In Brief:
- Last month, Los Angeles County voters approved a measure to restructure their government. The changes will take place gradually but include creation of an ethics commission, an expansion of the Board of Supervisors from five members to nine and the creation of a directly elected county executive.
- The county had kept the same government structure since the mid-1800s, failing to keep up with demographic changes and ending up with a system that was slow to react to new challenges.
- Critics warn that the new executive will be too powerful, but supporters of the changes say the county will benefit from the creation of checks and balances between the executive and the legislative offices.
Los Angeles County, which has a bigger population than 40 states, is about to get a new system of government. In place of its five-member Board of Supervisors, which critics have complained can be both unresponsive and unrepresentative, the county will be run by an elected executive and an expanded board.
“It is such a staggering surprise,” says Raphael Sonenshein, director of the Haynes Foundation, which has been pushing for these kinds of changes for decades. “This is hugely significant, because it's one of the biggest county governance reforms in the country … at the largest county government in the country.”
The successful ballot measure was sponsored by a pair of sitting supervisors, but its popular support might have had less to do with the county itself. The city of Los Angeles had suffered through a variety of scandals in recent years, including an incident in which two city councilors and the council president made racist remarks. The city has embarked on a charter reform process that may lead to changes such as expanding the City Council. (City residents make up 40 percent of the county’s population.)
“That’s usually how reform happens,” Sonenshein says. “A whole bunch of cataclysms happen, and it shakes loose a bunch of ideas that have been bottled up that no one would pay attention to because there was no urgency around it.”
Ready for Change
The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors presides over 9.6 million people and has enjoyed not just legislative but executive and even quasi-judicial power. The board enacts ordinances and sets policies, while also overseeing county departments such as Children and Family Services and Public Health. It sets salaries and approves the county budget. It’s responsible for a park system, libraries, roads and waterways, the fire department, a sizable hospital system and more. It is the only local government for the roughly 1 million people who live in unincorporated territory.
Having so much on their plate — and having to make decisions literally by committee — keeps the county from being nimble. If the head of a county department is facing a policy problem, that person must contact all five board members and wait until all five can convene — something that can only happen after public meeting notices are issued — and wait until the supervisors can reach consensus, says Lindsey Horvath, a member of the board and co-sponsor of the ballot measure.
The board does appoint a chief executive officer, but that individual lacks the authority to veto the board’s decisions. The lack of a single person in charge slows the county’s ability to respond to unfolding events or move expeditiously on goals such as closing the men’s prison, Horvath says. “When five people are in charge, no one's in charge, and it makes the county system quite inefficient,” she says.
So that’s the argument for creating a county executive who will be directly elected by voters (although not until 2028). Expanding the number of supervisors from five to nine represents an attempt to have it better reflect the changing nature of one of the nation’s more diverse counties.
The board currently has no Asian American member, even though that is the county’s third-largest demographic group, and only one Latina in a county that is 50 percent Hispanic. “Five supervisors is simply not enough to represent all of the diverse stakeholders in the county,” says Supervisor Hilda Solis.
The expansion, the first in more than a century, will take place after redistricting following the 2030 census. The current supervisors will all be out of power by the time the size of the board changes in 2032, due to term limits. That wasn’t the case back in the 1970s, when similar proposals failed.
Not All Sketched Out
Last year, the board unanimously approved a motion that called for a re-examination of the county’s structure, including the number of supervisors. But after more than a year, the county had not acted or even hired a consultant to lead the effort, which led Horvath to take the issue directly to voters. “It was clear to me that the institutional inertia of the county was going to impact our ability to even bring change, when we were using the existing systems to try and change it,” Horvath says.
Critics of the ballot measure complained that it lacked specifics about how these major changes were going to come about. The measure calls for a task force to pin down the details about creating an ethics commission, as well as the expanded board and elected executive. “When we’re looking at reforming something as important as L.A. County governance … details do matter,” says Helen Chavez Garcia, communications director for Supervisor Kathryn Barger.
Under state law, the new executive will not be subject to term limits, meaning that person will not only hold enormous power but potentially do so indefinitely. Horvath argues that the county will benefit nonetheless from having increased checks and balances by separating executive and legislative power.
She hopes the changes in L.A. County will ultimately serve as an example about how county governance can be restructured. “I think people are taking this moment of reform and change up and down the ballot, throughout our country,” Horvath says, “to really reflect on what it means to have a government that represents us in the 21st century.”
