Board Secretly Urged Killing Ballot Item

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors secretly directed its lawyer to kill a proposed ballot initiative aimed at raising the salaries of low-paid health aides who care for the elderly at home.

County documents obtained by The Times describe a series of closed-door meetings and telephone calls regarding the measure, which would increase the aides’ hourly wages from $6.75 to $11.50.

During those meetings, the supervisors told their lawyer, County Counsel Lloyd Pellman, to refuse to write and release the title and ballot summary of the measure. Supervisors Gloria Molina, Don Knabe, Mike Antonovich and Yvonne Brathwaite Burke agreed to direct Pellman to refuse to certify the measure.

“I was outraged,” said Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, the only dissenter. “I said: ‘That’s the most outrageous thing I’ve ever heard.’”

“I told Bill Pellman and I told the board: ‘You are going to get reamed for this.’”

Pellman investigated the possibility of not releasing the title and summary, but documents show that he ultimately concluded he was obligated to perform that work under the law.

The county counsel called at least three board members to inform them of his conclusion. Molina has complained that Pellman violated the state’s Open Meetings Act by speaking to a majority of board members without posting notice of a meeting.

Pellman said in an interview Thursday that he was not collecting votes. Rather, he said, he was simply informing them of a decision he had made.

Molina said in a letter to her colleagues that Pellman’s conduct undermined the board’s ability to act in a “fair and unbiased manner.”

Molina was out of the country Thursday, and an aide said she would not comment on the matter.

At issue is a last-ditch effort by the health aides to force the supervisors to accept a pay increase that the state has already agreed to match, according to Tyrone Freeman, president of Service Employees International Union 434B, which represents the workers.

In-home health supportive service aides--who are paid by a combination of federal, state and county money--have battled for years with the county over pay increases and health insurance.

Freeman said he was outraged by the supervisors’ covert attempts to derail the initiative.

“I think it’s a blatant abuse of authority and a total disregard for the care of seniors and the workers who are making minimum wage caring for them,” Freeman said of the board’s actions. “Sometimes you’re just lost for words for what they do.”

In December, the group filed its intention with the county registrar- recorder to begin gathering signatures to put the measure on the November ballot.

The board, which pays 22% of the aides’ salaries, responded by holding a closed-door brainstorming session Dec. 18 with the county counsel on how to defeat the measure, according to county documents. The discussion was listed on the board’s agenda as exempted from open meetings laws because it concerned potential litigation.

Yaroslavsky said the board was concerned that the measure might establish the precedent of allowing voters to set salaries. He said the measure, if passed, could cost the county as much as $200 million.

“They should be paid more than the minimum wage, but whether they can do it by initiative is another story,” he said.

The board could have voted to sue the proponents to block the measure. Pellman had given the board the results of a review he commissioned from O’Melveny & Myers, a well-known Los Angeles law firm, which concluded that the proposed initiative asked questions that legally could not be put to the voters.

But Pellman said in county documents that such a lawsuit had very little chance of success, so he proposed another solution: refusing to certify the measure.

That proposal would have kept the measure off the ballot altogether by circumventing the normal route that initiatives take to appear before county voters.

By state law, that process starts with the proponents filing a notice of intention, which includes a written statement of the questions they hope to put before the voters. County counsel is required within 15 days to write a ballot title and summary and deliver it to the registrar-recorder. Without it, the measure will not reach the ballot.

At that closed-door meeting Dec. 18, one day before Pellman had to deliver the title and summary, he suggested to the board that he could ignore his ministerial duty “in an effort to force the proponents to sue” the county, he wrote in an internal county memorandum.

Minutes of the meeting show that a majority of the board agreed with Pellman’s suggestion and directed him to draft a letter to the home health aides and inform them of his move.

The board did not announce this decision to the public after the closed session.

Yaroslavsky said the board’s mandate, had it been carried out, would have opened the door to criticism that it manipulates the voting process to hurt measures it does not support. Such allegations were raised in 2000, when the county miscounted the number of valid signatures for a ballot measure that would have set term limits for county officials, preventing it from appearing on the ballot that November.

He said the board was not responsible for the foul-up, but “here is something we do have something to do with and we will rightly be accused of manipulating the process.”

When the deadline to release the title and summary arrived, however, Pellman had second thoughts.

“As I contemplated what to present in the letter to the attorneys for the proponents ... I realized that any refusal to act on my part would lead to delays, possibly fatal in extent, in the processing of the initiative,” Pellman wrote. Both he and the county would probably be sued for civil rights violations, he concluded.

According to the county documents and interviews, Pellman proceeded to call at least three of the supervisors individually to fill them in and asked them what to do. Molina now believes those calls violated open meetings laws, according to the county documents.

“Based on these conferences, there was not substantial support for [taking] the risk” of being sued for civil rights violations, Pellman wrote. He sent out the title and ballot summary at 5 p.m.

“No matter how incompetent or incomplete the advice of county counsel was on the day the board voted,” Molina wrote in a memo, “the remedy for this mistake should have not included a circumvention of our protocol and a violation of the Brown Act.”

The supervisors discussed Pellman’s actions at another closed-door meeting Jan. 4, and Molina asked that it be discussed in public at the Jan. 8 meeting. Instead, the item was taken up in closed session because it ostensibly involved a personnel matter: Pellman’s performance.

The supervisors had all declined to discuss the matter until this week, when the county declined a public records request from The Times regarding the issue but enclosed with the denial the records sought. County officials subsequently said it was a mistake to include those records and demanded their return.