Activists to Seek Term Limits for Supervisors

In the latest attempt to shake up Los Angeles County’s most powerful elected body, activists this week are expected to start gathering signatures to place an initiative on next year’s ballot setting term limits for members of the Board of Supervisors.

The proposal would also strip supervisors of the power to draw their own districts and put it in the hands of a commission whose three members would be randomly selected from 88 nominees provided by all the county’s cities.

“The Los Angeles Board of Supervisors needs term limits more than just about anybody around,” said Christopher Skinnell, the 22-year-old political researcher who is leading the effort. “People feel there isn’t a lot of accountability on how money is spent and they think that shaking things up at the ballot box increases accountability generally.”

The proposal would limit supervisors to two four-year terms. Sitting supervisors who are not up for reelection next year would be limited to one additional term.

Supervisors quickly attacked the proposal.

“I have a lot of faith in the voters and if they want to remove someone from office they have the power to do that,” said Supervisor Don Knabe, who called the redistricting proposal bizarre. He said the plan could allow representatives of three neighboring cities to redraw the county’s political map.

While noting that term limits were legal and apply to officials up to the president, Supervisor Gloria Molina said: “It’s unfortunate that people who wish to elect somebody can’t continue to do so.”

Skinnell said his group would start to circulate petitions soon to gather the 197,000 signatures needed to qualify the initiative for the November 2000 ballot.

The fledgling term limits initiative is only the latest proposed reform for county government. State legislators have pushed supervisors to place a measure on the ballot to expand the board from five to nine members, a proposal that will come before the board in the coming months and is expected to also be on the 2000 ballot.

The county’s supervisors are an anomaly in this era of rapid electoral turnover. No elected incumbent supervisor has been defeated in an election in 20 years, and the post, along with its tremendous powers, is viewed as virtually a lifetime seat.

Supervisors each represent nearly 2 million people, with districts larger than those of many U.S. senators. Elections in these massive districts are so pricey, analysts say, that incumbent supervisors are basically unopposed. Indeed, of the three supervisors up for reelection next year, none faces credible opposition.

“The Board of Supervisors is the most unique local legislative body in the country, and it is at the same time the most powerful and least understood,” said Fernando Guerra, head of Loyola Marymount University’s Center for the Study of Los Angeles. “A lot of [the reforms] is being pushed by people on the outside looking in, saying how can you have a local government body . . . that doesn’t seem to be responsive.”

The unusual committee that will circulate petitions for the term limits and redistricting initiative is headed by Skinnell, a recent graduate of Claremont-McKenna College, and includes a Republican Latino activist and a former Florida state legislator.

Some of its members have ties to the Rose Institute for State and Local Government, a conservative think tank at Claremont-McKenna that was instrumental in 1990 in the passage of Proposition 140, which placed state legislators under term limits.

That campaign was led by former county Supervisor Peter Schabarum, who has since pleaded no contest to tax evasion to avoid prosecution on charges of using money from his nonprofit term limits organization to pay for vacations. County officials have questioned whether the initiative would have to rely on Schabarum for financial support.

Skinnell stressed that Schabarum is not behind this initiative, but said he has spoken with the former supervisor and that he hoped to get his financial help. But Skinnell emphasized that he was looking for aid from other sources as well.

Linking the term limits proposal to the redistricting one could jeopardize the initiative, said Bill Carrick, a veteran political consultant who opposes term limits. The practice is part of an increasingly popular tactic, Carrick said: “Let’s put an attractive idea with a complex idea hoping we can pass a complex idea. [But] when the voters try to figure these things out they can have a negative reaction and say forget it.”

The redistricting proposal is similar to one slated for the March statewide ballot, which would remove redistricting powers from the state Legislature and place it in the hands of a panel of judges, as well as limit the pay of elected officials.

Skinnell said he opted for the random selection to ensure that the commission is truly independent. “It’s mostly to take the chance out that there are ringers there,” he said. “You want to make it something that’s random so people have faith that it’s not set up as a show without much substance.”

Under the proposal, each supervisor and the mayor of each city in the county would forward the name of a candidate for the redistricting commission to the county registrar. The nominees cannot have held office in a political party for five years or have lobbied the board. The three commissioners will be chosen randomly, as will their three alternates.

Under the current system, Skinnell said, “legislators choose their voters instead of voters choosing their legislators.”

Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky said the redistricting proposal was camouflaged by the term limits initiative, and portrayed it as a conservative attempt to roll back the county’s last redistricting process, done under a court order to increase Latino representation that resulted in Molina’s election. He called it “a Republican scheme . . . to wrest control of the redistricting process.”