After a century, voters say they want changes to LA County Board of Supervisors
After more than a century of the status quo in Los Angeles County government, changes are coming via Measure G.
The passage of Measure G, the county charter reform, will add four county supervisors to make nine, elect the county executive officer as head honcho, establish an ethics commission, and give more chances for the public to weigh in on board motions and components of its $49 billion annual budget.
“People really want this change. They know it is time,” said Supervisor Lindsey Horvath, chair of the board and co-author of the measure with Supervisor Janice Hahn, on Tuesday, Nov. 12.
Voter approval has grown in the last week as more ballots were counted. As of late Monday the L.A. County registrar’s office had counted more than 3.6 million ballots and said there were 187,000 left to process countywide. Measure G had 51.40% approval and 48.60% disapproval, or 87,989 more people supported it than opposed it as of 4:35 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 12. The campaign declared victory.
If results stand, changes will arrive in bursts. Adding more supervisors won’t happen until 2032, after the 2030 U.S. Census is digested and new supervisorial districts are carved out. Today each supervisor represents about 2 million people, or about one-fifth the 10 million population of the largest county in the United States.
“Five supervisors for 10 million people? That doesn’t make sense,” Horvath said. “Even with the hardest working supervisor, people would like to see you more and pay more attention to their needs. It means we can do a lot better.”
In 2028, voters will choose a chief executive officer that will have power to take final actions and veto board decisions. This is a huge change because the CEO today is chosen by the board and has to listen to five bosses before acting.
A new budget review will start in mid-2025, with department heads laying out their spending one by one for public comment, instead of one single look at the final document with the public getting only a minute to speak. And immediately, the so-called “green sheets” with late board motions will be disallowed, meaning the motions must be on the agenda released Thursday before the Tuesday board meeting, except for “urgency” motions, Horvath said.
“The most important changes in our budgeting process will happen in the next round of the budget,” she said. “We will now be able to hear directly from department directors and what are the services and outcomes people can expect from their budget for the year. That’s the kind of transparency people want to see.”
An independent ethics commission will be formed by 2026, she said. Very soon, the Governance Reform Task Force will be created to walk the public through the myriad of reforms in Measure G. The current board will pick who will be on that task force and it will hold public meetings. “The Government Reform Task Force will hear suggestions that maybe we had not contemplated in this charter reform amendment,” she said.
While this is what Horvath calls “added transparency” to a board that makes decisions on healthcare, homelessness, housing policy, law enforcement, jails, arts, libraries and more, the biggest shift that most pundits talked about was creating a powerful chief executive officer who is accountable to an electorate.
Zev Yaroslavsky, a county supervisor for 20 years before retiring in 2014, said the elected county executive is a key reform in the measure.
“It is the most transformative reform of county government in at least a century,” he said on Tuesday. “I was an advocate for this 25 years ago.”
The elected county executive will be the most powerful locally elected official in California, Yaroslavsky said. “There would be one person who would be the go-to person. He or she would have the biggest bully pulpit of any official in the state.”
The other benefit is to have a person in the organizational flow chart with the power to cut through the county bureaucracy. Yaroslavsky said during his tenure, the board debated for many years whether to close Martin Luther King-Drew Medical Center, even after the federal government threatened to shut it down. It was eventually restructured.
Similarly, during the pandemic, the board fought over a science-based approach versus keeping businesses open, causing delays in board actions, he said. The same issue is happening in resolving the question of what to do with the dilapidated Men’s Central Jail, which the supervisors voted to close more than three years ago.
New reports to the board said more infrastructure is needed before the jail could be closed.
“Do they close Men’s Central Jail? Do you replace it? This is the debate we were having when I was on the board in 2013 and 2014. We couldn’t build consensus. Now, next year it will be 10 years since I left the Board of Supervisors and they still haven’t figured it out,” Yaroslavsky said.
“The boards have had to work within the system but it is not a good system. There has to be one person in charge and that is a chief executive (elected by the people), who can be a decision-maker and step on toes if necessary.”
Horvath talks about a needed separation between the legislative and executive branches of government. Right now, both functions are embedded in the Board of Supervisors. By adding an elected chief executive officer, it allows the supervisors to make policy, i.e., a legislative branch, leaving a new CEO to carry it out, i.e. an executive branch.
Today the board brings motions after motions, but institutional inertia within the county government stops them dead. “The lack of an elected county executive has resulted in the county falling short,” she said.
Supervisors Kathryn Barger and Holly Mitchell opposed the measure, often citing the elected CEO as the reason. Barger said it was “wrong” to have what many call a county mayor with no term limits. “That will politicize our chief executive officer position. We need an executive that is non-partisan and unbiased running the daily operations of the county, not another politician,” Barger said in a statement.
Joel Fox, an adjunct professor at Pepperdine University in the Graduate School of Public Policy, follows county government and local elections. He said the expansion of the board is logical, but an elected county executive will feed special interests’ agendas.
“My concern is that this will be a position that special interests will try to control,” Fox said on Tuesday. “Take unions for example. They will get their way on a lot of measures and that doesn’t necessarily serve the people of L.A. County.”
He also said some of the supervisors will undoubtedly run for this position in 2028.
Yaroslavsky said political power and monied-politics already exist when individuals run for board seats, so he’s not worried about politics.
The Yes on Measure G campaign said the 2024 election turned the page on history. Two recent efforts to institute an elected county CEO failed in 1976 and 1992. Efforts to expand the board were rejected by voters in 1962, 1976, 1992 and 2000.
This year the voting results were different. Fox said Measure G did not get a lot of attention due to a presidential race and 10 state ballot propositions sucking up all the political wind. “They were sort of successful by hiding the ball,” he said.
Horvath said many “yes” votes came from Asian-American Pacific Islander voters who want to see a person who looks like them on the board. She also said the vibe for change was in play, with L.A. City Hall reform measures on the ballot to enhance the powers of its own ethics board and stop city council members from drawing their own electoral districts.
“Nothing like this has happened since 1912,” Horvath said. “That layer of accountability that will exist now is long overdue.”