Trying, Trying Again to Expand L.A. County Board : SPECIAL REPORT * Similar efforts have failed in the past, but backers of adding supervisors and creating an elected ‘mayor’ post say time is ripe and that new system would better serve area’s diverse population.

Ronald Reagan had just been elected president. The Dow was at 937. Ricky Martin was 8 years old.

That year, a former teacher named Mike Antonovich squeaked by Los Angeles County Supervisor Baxter Ward in a hard-fought election.

The White House has changed hands twice since 1980. The Dow Jones industrial average has cracked 11,000, and Martin has gone platinum. But Antonovich remains on the board, the last candidate to have unseated an elected incumbent supervisor.

The Board of Supervisors is Los Angeles County’s most powerful and least understood institution. Its basic structure has not changed since 1850. Its five members possess enormous powers, remain free from term limits and, historically, have been safe from electoral challenges.

Yet now the supervisors are considering placing on the ballot an initiative that could revolutionize this cozy system--expanding the board to nine seats and creating an elected county executive officer, whose constituents would outnumber those of 42 U.S. governors.

It is a revolution that has failed before, most recently in 1992, when voters for the third time in three decades decisively rejected adding more politicians to the county payroll.

Advocates hope that this time will be different, since unprecedented numbers of politicians put out of office by term limits are looking for new work, and unprecedented numbers of civic organizations are saying that Los Angeles County’s size and diversity are given short shrift under the board’s current structure.

The campaign is already underway, with Asian American leaders--who hope a larger board will create a seat for the county’s third-largest ethnic group--holding a news conference in the San Gabriel Valley to support the initiative. And Supervisors Yvonne Brathwaite Burke and Gloria Molina are calling for an independent commission to study the county’s governance structure and possibly recommend other changes.

“Los Angeles County could not only be a separate state, but a separate country” because of its size, said Richard Fajardo, an attorney and longtime advocate of expansion. “And it’s essentially run by five individuals.”

Changing that could have enormous repercussions.

“There’s no one person in charge, and so no one person is accountable,” said Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, a proponent of creating a county executive. “That one change alone would be a greater change than all that’s in that [Los Angeles] City Charter that voters approved last election.”

But other supervisors see no need to alter the county’s governmental structure.

“The most open form of government I’ve been involved in is county government,” said Supervisor Don Knabe, a former Cerritos councilman. “Three votes can change things. You don’t need to worry about a governor’s veto. You don’t have to search for 39 other votes.”

It is not guaranteed that the expansion issues will go before the voters during the 2000 election, but it is increasingly likely. Supervisors last month directed county lawyers to draw up language for the ballot initiatives to head off an attempt by Sacramento lawmakers to place the issue on the statewide ballot. A majority of supervisors say that they favor putting the proposals before county voters next year, if only to stop residents of other counties from deciding the governance of Los Angeles.

Some thorny issues remain. Yaroslavsky abruptly broke a stalemate over whether the board would act on the expansion issue by proposing the county executive position. He says that he will only support board expansion if it is coupled with creation of the executive. But some advocates of increasing the board’s size believe that the executive could do more harm than good. It is still unclear whether both issues will make the ballot.

Dubbed ‘Five Little Kings’

The five supervisors are the elected officials in charge of the massive, obscure county bureaucracy, a $14-billion mass of institutions responsible for everything from paving roads to running hospitals and jailing criminals. Supervisors also control the pay and working conditions of 80,000 county workers, making the board the region’s biggest employer.

Dubbed “the five little kings,” the supervisors appear together in public only once each week, in a cavernous hearing room inside the Kenneth Hahn Hall of Administration in downtown Los Angeles. Seated on a dais protected by a bulletproof screen, they tear through an agenda of sometimes more than 100 items, passing most without discussion. They approved their $14-billion budget this year in less than an hour.

Because supervisors are less involved in the mundane, daily matters of government, they have a lower profile than even Los Angeles City Council members, who represent far fewer constituents and have less of an impact on public policy.

“The city generally deals with middle-class issues like trimming trees,” said Yaroslavsky, who served on the City Council for 20 years before his election to the board in 1995. “Most of the county’s issues are human service issues that deal with the poor and disenfranchised.

“As a result,” he said, “there’s a disconnect between the government that provides the services and the people who depend on it. The people who elect us don’t use the services very much, and the people who use us don’t elect us.”

Advocates of board expansion say that there are additional reasons for the disconnect.

“From the moment I came to Los Angeles and the first meeting I went to, the board didn’t seem representative of the people of Los Angeles County,” said Ramona Ripston, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California. “The Board of Supervisors seems like a distant body.”

Each supervisor represents nearly 2 million people--more than many U.S. senators and governors. The districts are so huge that one supervisor, Antonovich, has used a county helicopter to get around his--which stretches from San Dimas to the Antelope Valley.

“I really have always thought it is a great job,” said veteran political consultant Joe Cerrell. “Once you get there, it’s easy to keep. [You have] a really large staff to meet the needs of constituents. You get to travel anywhere in the U.S.”

Antonovich said he is untroubled by the lack of viable challenges at the ballot box over the past two decades. “The voter is the employer of the representative, and every four years they have the opportunity of returning that officeholder,” said Antonovich, a longtime opponent of board expansion.

He said his triumph over Ward, a former TV newsman, in the 1980 election was a perfect example of that. “I had Baxter Ward’s record to run on,” Antonovich said, “and that’s why I won.”

But observers say that the low turnover on the board has at least as much to do with the size of the districts as it does with supervisors’ records. With such large districts, elections are prohibitively expensive, costing millions of dollars. And incumbents, aided by a lack of campaign fund-raising regulations until voters passed restrictions in 1996, have built up substantial war chests.

Supervisors Usually Face Little Competition

“It’s next to impossible to defeat anybody” on the board, said Cerrell, the political consultant. “How are you going to raise money to campaign in districts with 2 million people?”

Supervisor Knabe gave another reason for the limited competition--lack of interest. “A lot of local elected officials look beyond supervisor, to state government and Congress,” he said.

The reason, according to Knabe, is that supervisors have less legislative leeway than other elected officials. That’s because most of the county’s money comes from Washington or Sacramento, and supervisors have little discretion over how it is spent.

Knabe said that is one reason expansion is unnecessary. “Within each city you’ve got the City Council and mayor, who take care of the day-to-day concerns of government,” he said. “There are 88 mayors and city councils in Los Angeles County.”

But the county is different from cities in another notable way. In municipalities that even approach the size of the county the mayor and city council are separate arms of government, acting as checks and balances against each other. The mayor administers the city’s daily operations and selects staff, and the city council legislates.

But in the county, the board has both roles, which Ripston of the ACLU said “violates separation of powers.”

That is the idea behind the county executive position--to create a single person to act as a check on the board and to look out for the whole county.

“You have now a collective executive; you don’t have one person responsible for executive decisions. You have five people,” said former Supervisor Ed Edelman, a longtime advocate of the county executive who helped place the issue on the 1992 ballot. With an executive “you’d have the county speaking with one voice.”

Yaroslavsky, who succeeded Edelman, has taken up his predecessor’s cause, sparking speculation that he would seek the position, which analysts say would be more powerful than any elected position in California other than governor.

“That’s not my motivation,” said Yaroslavsky, also the subject of constant speculation about the Los Angeles mayoral election in 2001. “By the time this gets passed I may not even be in politics.”

Greater Efficiency Touted as a Goal

On the other hand, he may be running for mayor. And backing a proposal popular within an increasingly assertive Latino political establishment might go a long way toward mending fences damaged when Yaroslavsky clashed with many elected Latino officials over subway construction to the Eastside and the size of the proposed new County-USC Medical Center.

Yaroslavsky said his motivation for the new proposal is to make county government more efficient and responsible. Today, “every decision, from rebuilding a county hospital to adding space in a men’s restroom in a county facility, takes five people,” he said.

The county executive also could emphasize the common ground between the impoverished people the county serves and the middle-class voters who decide its elections, Yaroslavsky added.

But some caution that creating such a position might do the opposite. Alan Clayton, a demographer with the County Chicano Employees Assn. and one of those who has advocated board expansion the longest, warned that the high cost of winning such a race--which he projected at $7 million--could make the executive the captive of special interests.

“The proposal of a county mayor is one that would benefit the vested interests,” agreed Antonovich, who has himself drawn criticism for giving developers breaks from county regulations, “because the decisions that are made at public meetings would be turned over to a county mayor who would make decisions behind closed doors.”