Setting an Example : No more non-solutions and flip-flops; supervisors must make hard choices

Three members of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors left prestigious jobs in city government or the private sector in recent years to join county government. As it turns out, these were not model career moves; the board now must find a way to pull the county out of its continuing fiscal crisis.

In the latest in this continuing saga, the board’s flip-flop this week on the 5% pay cut for county employees hurts the supervisors’ credibility. Board members quickly retreated from a pay-cut decision that sounded good but was not well thought out; since the unions, predictably, refused to negotiate wage cuts, the effect of the supervisors’ decision was to focus all pay cuts on non-unionized employees, which was neither fair nor wise. But having to flip-flop inspires little confidence that a majority can stomach the fight needed to pull the county out of its financial morass.

Even after initial cost-saving measures, Sally Reed, the county’s chief administrative officer, recommended additional spending cuts in all departments, including the politically sacrosanct Sheriff’s Department and district attorney’s office. The supervisors rejected Reed’s proposed cuts and offered instead to cut all employee pay by 5%. As proposed, that cut would have saved $10.7 million. But the board made a promise it couldn’t keep, because 77,000 county workers are covered by union contracts.

The easier target, non-unionized workers, amounts to perhaps 9,000 employees, including secretaries, prosecutors, department heads and even the supervisors themselves. So why propose what amounted to a non-solution in the first place?

Tough times require hard choices. For starters, the supervisors should set an example by diverting some of their $107,000 salaries to county expenditures and cutting their almost $3-million office budgets. The one good thing that may have come from last week’s non-solution and this week’s flip-flop is the realization that salary cuts--for everyone in county government--are increasingly likely, and perhaps the only alternative to massive layoffs. Given a choice between wage cuts for all or wholesale elimination of many jobs, how can union leadership choose unemployment? Let the supervisors--who could face their own layoffs at the polls if they fail to deal properly with this crisis--set the example.