County Governments Amble on Without Anyone in Charge

Midway through his first week on the job last November, David L. Baker, Ventura County’s chief administrative officer, took a walk on the beach in his new hometown and began to wonder if he’d made a big mistake. The next day, he went to the office and started making a list of things he didn’t like about his job.

By the time he was done, Baker had written six pages of accusations, scolding elected officials and top bureaucrats for ignorance and incompetence on a truly grand scale: backbiting and infighting, palace intrigue, political self-aggrandizement and fiscal mismanagement. He even said the county might have a tough time meeting its next payroll. After reviewing his list, Baker turned it into a resignation letter, moved back to Lodi and resumed his old job with San Joaquin County.

The Ventura County government managed to make its next payroll, but its fiscal wobbliness, palace intrigue and self-aggrandizement continues apace, leading everybody in Ventura to wonder whether this town’s largest employer can ever straighten itself out. This isn’t the first time such questions have been asked about a county government in Southern California. The same questions were posed after Orange County’s bankruptcy in 1994 and Los Angeles County’s near-death experience with fiscal failure the following year. Undoubtedly, they will be asked again. Because the basic problem Baker found when he arrived in Ventura was that nobody is in charge.

Under California’s rural, 19th-century county system, five supervisors elected by district have operational control over most county operations. But many department heads--district attorney, sheriff and county treasurer--are separately elected; even the appointed department chiefs go their own way. The chief administrative officer--appointed, not elected--is little more than a traffic cop. Running a county in California under the current system is kind of like running the state without a governor.

As Mark Baldassare pointed out in his book about Orange County’s bankruptcy, “When Government Fails,” county governments in California are afflicted by structural problems almost guaranteed to provoke crisis. They must provide services to the poor while answering to middle-class voters. They are essentially prohibited from raising taxes. They must operate in a political environment in Sacramento that is stacked against them.

The typical county government in California, rural or urban, is assigned a hodgepodge of mostly unpopular duties. Counties’ main tasks are to fulfill the state’s mandates of providing health care and welfare benefits to poor people and running the district attorney and sheriff offices and the courts.

With Proposition 13 holding down property-tax revenues, counties must rely on getting a fiscal break from Sacramento to pay the bills. But as one Sacramento wag likes to say, their constituencies are poor people, sick people and criminals, hardly groups with much clout in Sacramento. Meanwhile, cities get to do all the fun stuff and generally get a better financial deal out of the governor and the Legislature.

Given these dismal circumstances, you might wonder why anybody would want to run for county supervisor or any of the other county-level elected jobs. The answer is simple: With a few exceptions, these are the only elected jobs in local government that pay a full-time salary. Anyone who wants to build a political career--and isn’t wealthy enough to subsidize a city-council salary--has no choice but to run for a county job.

Once in office, none of these elected officials has enough power to set a direction for the county government. Because of the “hodgepodge” problem, only a few special-interest groups--unions, contractors and advocacy groups for the poor and mentally ill--have the time and inclination to pay attention to what counties do.

Consequently, elected officials typically go their own way, protecting their favorite fiefdoms, carping with each other and positioning themselves for higher office. They have almost no incentive to work together--or even to be nice to one another. One supervisorial candidate in Orange County reported that Robert L. Citron, the elected county treasurer who brought the bankruptcy on, saw no need even to acknowledge him in conversation. In Ventura County, Baker revealed that before he was hired, he met with the entire board only once and never met with the supervisors individually.

Elsewhere in the nation, state officials and local voters have begun to recognize that what counties do is too important to maintain the status quo. In some states, counties are shedding their 19th-century structure and turning themselves into true regional governments. A few have elected county “mayors”; many more are giving the chief-administrative-officer job real clout. At the same time, in other states, counties are simply withering away, their functions being taken over by municipalities, special districts or joint-powers authorities.

Similar changes were mulled in California after Orange County went bankrupt. But, ironically, the problems created by the current system have undermined voters’ belief that changing it would solve them. In Orange County, voters not only rejected a sales tax to bail the county out of its fiscal problems, they also turned down a charter that would have radically restructured the county’s powers and organization, apparently because they didn’t want to give a “failing government” more power.

Five years later, Ventura County’s situation shows that the problems of counties are still with us. A bevy of state commissions are currently looking into the problems of local governments, but they are calling for Band-Aid solutions like marginally increasing county revenue. The flawed undergirding of the government system remains unexamined.

County governments are a big deal. They are the largest and most visible of all local governments, the ones with the broadest reach, the most constituents and the most attractive elective positions. Yet, they also have the narrowest constituencies and an outdated structure that guarantees a lack of cohesiveness and direction. As California embarks on the 21st century, voters would do well to ask themselves whether their communities are well-served by an arcane system of county government devised in the 19th.