Smart Money Is on Apathy to ‘Resolve’ County Crisis

As the holiday season preoccupies the voters, this is the secret mantra whispered by many of our top officials inside the walls of our management-challenged county government: Don’t worry. We can ride this out. It will all blow over.

The people who feel that way are counting on one of the great realities of political life here or anywhere else: voter apathy.

One of the county’s more concerned leaders was making that point privately last week. Despite the initial public reaction to the county’s latest leadership crisis, the smart money bet is that apathy will win out in the end.

“It’s the most frustrating part of this whole situation,” he said. “They are probably right. The sad thing is that a lot of good people in county government really care about getting this mess cleaned up. But they need some help from the voters.”

Well, we shall see.

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The unique fact about this particular county crisis is the timing. We are only months away from a March election that will give the voters of Ventura County a clear opportunity to weigh in on how they think this place is being run.

David L. Baker’s scathing letter blasting county government management practices touched off the latest county crisis. But it has been festering for years. And the stage was really set with the ill-advised 3-2 vote by the Board of Supervisors last year on the disastrous mental health merger plan.

The chief architect of that plan, a classic example of back room politics, was Supervisor Susan Lacey. She isn’t running for reelection, so the voters won’t have the opportunity to tell her in March what they think of her total lack of remorse in the matter.

But two of those who voted for the merger, despite warnings that should have slowed their hasty decision, are up for reelection. And, in the aftermath of Baker’s letter, they now face serious challengers.

Supervisors Kathy Long and John Flynn have been far more courageous than Lacey in accepting blame for their votes on the mental health merger and admitting their mistakes. We will have to sit back and watch to see if that is enough to keep them in office when the voters speak in March.

Long is being challenged now by Mike Morgan, and Flynn faces the last-minute challenge of Latino activist Francisco Dominguez in his Oxnard district. Both challengers can hit hard at the incumbents’ records, but they still face uphill battles.

The events of early January, as the Board of Supervisors begins to wrestle seriously with budget issues, should weigh heavily in those races. If the voters care at all about correcting the county’s current troubles, they will be watching Long and Flynn most carefully to see how they conduct themselves.

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The case can be made that no politician should be judged at the polls on the basis on one questionable vote. And we will doubtless be hearing that case in spades from supporters of Long and Flynn in the coming months. But we probably won’t be hearing that from Morgan and Dominguez.

Whatever the voters decide, it will ultimately tell us something about ourselves. And it will ultimately serve as a kind of referendum on that entrenched belief of many county leaders that the voters will put up with just about anything.

Nearly a month after the start of this particular time of trouble in county government, it is the fact that we now have legitimate challengers in two crucial supervisor races that stands as the most concrete result to date of Baker’s devastating critique of county leadership.

There’s no way of telling yet if county leaders can continue to maintain a unified course as they try to navigate a way out of the current difficulties.

But at least there is a way to measure how hard they try and how well they do in the months ahead. If the voters aren’t paying attention, they will have only themselves to blame.