Breaking Up the Glacier of the County

Watching Los Angeles County government at work is like being assigned to monitor the progress of a glacier.

The bureaucratic monolith moves slowly, and is impenetrable.

For a reporter, assignment to the Hall of Administration resembles covering the pre-Gorbachev Kremlin. County officials are afraid to talk to the press. Only under duress will they grudgingly distribute public documents that are freely available in other jurisdictions.

This goes beyond a journalist griping about tough working conditions. Community activists and reformers have just as much trouble obtaining essential information about proposed land developments, foster home care, mental health facilities and similar important doings of county government.

The silence that surrounds county government is symptomatic of a greater weakness within the system, a weakness that has prompted the Los Angeles County League of Women Voters to join with the Los Angeles County Bar Assn. and California Common Cause in plans for a ballot measure, possibly in November, to overhaul the entire system.

The proposal would split power, creating an elected county executive, or mayor, to run the government, while the supervisors were confined to a legislative role.

The board would be expanded from its present five members. Also, there would be limits on the gifts and campaign contributions supervisors and the executive could receive from entities doing business with the county.

The proposal effectively would open up county affairs to the public. Now, there’s only one branch--the five supervisors, a system that encourages secrecy. The supervisors pass the laws, and then are in charge of executing them. It is as if we had Congress and no President, or the Legislature and no governor.

The pursuit of information is aided by the creative tension of conflicting branches of government. If Mayor Tom Bradley’s office won’t tell me something at Los Angeles City Hall, I can go to one of the 15 council offices. I’ll find a Bradley enemy who’ll be glad to share the news.

But as things stand now at the Hall of Administration, if I want important information from the county administrative office or the Planning Department, someone there checks with the supervisors’ offices before releasing it. A homeowners group trying to find out about a subdivision in the Santa Monica Mountains or the northern San Fernando Valley has the same experience.

The proposal has a tough future. A county charter amendment for an elected county executive and an expanded board was defeated by the voters in 1976. This year’s electorate may be just as reluctant to create the new offices.

The man who should know about that is Seth Hufstedler, an attorney who led the 1976 campaign. Undeterred by defeat, he heads the Bar Assn.’s Commission on County Government, and is helping to prepare the proposed ballot measure.

Hufstedler represents Establishment Los Angeles, and his involvement shows that discontent with county government extends far beyond the poor denied health care, or environmentalists and homeowners trying to stop uncontrolled subdivision growth.

We talked in his corner office on the 45th floor of one of the downtown Los Angeles Wells Fargo Center buildings. He’s a fast-moving man of 67. He and his wife and law partner, Shirley Hufstedler, a retired federal judge, had just returned from a trip to the South American rain forests, which they’re trying to save.

“On the whole, I don’t think the supervisors are doing a bad job,” he said.

But, he went on, with no supervisor looking beyond his district, nobody’s in charge. That’s why nothing’s happening at the Hall of Administration.

With an elected county executive, there would also be the clash of ideas between the executive and the supervisors. The supervisors and the executive would fight with position papers, reports, memos and in public hearings. That process would produce the life support of democracy-- information. There’s little of that now.

Hufstedler is a cautious crusader, remembering 1976. “Maybe our poll will tell us people are so disinterested in county government that we’re wasting our time,” he said.

That would be too bad. It would be a mandate for the glacier to continue its creep, impenetrable to the public.