It’s Time for Citizens to Ask, ‘Who’s In Charge Here?’

I’m sitting here fondly recalling Old Ironpants.

He was a former colleague who got the nickname for his ability to sit through public meetings, long after everyone else had nodded off.

A six-hour budget committee meeting? Who needs lunch?

Four-hour meeting on a zoning variance? Let’s go for five!

Sure, it was Ironpants’ job to stay to the end, but he actually liked it. He couldn’t get enough of local government.

How many among us today could answer to the name Old Ironpants?

Not many. At a time when federal and state governments are shifting more and more responsibility to local governments, public awareness or interest in the homeboys rivals that of our knowledge of quantum mechanics.

A Times Orange County poll released earlier this month indicated that most voters didn’t know enough about members of the Board of Supervisors to have an opinion about them. Nearly 7 of 10 voters didn’t have any opinion at all about board Chairman Roger R. Stanton. Thomas F. Riley has been a fixture on the board for nearly 20 years and more than half had no opinion of him.

Two other examples come to mind. The most recent was the Republican congressional primary contest between Robert K. Dornan and Judith Ryan. Despite all the hype and its presumed significance, only about four in 10 Republicans cared enough to vote.

The other example was the 1991 special election measure to raise the sales tax a half-cent to build a massive new county jail. Despite the high stakes involved, voter turnout was around 15%.

Paging Orange County. Hello? Hello? Is anyone there?

“My mother and your cousin--ordinary people--have a relatively undifferentiated view of government and they’re hazy at best in their estimates of who does exactly what,” says Cal State Fullerton political science professor Keith Boyum. “If you quote people the size of the state budget or county budget, if you try that at an informal social gathering, a back-yard barbecue or a cocktail party, nearly all the people will give you a low whistle and say, ‘I never knew that.’ ”

Boyum said surveys consistently show that people’s awareness of public officials drops as they go down the hierarchy from the President to local leaders.

That’s not good news for participatory democracy in an age when federal and state officials are handing down more and more problems to local officials.

James Danziger, a political science professor at UC Irvine, said he tends to empathize with local governments that are expected to provide services but are constrained either by inadequate revenue or a myriad of rules from higher levels of government. However, those constraints make local decisions on priorities all the more difficult and, therefore, more deserving of public scrutiny, Danziger noted.

Orange County fits into a category that political scientists refer to as the “metropolitan problem,” Danziger said, “which is a huge number of different government agencies operating in an overlapping geographic area and with overlapping functions. People aren’t sure who’s responsible for what, who ought to be held accountable for what. There are so many different agencies and sets of decision-makers that it’s hard for people to grasp what’s going on.”

Getting a handle on local government is even more difficult in a place like Orange County, Boyum and Danziger noted, because the political players are seldom seen on television. In recent months, virtually everyone in Los Angeles must have formed an impression of Police Chief Daryl F. Gates because of his constant exposure, but how is anyone in Orange County going to get a fix on Roger Stanton?

Just about the time I started fearing for the republic, however, Danziger soothed me. He said the American public has never had an abiding interest in politics and that even while the framers were pounding out the Constitution, most people were out farming.

He doesn’t wake up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night worrying about democracy, Danziger said, “because I figure there are a few watchdogs who care enough to keep councils and other local agencies relatively honest.”

My humble entreaty, dear reader, is that you try to stay abreast of what your elected officials are doing. I can’t in good conscience urge you to attend council or supervisors’ meetings; I’m a trained professional, and I can only take about 45 minutes before the urge strikes to machine-gun whatever chamber I’m in.

And to tell you the truth, we always thought Old Ironpants was kind of strange.