Let’s Leave the Ice Age

The antiquated system will sound instantly familiar to anyone accustomed to county government in California: The article by John Herbers in Governing magazine talked about a state in which most county governments remain essentially what they were in the 19th Century, ruled by five members of a board of supervisors who wield both executive and legislative authority. The supervisors rule their districts like little fiefdoms, and often it is impossible to have a new facility or a new program without having five of each. There is no single elected official to speak for the county or to take overall responsibility for decisions.

That is essentially the case in California, with identical forms of supervisorial government in the smallest rural counties as well as the largest, including 8.5-million-resident Los Angeles.

Herbers was not writing about California, however, but Mississippi, where a reform movement was launched following the disclosure of widespread corruption in county government. The plan sponsored by Democratic Gov. Ray Mabus was adopted in only 47 of Mississippi’s 82 counties, losing in some areas where the wrongdoing was most prevalent. “Mississippi’s resistance to change has many parallels in other states with mostly rural, small-population counties and is a major cause of keeping county government collectively with one foot in Colonial America,” Herbers wrote in the magazine edited for officials of state and local government.

If Mississippi has one foot in Colonial America, Los Angeles County has both planted firmly in the last Ice Age. An underfunded initiative measure to create an independent county executive failed narrowly back in the mid-1970s. Since then, the quickest way of getting booted out of the county Hall of Administration is to dare whisper the word reform . Today, the Board of Supervisors even has dug in against a lawsuit brought by the U.S. Justice Department seeking to force a redrawing of the five supervisorial districts to allow Latinos the prospect of fair representation.

But even this minimal attempt to achieve some political equity will not correct the inherent defects of a system of government that might have been adequate to county needs nearly a century ago, but is ill-equipped to handle the modern problems of an area that has more residents than most states. Without even taking into account the clashing political philosophies and agendas of the current supervisors, the system lacks cohesion, direction, efficiency and accountability. Most grievously, the present structure lacks the most basic checks and balances that are the foundation of American democracy. The same five men who make the laws as the legislature also administer them and, to some degree, interpret them.

In the 1970s, the major argument against the reform plan was the cost of creating the executive’s office. But that price was negligible compared with the waste built into the present system, as noted on these pages earlier this year by Jerry B. Epstein, a developer of Marina del Rey and member of two county commissions: “Hundreds of millions of dollars are wasted in inefficiencies instigated by an administrative system rife with bureaucratic end runs to five different supervisors divided as often by personal animosity as by political philosophy.”

County government today is on the front line of erupting problems like growth management, transportation, emergency health services and homelessness. The challenge demands innovation, efficiency and coherent leadership. Some dynamic areas of California are rising to the challenge. The city and county of Sacramento are considering a merger. In Los Angeles County, a governmental structure rooted in rural Colonial Times, or glacial ice, is not up to the task.