A LOOK AHEAD * The near-bankruptcy of the mid-’90s sparked infighting. Now, thanks in part to prosperity and fatter budgets, the county’s . . .

The creme de la creme of what they call “the county family”--administrators, bureaucrats, politicians past and present--gathered recently at the Music Center to bid farewell to the woman who had kept the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors’ meetings running as smoothly as possible during some of the county’s most tumultuous times.

But though the occasion was Executive Officer Joanne Sturges’ retirement after 35 years of county service, many eyes that evening were on the five people who tend to dominate the room at all county events they attend: the supervisors.

“They were all standing together . . . cracking jokes,” said one county veteran. “I have never seen them behave that closely. They acted like they were brothers and sisters.”

What a difference a little prosperity makes. Back during the depths of the economic downturn in the mid-1990s, the “five little kings,” as they are sometimes called, battled ferociously over how the county could avoid bankruptcy.

Now, fueled by rising property values, the county’s budget is growing, its bond rating is up and--with a few significant exceptions--amiability reigns in the cavernous hearing room in the Kenneth Hahn Hall of Administration, where the supervisors meet every Tuesday.

“This board is getting along as well as any board I can remember,” said Supervisor Don Knabe, whose experience at the county dates back 18 years. “Remembering what it was like in those days . . . now we’re unanimous in the sense that we don’t want to go back to that.”

The unity of the most powerful body of elected officials in the county contrasts sharply with the turmoil gripping other local agencies: the Los Angeles City Council and school district and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, on whose board the supervisors also sit.

It occurs, coincidentally, as two separate efforts are underway to place on the November ballot measures that would irrevocably change the way the board operates--one to subject supervisors to term limits and the other to expand the number on the board from five to nine.

And the unity is significant not only as a reflection of the personalities of five of the most powerful people in the region, but also as a window into the murky operations of county government.

The supervisors are widely thought to occupy the best elected offices in town. Their jobs come with tremendous security and no term limits. With districts more populous than those of many U.S. senators, no elected supervisor has been defeated in an election since 1980. Indeed, for the first time in memory, the three supervisors up for reelection this year ran unopposed.

Though legally nonpartisan, the board splits 3 to 2 between its Democrats--Zev Yaroslavsky, Yvonne Brathwaite Burke and Gloria Molina--and Republicans--Mike Antonovich and Knabe--over certain matters. But those are usually symbolic and ideological issues--such as controversial ballot initiatives and gun control.

There usually is unity on matters concerning the vast county bureaucracy, which runs the jails, hospitals, children’s services and welfare operations that, combined, make up a government larger than those of all but eight states.

The board passed the county’s $15-billion budget last year in 49 minutes with minimal public discussion. The supervisors were unusually unified in their decision earlier this year to extend a politically connected developer’s leases in county-owned Marina del Rey, an issue that once divided the board, but no longer does. Nor have normally hot-button issues, such as children’s services and cutting people off General Relief, provoked much division.

Indeed, board meetings now mainly dwell on the sometimes hours-long ritual of awarding scrolls and other memorabilia to politicians, county employees, community groups and even departing reporters. The board usually unanimously approves the matters before it, passing a vast majority of questions on consent, without public discussion.

There are two exceptions, one the spillover of an election campaign and the other a battle over health care, that demonstrate the problems hidden beneath the current peace and prosperity in the Hall of Administration.

Four of the five supervisors support Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti in his November runoff against his challenger, veteran prosecutor Steve Cooley. Antonovich supports Cooley, and has repeatedly offered motions critical of Garcetti’s office over the last year only to have them shot down by his colleagues.

The second division shows no signs of ending as soon as the November elections. It is the epic battle over the size of the rebuilt County-USC Medical Center, one of the most contentious disputes in the state.

Molina, in whose district the Boyle Heights hospital lies, has long fought for a 750-bed facility and is backed by a number of medical experts and an unusually unified group of Latino lawmakers. The rest of the supervisors, however, have stood by their proposal to rebuild the facility with only 600 beds, saying that there are numerous empty beds in other county hospitals that could take excess patients and that the number of patients in hospital beds is shrinking nationwide.

A compromise--building a satellite hospital in Baldwin Park--seemed near last summer but has since crumbled, with the board majority and state legislators still quarreling over how to fund the new facility.

The County-USC fight has many subplots, but the most serious is that of the county’s brush with bankruptcy in 1995, two years before the board agreed on the smaller facility.

During the recession, the board considered shutting down County-USC or the five other county hospitals to close a gaping health department deficit. After months of battling over which programs and facilities to cut, the board united behind an ultimately successful effort to obtain a $1-billion federal bailout that would allow the health system to continue to serve the growing number of uninsured.

A health care waiver from Washington attached to the funding required the county to cut its reliance on pricey hospitals in favor of outpatient care. And that led to the decision to downsize County-USC, in violation of the unwritten protocol that each supervisor has final say over development and facilities in that supervisor’s district.

Five years later, the health care problems have not been solved, for reasons that are partly out of the county’s control. The number of uninsured people continues to rise. The state government has declined to return county tax dollars it took during the recession that were used to keep the health system afloat, and the county has few ways to generate new revenue.

A recent study by the Public Policy Institute concluded that, because of its health care problems, Los Angeles County remains one economic downturn away from insolvency. And supervisors remain split 4 to 1 over what to do with their medical system’s largest piece.

“It’s going to continue to be contentious and continue to be explosive,” Knabe said. “It’s an issue that is not going to go away. . . . Everyone gets along fine until we have to sit down and talk about County-USC.”

But he and others said that--despite occasional obvious tension between Molina and her colleagues--the dispute has not harmed the supervisors’ ability to work together. In fact, for the first time in years, all five are expected to travel jointly to Sacramento later this month to lobby legislators.

But longtime observers predict that unity may be as fleeting as the market value of the latest Internet start-up.

“If we start not getting money,” one county insider predicted, “those guys will start fighting again.”