County’s Redistricting Case and Edelman’s Approach to Politics

Joe Domanick’s column (“Save for His Seat, the Passion Was Missing,” Commentary, July 3) may have made a good polemic, but it falls woefully short on making its case.

There’s no denying that with the passage of Prop. 13 in 1978, which sharply cut property taxes--at one time, the county’s principal revenue source--and the election of a new conservative board majority in 1980, funding for social services in Los Angeles County has taken a severe beating. For the last decade, Supervisor Kenneth Hahn and myself have been fighting a rear-guard action to preserve what we must, and improve where we can in a true “era of limits.”

I chose to work patiently and persistently to assemble working coalitions, issue by issue and one-on-one with my colleagues, to achieve our aims.

Admittedly, this approach offers less political drama than Domanick would like. But in the last few years alone, my efforts have averted potentially crippling strikes by county nurses, and by caseworkers in the Department of Children’s Services; kept open county health and mental-health clinics slated for closure; increased AIDS funding; led to this year’s groundbreaking for a new Children’s Court facility for cases involving abused and neglected youngsters; improved hazardous materials management; kept intact the Community Youth Gang Services anti-gang violence program; initiated a county government recycling program, and created an agency to help retrain displaced aerospace workers, to name only some of the areas we have addressed successfully.

EDMUND D. EDELMAN

Supervisor, Third District