Malibu Chili Not All That Is Cooking : But Supervisors Suffer Lethargy

This early August Tuesday looked like the summer doldrums at the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors.

Chairman Ed Edelman mumbled his way through the agenda, his voice more inaudible than usual. Even conservative Supervisor Mike Antonovich’s customary outrage seemed flat when he attacked the idea of illegal immigrants being admitted to state public universities, the same as legal residents.

The fourth annual Malibu Chili Cook-Off, the International Footprint Assn. fund-raiser at Crescenta Valley Park and whether jail inmates or county employees should do county hospital laundry were among the topics of the day.

Only James C. Hankla, the new chief administrative officer who heads the county bureaucracy, seemed energetic, turning around in his chair on the dais occasionally to summon an aide with a single, quick wave of the hand.

That was fitting. For there really are no summer doldrums at the county Hall of Administration this August, despite the lethargy of Tuesday’s supervisorial session. Plenty is going on, but it is being done by Hankla and the other bureaucrats who work in offices in the gloomy hallways of the Hall of Administration and other county buildings.

Important Items

There were three important items on the supervisors’ agenda, all representing complex and possibly insoluble problems that the supervisors could do nothing about at the meeting. Only the unknown bureaucrats, at this point, could offer any help.

The items involved the quality of health care for the county’s poor, the treatment of children at MacLaren Children’s Center, where abandoned and abused youngsters are sent, and the repercussions of the congressional budget compromise, which could cost county government millions.

A complaint had been made about the quality of orthopedic surgery at Martin Luther King Jr. Hospital, the facility in South-Central Los Angeles that is the major provider of health care for the poor blacks and Latinos in the area.

Robert Gates, who heads the Health Services Department, was called from a back room, where department heads wait during meetings for supervisorial summons. He explained that he was looking into the situation.

“We’re reviewing certain aspects of our operation,” he said.

Not very satisfactory, but a supervisors’ meeting was no place to settle the question of whether operations are correctly performed.

A MacLaren center worker kept a diary while there, and when he quit, he publicized it, contending it showed some other workers mistreated children.

Press and Public

Antonovich wondered if MacLaren workers should be debriefed by their superiors before they quit, telling their bosses what is wrong before complaining to the press and public.

Robert Chaffee, the new head of MacLaren, was summoned before the board.

“We’re in the process of completely reviewing MacLaren’s staffing standards,” he said.

However, the entire problem of MacLaren--an overcrowded institution full of an often-unmanageable mix of troubled children--had been discussed many times by the board and this was just another manifestation of the dilemma. Chaffee would report back. No solutions were possible on this day.

The third item was the most troublesome. In Washington, Senate and House leaders had agreed on a budget compromise that would cost Los Angeles County and other local governments huge amounts of money. General revenue sharing, a longtime federal subsidy to local government, would end, some other programs would be cut and expensive changes would be made in still other areas.

Problem Outlined

Edelman outlined the problem briefly, and the board told Hankla to come back in a couple of weeks with a complete report on the compromise. Again, the board could do nothing.

It demonstrated what Hankla has been saying privately and publicly: that the fiscal dilemma faced by the county and the social problems it must solve are so overwhelming that there is little the supervisors can do at their weekly meetings.

Thus they have turned over the work to the bureaucrats, who will try to devise programs of financial aid that Sacramento and Washington will accept and who, within financial limitations, will come up with fixes, probably superficial, to what ails Martin Luther King Jr. Hospital and MacLaren Children’s Center.