Freer Rein for Childhood Panels

The executive director of the state’s Proposition 10 commission, Jane Henderson, recently insisted that the measure, which voters narrowly approved last year to fund early childhood development, “really isn’t government as usual.” However, the initiative’s promise of creating innovative new programs to boost learning in children’s crucial early years is still far from being realized.

State officials began collecting a 50-cent-a-pack cigarette tax to fund the measure nine months ago, but counties, which are in charge of distributing the money, have failed to give their appointed Proposition 10 commissions the autonomy they need to be something more than old-fashioned, glacially paced, red-tape-ridden government bureaucracies. The initiative called for the appointment of commissions in each county to find and finance programs. Because the language of the measure was not specific, counties have a lot of latitude in how the commissions operate. So far, the counties’ inaction is fanning the flames of a petition drive, funded by cigarette retailers, to repeal Proposition 10.

Today, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors has an opportunity to restore Proposition 10’s original promise by giving its oversight commission the semiautonomous status it needs to innovate. A measure of autonomy would, for example, allow the commission to circumvent Civil Service rules that currently constrain its ability to hire staff from the private as well as the public sector. County employees so far have contested the commission’s right even to hire an executive director from outside.

Existing Los Angeles County agencies, eager to control the $150 million in yearly revenues that the county expects the tax to generate, argue that autonomy would strip the commission of public accountability. That’s absurd. The commission--whose members were all appointed by county supervisors and who can be fired by them at any time--is hardly unaccountable to the public. Proposition 10 also requires the commission to chart the success or failure of all expenditures in a yearly, publicly accessible analysis.

Like Proposition 10 commissions throughout the state, Los Angeles County’s commission is going to have a hard enough time finding programs that are innovative and yet proven to be effective; new but sustainable over the long term even as tobacco tax revenues diminish. County supervisors should not make its work harder by refusing to grant it some autonomy.