-large arrangements have fallen into disfavor in most large cities in recent years because they tend to favor activist elites and underrepresent minorities. If districts of a million residents seem a bit unwieldy, having at-large supervisors with 10 million constituents each comes off as a little frightening. It isn’t going to happen.
So I’m left with the idea that the least-worst option is something like what Los Angeles County is doing — creating an elected executive with powers that the present appointed figurehead doesn’t have, and giving that person authority to regulate what the oligarchs are doing. Of course, there need to be some restraints on the clout of the executive as well. But that seems, if not easy, at least doable.
