Supervisors Live Up to Promise of Action, but Will Pace Slacken?

If there was one thing Brian Bilbray, Susan Golding and George Bailey pledged when they joined the county Board of Supervisors a year ago, it was action. And if there was one thing they delivered, that was it.

It will be months, maybe years, before the long-term performance of the current board can be evaluated. But in the 12 months since Bilbray, Golding and Bailey joined Paul Eckert and Leon Williams on the five-member board, the county has made more changes and undertaken more initiatives than in any recent year.

Like a group of school kids on a field trip through a rock-strewn canyon, the supervisors hardly took a step without pausing to pick up and examine some stray stone or pebble. Some issues they tossed aside with only a glance at the surface. Others they cracked open for a look inside, and a few they shoved in their pockets to be saved and studied later.

“The three new board members were elected pretty much as reformers, and they are anxious to do anything that they can to show their constituents that there was a reason to vote for them--that there are things that need to be fixed and issues to be dealt with,” said one top county official who asked not to be identified.

“They were able to come in and take a fresh look at things,” said Dorothy Migdal, the San Diego Chamber of Commerce’s vice president for local government affairs. “They weren’t part of the system and didn’t feel they had to defend what had gone on before.”

The system that the board oversees is a massive one. The county’s annual budget of roughly $1 billion is spent on services that affect nearly all the county’s 2 million residents. They range from health care for the poor and restaurant inspections countywide to sheriff’s patrols and land use planning in the unincorporated areas. The county also is responsible for the region’s courts and jail systems.

Some of the changes were minor: the board revamped the format of its weekly agenda in an attempt to make it more understandable. Other actions carried more import: they forced the resignation of Clifford Graves, the county’s top administrator since 1978, and hired Norman Hickey, the administrator in Hillsborough County, Fla., to replace him.

Faced with instances of poor patient care and bad management at the Edgemoor Geriatric Hospital in Santee and the county mental health hospital in Hillcrest, the county disbanded the Department of Health Services and began a search for new and better ways to manage those programs. When reports surfaced of shoddy work in the coroner’s office, that department was reorganized and given a massive budget boost. Troubled by inefficiencies in the county office that provides attorneys for people too poor to afford their own, the board ordered a detailed review of that operation with an eye toward a possible overhaul.

The board members undid some actions of their predecessors, scrapping plans to build an office, hotel and restaurant complex on the parking lots flanking the County Administration Center and arranging to buy for use as a regional park a Solana Beach canyon that the previous board had slated for development. They reestablished a Human Relations Commission seven years after an earlier board had disbanded a similar panel.

In other cases, like the decision approving construction of a controversial trash-burning power plant in San Marcos, the supervisors put the finishing touches on programs begun years before. When they weaned more than 60 private health and social service agencies from their dependency on federal revenue sharing funds, and when they gave conceptual approval for a $400-million jail and courthouse construction program, the board members were able to do what their predecessors had pondered but never accomplished.

In some cases, the board tried to move in front of a bandwagon already on the move: they formed a task force on AIDS more than two years after former Mayor Roger Hedgecock had established one in San Diego city, and they declared themselves the lead agency on the border sewage problem just as the federal Environmental Protection Agency was about to make a breakthrough in its negotiations with the Mexicans.

Other Issue

Other issues on which the county tried to position itself as a leader: international trade, downtown development, regional planning, human relations and the homeless.

The board did all this while maintaining, at least in public, a relatively cordial working relationship. While past boards have been known for their alliances and clashes, the members of this board so far have shown a tendency to work together smoothly. Back-room tensions and suspicions are still present, as they are in any political body, but the board seems to have a knack for settling thorny issues with unanimous votes rather than the 3-2 splits that used to be the norm.

“I think we’ve given an indication that we’re not going to be a lackluster, complacent board,” Golding said. “If a problem arises, and no one else does something about it, then we’re going to do something.”

“I don’t think we’re quite as conservative as the prior board,” Bailey added. “It’s an action-oriented board rather than one that puts off action and just studies the problems.”

As an example, Bailey cited the board’s handling of the county’s chronic shortage of courthouse and jail space. Although the shortage has existed for years and has steadily worsened, previous boards could never agree on a comprehensive solution. Late last year, the supervisors agreed in concept to spend as much as $400 million to build a major jail, an honor camp and new courtrooms. They also pledged to open booking centers in the El Cajon and South Bay jails, a move long advocated by Sheriff John Duffy.

But the criminal justice issue is also an illustration of how far the county still has to go. By illustration, if county government were an old car that had been poorly maintained, you could say the Board of Supervisors spent 1985 tearing it down into its various parts. But they’ve yet to piece it all back together. Agreeing to build jails and courtrooms is one thing. Finding a way to pay for them is quite another, and that’s a problem the board has yet to solve.

Financial Future

David Janssen, the county’s acting chief administrative officer, said the county’s fiscal health, while sound today, will be threatened again by the federal government’s move toward a balanced budget. And the Board of Supervisors’ recent habit of allocating large chunks of money to solve the county’s problems is a trend that will probably not continue much longer, he said.

“When you identify problems that have developed over the years, more money seems to be the solution,” Janssen said. “We have put additional money into the coroner, significant additional money into Edgemoor, Hillcrest, and the county simply does not have that kind of money. If we do have a federal cut of any significance, I’m concerned we may overextend ourselves.”

Another factor that observers believe could dampen the new board’s enthusiasm is human nature: the longer the supervisors serve, the less able they will be to blame the county’s problems on their predecessors and the more likely they may be to defend the status quo.

Assemblyman Larry Stirling (R-San Diego), who has criticized the board for moving too slowly to solve problems in its mental health hospital, said he was surprised, and disturbed, by the board’s resistance to acknowledging many of the allegations Stirling made public, most of which proved accurate.

“I think they are defensive, and I’m not sure why,” Stirling said. “The problems of the county are not of their doing. This is a new board. It’s a mystery to me why they would respond by attacking me and defending the staff they had been brought in to clean up.”

Said one longtime county official: “To take a jaundiced look at the thing you could say, ‘OK, this is good for this year, but what’s it going to be like next year, or, more important, toward the end of their terms?’ We’ll see what happens.”

But Golding said she doubts the board will fall into the trap of ignoring the county’s problems as a way of avoiding responsibility for their origin.

“You can only go so long saying ‘Oh, that was a problem before I came on,’ ” she said. “I’m not interested in being surprised by headlines about a problem I knew nothing about. I’m interested in addressing problems when they first arise and not letting them become crises.”