A Strong Executive Is Essential

The five members of the Orange County Board of Supervisors are elected to run the county. That should mean setting policies and ensuring they are carried out. That should not mean hiring and firing this department head or that one, overseeing the filling of potholes and felling of trees and undertaking a host of other activities that could be characterized as micro-managing.

On Tuesday the supervisors are scheduled to vote on what could be their final contract offer to the county’s chief executive officer, Jan Mittermeier. The offer contains a pay raise starting next July, a change in title to executive director and, importantly, a change in her now theoretically unfettered power to hire people to run the county’s many agencies and departments. Mittermeier has warned she might quit if the contract is not to her liking.

The bankruptcy nearly four years ago clearly dramatized that this has become a large, increasingly urban county in need of professional management. As the county tried to struggle out of the chaos of the fiscal disaster, the supervisors appointed a 30-member commission to determine what reforms were needed. The panel sensibly recommended that the supervisors set policy and allow a strong CEO to carry it out.

Four current supervisors were not on the board when the bankruptcy occurred, and the job now held by Mittermeier had the title chief administrative officer. Nor were they supervisors in the days before December 1994, when department heads practiced end runs around the CAO, negotiating directly with the supervisors over budgets, policies and personnel.

Two supervisors are dissatisfied with Mittermeier over what they contend is her withholding of information from them on the possible conversion of the El Toro Marine station to a civilian airport. But dissatisfaction with an individual is no reason to change the system, especially if it leads back to the bad old days.

Whoever is CEO, or executive director, or whatever title may be decided upon, needs the power to manage the county with the guidance of the supervisors. If the CEO does an unsatisfactory job, the supervisors can replace him or her. But having a strong, professional CEO allows the opportunity for someone to rise above parochial interests and “district prerogatives” and take the broad view on how the county should operate day to day.