Candidates Wrangle Over County’s Woes

If Friday’s first face-to-face showdown between Donald Knabe and Gordana Swanson is any indication, voters are in for a six-week barrage of charges and countercharges in the race for the only open seat on the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors.

With Knabe repeatedly accusing Swanson of “simply not telling the truth,” the two candidates engaged in a rhetorical tussle over issues ranging from who is responsible for the county’s financial problems to how to open the high-security Twin Towers jail and restructure the county’s vast health system.

Appearing on a Century Cable television show in West Los Angeles, the two candidates fighting to fill the seat of retiring Supervisor Deane Dana offered sharply different perspectives on the county’s problems.

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Knabe, chief deputy to Dana for the last 15 years, offered a five-point plan for the county’s future that stresses job creation, public safety, health care and welfare reform, environmental quality and restoring the county’s troubled finances. “I won’t make pie-in-the-sky promises designed to appeal to your emotions and not your common sense,” he said.

Moments later, Swanson, the former mayor of Rolling Hills, compared Knabe to an incumbent and said he should be held responsible for the woes that beset the nation’s largest county government. “We’re worse off than Orange County today,” she said. “You know Orange County filed bankruptcy, but Los Angeles County is a mess.”

She scoffed at Knabe’s five-point plan, saying he had an opportunity as “a highly paid county bureaucrat” to promote change from within government but did not do so. “I am providing a new, fresh approach,” she said. Swanson complained that the county has mortgaged its properties and has a huge burden of debt after years of excessive spending. Her use of statistics on the amount the county pays annually for debt service sparked a freewheeling exchange with Knabe over the county’s borrowing practices and confusion about precisely what was being discussed.

On more than one occasion, Knabe suggested that Swanson did not know what she was talking about. “You don’t seem to understand,” he told her. “You like to use numbers that you don’t know about.”

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When the program’s moderator, Bill Rosendahl, asked Swanson why she opposed creation of an independent inspector general position to oversee transportation spending while she was a member of the Southern California Rapid Transit District board nearly a decade ago, Swanson responded by accusing Knabe of hiring an opposition research firm to dig up dirt on her.

Knabe this week called for creation of such an independent overseer post to review the county’s finances. Swanson said she favors outside audits of county spending, but she objected to creating a layer of bureaucracy to do the job of the supervisors in determining spending practices.

The two candidates wrangled over Swanson’s role at the RTD and Knabe’s record while he was Dana’s representative on the county Transportation Commission.

The two candidates, both Republicans, are competing in the nonpartisan race for Dana’s seat. The sprawling 4th Supervisorial District cuts a swath across the southern part of the county. It begins in Marina del Rey and follows the coast to Long Beach before heading inland to Whittier and then east to Diamond Bar.

Swanson sought to paint a dire picture of thousands of criminals, released early from the county’s overcrowded jail system, posing a threat to the public’s safety because county officials were “unwilling to open jails.”

Knabe, who has the backing of the county’s law enforcement establishment, predicted that the opening of the $373-million Twin Towers jail near downtown Los Angeles “will happen in January” as a result of a plan to reorganize the jail system announced recently by Sheriff Sherman Block.

Swanson questioned the timing and basis of the plan, which involves closing some facilities, moving inmates and contracting out beds in closed jails to state or federal agencies in order to open the high-security Twin Towers.

When it came to the county’s health care system, there was basic agreement between the candidates on the need to shift from expensive hospital treatment to less costly preventive and primary care at community clinics.

“We need to wean ourselves out of the acute care business,” Knabe said.

Swanson called for taking the politics out of an inefficient health system by creating an independent health commission to set policy. “My opponent has been there,” she said. “Since he has been there, the health care system has become a disaster.”