A Cassandra Who Finally Got Heeded

Huge changes have swept through the Los Angeles County Hall of Administration since last I checked there, a year and a half ago.

The warnings of the county’s Cassandra, Chief Administrative Officer Sally Reed, have finally come true. Years of hiding deficits with complicated borrowing schemes and other gimmicks have caught up with county supervisors. Only a last-minute rescue by President Clinton saved county hospitals and health clinics from closing. Still, a huge deficit forced the firing of more than 3,000 workers whose jobs had once epitomized security.

For the first time since 1978, when the county’s downward financial spiral began with approval of Proposition 13, the supes had to face financial reality.

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I was off covering the O.J. Simpson trial during this period and missed the drama playing out a block away at the Hall of Administration. On Wednesday, I walked up the hill to the county compound to see the changes for myself.

Reed, who is in charge of county budgeting and day-to-day operations, welcomed me to her office conference room.

She is a friendly, attractive woman with longish brown graying hair. She wore a stylish purple outfit and looked fresh and energetic even though it was late in the afternoon.

An O.J. trial junkie, Reed taped the proceedings during the day and watched them when she finished work at night. So, naturally, we spent a few minutes rehashing the trial.

Her easy manner gave no hint of the battering she had taken from supervisors, unions and county bureaucrats since first warning of financial disaster late in 1993, just after she assumed the job. Nobody appreciates a Cassandra, a mythical figure who was given the gift of prophecy along with a curse that kept anyone from believing her.

Someone finally paid attention, I said. What was the turning point?

It began last year, Reed said, when the supervisors announced plans to balance the budget with more than $600 million in federal health funds. But the feds didn’t come through. “For the first time they bet on the come and it didn’t happen,” she said.

The next important event, she said, was the election of Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, a budget expert in his many years on the Los Angeles City Council. “He walked in saying, ‘We are going to rely on ongoing sources of revenue. We are not going to borrow.’ ”

Yaroslavsky was just one vote out of five. But he was a new breed of supervisor.

The others either tried to hide the looming financial crisis or spoke of it in equivocal or bureaucratic terms. Yaroslavsky is a media-smart politician who knows how to talk in sound bites and translate the complexities of government finance into something eye-catching enough for a news story.

He soon found an ally. Given Yaroslavsky’s liberal Democratic background, it was an interesting alliance--with the most conservative member of the board, Republican Mike Antonovich, who shared Yaroslavsky’s insistence on paying as you go.

The dose of reality was the Orange County bankruptcy. “Orange County got the media and the [municipal bond] rating agencies interested in us,” Reed said.

A series of budget-cutting actions followed, along with the Clinton aid. But the county is still in deep trouble and, despite everything that’s happened, the huge county bureaucracy is finding it difficult to adjust to the new realities.

“I think it’s changed some,” Reed said. “I don’t think it’s changed totally. There is a significant group of people who either don’t think significant change is necessary or [think it is] so undesirable that it’s not worth taking the chance. . . . Most department heads are not supporting me in trying to pull spending down.”

On the plus side, she said she enjoys working with four of the five supervisors. “They are one of the high points of the job for me,” she said. “I have a great deal of respect for them and I like them as people.”

Her foe on the board is Supervisor Gloria Molina, who objected strongly to a Reed proposal, subsequently abandoned, to close County-USC Medical Center, located in Molina’s district. “She feels from time to time like making me as uncomfortable as she can,” Reed said.

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Even more difficult days are ahead, she said.

The county hospitals and health clinics will undergo a wrenching transformation. Big county hospitals will be scaled down. Private clinics and hospitals will serve more of the county’s indigent patients.

Now the county cares for all who need help. When private facilities take over, the rapidly growing number of uninsured may be turned away.

Law enforcement--the sheriff, the prisons, the criminal courts and the district attorney--continues to eat up a larger share of county funds. All of them are immune to demands for economy.

Sheriff Sherman Block and Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti, powerful elected officials in their own right, rally their constituencies any time Reed or the supervisors threaten them with cuts. “And they have tremendous public support,” Reed said.

The courts also won’t cooperate. Judges view any attempt to force them to economize as an attack on their independence. The Founding Fathers undoubtedly didn’t have judicial perks in mind when they created an independent judiciary, but you can’t convince the Los Angeles County bench of that.

This all adds up to bad news in the coming year, in such huge quantities that the public and the media may turn away in boredom or disbelief. That would be a mistake.

By now we should have learned that when Cassandra makes her dire prophecies, she has to be believed.