Organizing California’s Governmental Crazy Quilt

The time is growing ever riper for a sequel to celebrated Proposition 13. Prop. 13 put a lid of sorts on taxes. “Prop. 14” would be far more revolutionary. It would call for a halt to the senselessness pervading California’s network of city and county governments.

That affliction is approaching terminal severity. Assembly Speaker Willie Brown summarized the situation the other day: “California has 58 counties, 445 cities and over 5,000 special districts covering every kind of service from fire to parks, to irrigation, to transportation, to libraries. Each city and county has its own central administration, its own ordinances, its own array of services. . . . What we have is a haphazard, random assortment of government bodies, all fighting over the same (tax) dollars and all contributing to a service delivery system that is more of a crazy quilt than a safety net.” Amen.

Brown was guilty of diplomatic understatement. Symptoms of galloping chaos in California’s public administration proliferate daily.

Tehama County doesn’t know how it can meet its budget. Other thinly populated, thinly resourced “cow” counties aren’t much better off. San Francisco is so strapped for funds that people talk about transforming Alcatraz Island into a gambling resort--oblivious to Alcatraz’s status as a national park. Los Angeles has managed to balance budgets, but only by wide retrenchment in public services.

It has been fashionable to blame Prop. 13 for the statewide fiscal anguish. It did indeed drastically limit property tax revenues and make localities more dependent on Sacramento. But Prop. 13 was valid enough to be emulated in a number of other states. And it fell far short of dire predictions that it would paralyze California’s cities and counties. Public spending continues apace.

In the decade since Prop. 13 was enacted, for example, Los Angeles County’s budget has risen 75%, to around $7 billion, while the population served has increased only about 14%. The city’s budget has nearly doubled, to about $2 billion, while the population served has increased no more than 20%.

What Prop. 13 did was bring to a head two ulcerous conditions rooted more than a century in state history. One was the rag-tag governance of California’s cities and counties. The other was their ineffably tangled relationships with the state.

Los Angeles epitomizes problems rife among the other counties. It has an ever-growing mass of state-mandated responsibilities without commensurate financing. This isn’t helped by a governmental structure and operation that are a management experts’ nightmare. Major community problems, from AIDS to zoning--and including welfare, the homeless, mass transit and trash disposal--transcend municipal boundaries. Yet both city and county regimes grapple with these problems as if they were on separate planets.

Overlap, duplication and waste are incalculable. One official counted 25 different public services in which both city and county units have a hand, from police protection to animal regulation.

Presiding over this mare’s-nest is a five-member county Board of Supervisors--the same size it was 136 years ago when population was 3,500 instead of 8 million--exercising both legislative and executive functions, purporting to oversee the activities of some 50 different departments. Alongside is the City Council, each of 15 members with about 200,000 constituents, operating through a skein of fractious boards and commissions.

The county, with enough problems of its own, undertakes to supply community services to a number of cities. Conversely, it contracts out some of its duties to private operators. Of course there is running disagreement about whether this saves or costs the county money.

A visitor from Mars would find it hard to believe that it took Los Angeles half a century of jawing to hatch a rapid transit system, that the city stonewalled the federal government for 15 years on installing an indispensable sewage plant or that a police chief being paid $136,000 a year had to submit a relatively small personnel question to a public vote.

Consolidation of Los Angeles’ city and county regimes is recurrently suggested to moderate this gallimaufry, and on paper it makes some sense. Voters approved the idea in a 1978 advisory ballot item. But what can be done about the county’s other 84 cities, and the vast reaches in between, where one million people live? As consolidated San Francisco is demonstrating, a merged city-county Administration can get into as much trouble as anybody else.

Alice-in-Wonderlandism is statewide. Counties raise some of their funds themselves, relay money to Sacramento, get federal money and receive unpredictable sums back from Sacramento. Cities are in a similar economic cat’s-cradle.

The state tosses dollars back to taxpayers even as it poor-mouths city and county emissaries who annually come to beg for subsistence monies determined by legislative whim--an exercise antedating Prop. 13. The flip side is the spectacle of San Bernardino County threatening to fractionate itself because of dissatisfaction with governmental processes.

Even the number of supplicant cities is out of public control. The state has yielded its authority over city formation to county commissions. Pseudo-cities without population, like Vernon, Commerce and Irwindale, designed for tax advantages or less worthy motives, materialize to tap into the public cash flow.

What’s the solution? Speaker Brown proposes that the governor name a blue-ribbon commission to delve into reforms. But we know where any recommendations will end up. On the shelf.

It is axiomatic that governmental reform is never going to be initiated or pursued by incumbents who are likely to lose something from change.

What is missing from an effective equation is the voice of the people--who pay for all this and suffer in various degrees from maladministration.

How could that voice be expressed? The most promising device would appear to be one long effective in foiling obdurate politicians and bureaucrats: the initiative.

The 1972 initiative measure establishing coastal zone management offers a mini-model. It set up a democratically constituted statewide body that developed criteria for coastal management by a democratic process--and contrived means of implementing these criteria, also democratically. There has been sporadic lamentation about Coastal Commission rulings, but it has been outweighed by voters’ apparent satisfaction.

The first task of a voter-created governmental reform commission would be a constitutional overhaul yielding a sensible pattern of administrative and fiscal relationships among state, county and municipal governments. The second task would be to map a series of steps toward this goal from the where we are now. The final task would be implementing this program.

The most difficult chore throughout would be withstanding the anvil chorus of disaster from entrenched interests. And the weapon against this would be the same as the Coastal Commission’s: waving the electoral mandate of a citizenry insistent on reform.

Mounting such an initiative would take an immense amount of missionary work educating people in the need for reform. But Howard Jarvis campaigned for decades before his Prop. 13 became an idea whose time had come.

Remodeling government would take years. But the process has to start, or we will sink deeper into an administrative morass comparable to the La Brea pits.