Supervisor Who Does Homework

* After reading Dana Parsons’ profile of 3rd district Supervisor Todd Spitzer (April 12), it occurred to me that voters in the other four districts should be asking themselves, “Why isn’t my supervisor asking the tough questions about development issues in the county?”

Spitzer does his homework and comes armed with facts and questions for the county’s staff and consultants on each issue that comes before the board. Unfortunately for all of us, the answers he gets are often sloppy, lazy and incomplete.

He is a far cry from the standard supervisor, who sits on his hands and dutifully accepts whatever the county staff decides to spoon-feed him, and then proceeds to vote however the big developers want him to. This pattern has led to disaster in the past.

The landslides in Laguna Niguel are a good example. Over 10 years ago, when the site was being developed, the project was plagued by landslides. The supervisors were unwilling or unable to step in and put a stop to it. The 5th district supervisor at the time, the late Thomas Riley, merely complained that the developers were making him look bad with their incompetence. If the board had acted then, perhaps a dozen families would not have to sit by helplessly this year and watch their homes tumble down a hillside into a pile of rubble. Two of the major news stories about Orange County in the last few years (the bankruptcy and the landslides) are directly attributable to the board’s failure to live up to its oversight responsibilities.

Spitzer should continue to keep an eye on the county’s staff and consultants. What Orange County government needs is more watchdogs and fewer lap dogs.

ARNOLD BURKE

Lake Forest

* Todd Spitzer’s presence on the Board of Supervisors is much more than simply “the best show in town.”

For whatever the amalgam of complicated reasons, Spitzer has begun in earnest the long overdue transformation of county government. County staff doesn’t like this one bit and neither do the county’s economic/political elite, who have long had their way with county staff and supervisors alike.

Spitzer seems to be operating under the rather novel theory (novel at least in Orange County) that: a.) Government should be open; b.) Administrators should administer policy, not make it behind closed doors; and c.) Elected officials should be prepared to ask difficult, even embarrassing, questions as a prelude to making authoritative decisions, instead of rubber-stamping recommendations from staff, lobbyists or campaign contributors.

I disagree with many of Spitzer’s political views but admire the theory which seems to support his approach to governance. The vast majority of Orange County residents probably find Spitzer more refreshing than annoying, more honest than duplicitous, and more demanding than malleable.

Spitzer is disrupting the “business as usual” approach to governance in the county, which returned far too quickly to the Hall of Administration after the nation’s largest municipal bankruptcy. The feathers Spitzer is ruffling may end up creating enough of a gale to finally blow away the practices of county government which are no longer useful, relevant, or defensible. If we elect two new supervisors who share Spitzer’s theory of governance, the gale might become a hurricane, hastening the time when we might be able to trust county government again.

MARK P. PETRACCA

Irvine