By Jim Newton
Los Angeles voters will have the opportunity this fall to fundamentally restructure the organization of their government. This is a rare opportunity to rethink the way communities are represented and services are delivered.
You could screw it up.
Interestingly, the government whose structure could change is not the one in City Hall, where Reforms are a constant theme for decades, but in the County Hall of Administration. There, a five-member board of directors has managed the county’s affairs for over a century. During this time, Los Angeles has developed from an agricultural hamlet into a booming, diverse and complex county with around 10 million residents.
It is, as the respected Los Angeles historian Raphe Sonenshein noted in a recent essay, a “no more cow community.”
Despite its size and power, Los Angeles County government is often a side issue for many residents and voters, whose political attention is focused on the city and its mayor, Karen Bass, rather than on the city’s supervisors and their work. The city’s reform efforts over the years have included restructuring of power and Supervision of the LAPD and a Redesign of the city law in the late 1990s.
The district has since crawled along, growing ever larger, but is still governed by a structure designed for smaller, simpler times. The five supervisors combine legislative and administrative responsibilities, meet weekly to vote on policy matters, and effectively oversee services in their vast districts, which cover vast swathes 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 regulators voted last month to put a reform measure to the ballot that expand the board to nine members It also proposes to create an elected office for the head of a county government, essentially giving the county a mayor for the first time in its history.
So far, the analysis has focused mainly on power dynamics: More superiors means less performance for everyoneand therefore it is surprising that the majority of the Board supports the proposal.
That’s true, but that’s only a small part of what this ballot proposal means. The real impact comes in the form of accountability and representation.
From the narrow perspective of racial and ethnic politics, some communities will benefit from the law’s passage, while others could lose influence. Today’s council includes a predominantly Latino area, District 1; a historically black area, District 4; and three areas that include a mix of affluent, suburban and rural white residents on the West Side, in the San Fernando Valley, and in the vast district that stretches as far north as Palmdale and Lancaster. Here’s what a five-district map looks like.
The county council today consists entirely of women: one black woman, one Latina woman and three white women.
With nearly twice as many seats — and depending on how the boundaries are drawn — the proposed new board could likely include at least three predominantly Latino districts and one predominantly Asian American district, meaning those communities would likely be more strongly represented.
Black residents of Los Angeles, on the other hand, could lose their political influence. They hold one seat, which will now be reduced from one in five to one in nine. White voters could gain two to four seats with a similar probability, but again the body would be larger.
Voter approval will not be easy
That’s just the beginning of the representation problem. More significant, Sonenshein explained this week, is the way the expansion — coupled with the creation of a statewide board — is intended to reshape the body’s work and mission.
Under the proposal, the new executive council would become the county’s elected administrator, running the government in the same way that Bass runs the city of Los Angeles (or Gavin Newsom runs the state). That would – or at least could – strip the board of its executive responsibilities and turn it into a body that is more legislative and more voter-led. Supervisors could be expected to listen more carefully to voters and respond to their needs.
“Halving the district size,” Sonenshein said, “means a change in the role of the supervisors.”
The new county executive, an elected official, would be responsible to voters to implement the policies and goals he or she championed during the campaign — as well as those approved by the board. Just as Bass, for example, staked her political reputation on her promise to reduce homelessness in the city of Los Angeles, her new county counterpart would be directly responsible to voters, and if he or she doesn’t meet his or her goals, he or she would be “dropping a lot of bricks,” as Sonenshein put it.
“That’s what we call accountability,” he added.
This all sounds tempting. Who doesn’t want better representation and accountability? But support for this measure is not a given.
Sonenshein declined to discuss the politics of the fall measures, but anyone who has followed government reform for any length of time has seen voters reject good governance measures. Opponents of these ideas often fight them quietly—no one likes to be called an opponent of government reform—but they can be conspicuous by their silence.
Unions, for example, have historically viewed government restructuring with suspicion. And no wonder. Many elected officials were put in office with union support, and relationships are solid and well-established. More campaigns mean more money and more effort, and that threatens to undermine a status quo that benefits unions.
At the same time, Republicans may be wary of the current reform package crafted by the Democratic caucus, which, by adding more seats in a predominantly Democratic district, gives Democrats a better chance to run and win. Republicans like to run against expansion of government, and this is a tempting target.
This brings us to the difficulty of message transmission. The expansion of the board, such as Proposals to expand the Los Angeles City Councilrelies on first convincing voters that there is a problem with government serious enough to justify restructuring. Then convincing those dissatisfied voters that the solution is to double the number of civil servants who annoy them.
This dissonance is what caused the expansion of the City Council to fail in the 1990s, and it may be enough to derail this one too, even if it offers the chance to make Los Angeles no longer a cow district.
This article was originally published by CalMatters.
