Of Freeway Stiffs and Scalawags

Los Angeles County officials were telling horror stories last week. Health workers spoke of wholesale deaths in hospital hallways. Lifeguards envisioned riptides carrying schools of cramped swimmers out to sea. Librarians bemoaned an inevitable generation of illiterates. Jailers jingled their keys and mused about what might happen, once the criminals were loose.

Yes, that great roadshow of American politics--the budget debate--has reached the L.A. County Hall of Administration. The pageant is familiar. As always, there is not enough money to go around; supervisors must pare a few hundred million dollars from a $13.1-billion budget. As always, department heads are backed up to the beach, waiting to testify that, should any cuts be made to their fiefdom, Armageddon will follow.

The most hair-raising scenario came from coroner’s officials, who warned that under the proposed fiscal plan it won’t be possible to retrieve corpses from freeway wrecks for six hours or more. Now here was an image to save a budget with: Stiffs sprawled across the fast lane at rush hour, backing up traffic for miles . . . steam rising from radiators as the body decays in the heat . . . television helicopters and other buzzards circling overhead . . . horns blaring, windows rolled up against the stench, and nothing on the radio but Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern.

The horror.

It’s doubtful the coroner’s freeway stiffs can be topped, but who knows? The county budget battle has a few weeks to go, and clearly this is going to be one of the wildest ever. To believe the supervisors, what makes this budget so difficult to balance is that Sacramento officials--to balance the state budget--hijacked funds that belong to the county. Unfortunately, believing L.A. County supervisors is not always easy.

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To put it gently, the L.A. County Board of Supervisors has long been one of California’s least loved political bodies. Its reputation for arrogance, bully tactics and bloated budgets dates back to days when the supervisors were known as the Five Little Kings. They traveled by separate limo, operated in secret and projected an attitude of disdain. The Little Kings never had to fret about budgets. Those were the good old days before Prop. 13, when making ends meet simply required another raise in property taxes.

The Jarvis-Gann initiative took away this limitless bounty. Now, to make ends meet, L.A. County and other local governments were forced to rely on money from Sacramento, which at the time was flush. Maybe they resented being put on allowance, but it sure beat canning the chauffeur. The so-called bailout, however, scrambled what had been clear divisions of resources and responsibilities. And inevitably, it became institutionalized to the point where most local governments--and especially L.A. County--now regard the billions received from Sacramento each year as a birthright. “You are stealing our money ,” an L.A. County supervisor is said to have screamed at Gov. Pete Wilson last spring in a private meeting.

The county’s campaign to persuade the state not to touch the bailout money was hopeless. First, if the Legislature didn’t cut local government funds, it would have been forced to hack at public education. And instead of coroners and lifeguards, we now would be hearing sad tales from kindergartners and principals. Also, despite new faces such as Gloria Molina and Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, L.A. County government has not shaken its reputation for regal tastes.

Almost any state legislator can recite in detail the recent scandals that have befallen the board. They know all about juiced up pension funds and white linen lunches and bulletproof limos and redecorated offices. They can tell you the number of L.A. County department heads earning more than $100,000. “Scalawags,” Speaker Willie Brown called the supervisors in an impassioned floor speech. “Those . . . supervisors from Los Angeles would squeal no matter how much you gave them.”

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And so the Legislature trimmed, and now the supervisors must trim. And it’s almost funny: The same fiscal indiscretions cited in Sacramento as grounds to proceed with bailout reductions now are raised frequently in the Hall of Administration by opponents of proposed county service cuts or fee increases. The reputation of the supervisors taints all of county government. No one believes there is not fat to be found. No one believes the horror stories.

Indeed, if vital services are cut--if corpses do stack up on the freeway, if branch libraries are closed en masse--the presumption will be that this was not an act of fiscal necessity, but rather one of spite. This might be an unfair presumption. It might be true, this time, that the county is strapped. But who is going to believe it? Quite simply, the supervisors have forfeited the moral authority needed to make difficult decisions. The bill for all those fine $40 lunches has come due.