You Can Call Him Mayor of the Moment

Depending on your point of view, it’s either a bold innovation in local government or the political equivalent of grade inflation.

Either way, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday gave America’s most populous county a mayor--of sorts--by voting 3 to 2 to change the title of the board’s chairman.

Although reform-minded groups from the League of Women Voters to the Los Angeles County Bar Assn. have long advocated the creation of such a post, it is doubtful they had in mind anything quite like the motion sponsored by Mike Antonovich. By contrast, chronically harassed and underappreciated local officials across the country may find much to admire in the board’s novel approach to executive office.

Antonovich’s measure, for example, will eliminate the inconvenience created by separation of powers simply by investing the legislative board’s chairman with the mayoral title.

Unlike the president of the United States, the governor of California, the mayor of the city of Los Angeles or, say, the pope, the county’s chief executive will not have to endure the indignity of election because the board’s chairmanship passes among the five supervisors in a strict yearly rotation. The new mayor, in other words, will be spared not only the exhausting process of seeking popular support for the post, but even the tedium of canvassing his or her four supervisorial colleagues for their votes. Compared with this streamlined system, the selection of the Soviet premier by the old Communist Party Politburo was a raucous exercise in participatory democracy.

In fact, all the new county mayor will lack is the power to match the title. Like the current chairman of the Board of Supervisors, the new chief executive would be charged solely with presiding over the lawmakers’ meetings and with greeting visiting dignitaries. Antonovich, the board’s current chairman and the first potential beneficiary of his measure, has been something of an activist in the post, employing the county’s bully pulpit to introduce a program that requires departments to engage in long-term fiscal planning. He has also hosted a pet adoption program before each board meeting in which he displays homeless dogs and cats to a TV camera.

This is not, in other words, the sort of post that would appeal to more traditional big-city politicians like San Francisco’s Willie Brown, Chicago’s Richard Daley or New York’s Rudolph Giuliani. Los Angeles County’s chief executive would function more like Johnny Grant, the honorary mayor of Hollywood, although the new county official will lack his power to assign stars on Hollywood Boulevard.

Since it involves a change in the county Charter, Antonovich’s motion will require a second vote at next week’s meeting. But another vote next week is a formality only to amend the Charter, and as of now, Antonovich is the mayor.

Like many another innovations, that change had already generated controversy, anxiety and unanswered questions.

“Many people laugh at this and think it’s a joke,” said Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, who joined Antonovich and lame duck Supervisor Deane Dana in voting for the motion. “But the reason I’m supporting it is because when we go to Washington, D.C., for support, no one really understands what the board of supervisors does.”

Other lawmakers found the prospect of ridicule more daunting. “I have reservations about this,” Supervisor Gloria Molina told her colleagues before joining Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky in opposing the measure. “I don’t think there’s a very good reason or rationale for it. I don’t know that anybody is saying this without smirking, and that bothers me.”

But Antonovich said the new title better corresponds with the duties of the head of the chairman of the board.

“The board is in charge of welfare and health programs, which is more in line with the powers of cities,” he said. “This will let everyone know what we do. This is a step forward.”

But just two blocks away, at Los Angeles City Hall, the prospect of having another “mayor” so close by clearly troubled aides to Richard Riordan, the city’s chief executive.

“Now instead of 88 mayors in the county, we have 89,” said Noelia Rodriguez, Riordan’s spokeswoman, referring to the number of cities in the county. “Maybe we can put together a marching band.”

Riordan, a veteran of the rough-and-tumble world of corporate law and venture capital, seemed--as befits a onetime philosophy student and lifelong proponent of the free market--well, philosophical about the prospect of additional competition. “I am going to send over a copy of my novice mayor’s manual, which was written by Sonny Bono when he was mayor of Palm Springs,” Riordan said.

County officials, however, say the city of Los Angeles will have little to worry about from the new county official. On Dec. 3, Antonovich will have to surrender the title to the current county mayor pro tem (formerly board chairman pro tem), Yaroslavsky, who not only voted against the proposal but said he may refuse to accept his new title--if it really is a title, which he doubts.

“Primarily, I think this is much ado about nothing,” he said. “It is a totally nonsubstantive issue that has nothing to do with the problems we are facing, including restructuring county government.”

At Tuesday’s board meeting, Yaroslavsky told other supervisors that despite an assurance form the county counsel’s office, he believes the change to the county code might be illegal.

“I don’t know if we have the authority to do it without going to the people, and I don’t think anyone is going to suggest we put this on the ballot,” Yaroslavsky said.

If Antonovich’s motion does indeed survive legal scrutiny, the real winner in Tuesday’s vote clearly will be Riordan, since he no longer can be described as America’s least powerful mayor.