Just Be Careful How You Change It : L.A. supervisors’ rush to expand unrepresentative board may undermine a good cause

Los Angeles County supervisors have begun the process that could, eventually, result in the much-needed expansion of the board from only five members. That’s good. But the way they got started could undermine the process before it ever has a chance to be fully aired and discussed by county residents. And that’s bad.

The board voted Tuesday to ask the county counsel’s office to draft a ballot measure to expand the board from five to seven members, to be voted on by county residents in June, 1992. Unfortunately, in doing so they ignored warnings from minority community representatives that expanding the board to only seven seats may not be enough to avoid the legal problems that recently forced the county to realign its supervisorial districts after wasting more than $6 million in taxpayers’ money resisting a voting-rights lawsuit.

Attorneys who represented the victorious black and Latino plaintiffs in that lawsuit told the board that demographic changes are taking place so rapidly in the county that it’s likely that nine supervisors will be needed if the board is to avoid future lawsuits by groups that find themselves under-represented. Given the very substantial defeat the county suffered at their hands--the case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court--one would think the supervisors would have taken heed of the advice and given the county counsel some leeway in drafting the expansion ordinance. The county could leave the precise number of new supervisors aside for the time being.

As important as the views of local minority activists are, the rest of Los Angeles County’s 8 million-plus residents have not been heard on this latest effort to expand the board. Voters have defeated ballot measures to expand the board of supervisors before, in 1962 and 1976. The supervisors are all practical politicians, so they must know that the idea could lose again in 1992, unless a greater effort is made to draft it so that it meets the current concerns of voters. That’s going to take time--time for opinion polling and other research, not to mention hearings where a full public debate of the issue can be aired.

The conventional wisdom says that voters are in no mood to see government expand these days. But there is also a school of thought that says people want government to be more responsive to their everyday needs. Somewhere between those two divergent views is a balance that can convince Angelenos that an expansion of the board will make for a county government that is more representative than it is now. But that will take careful study and listening to what the people have to say.