Speaking of Which ...

Funny what people do when no one’s looking. At a closed meeting in December, four of the five members of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors--Gloria Molina, Don Knabe, Mike Antonovich and Yvonne Brathwaite Burke--tried to deep-six a proposed initiative to raise the salaries of in-home health aides for the elderly.

Those aides, unable to convince the supervisors to increase their pay beyond minimum wage, had filed notice to begin gathering signatures to put the raise to a vote in November. Before that process can begin, however, state law requires that county counsel certify the notice of intention. The four supervisors ordered County Counsel Lloyd Pellman to skip that step. Only Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky objected.

Government by initiative has plenty of problems, as we’ve never hesitated to point out. But arguing against the process, whether from the bully pulpit or in court, is entirely different from manipulating it behind the scenes. The plan, it turned out, was not merely devious. It was illegal, as Pellman eventually advised the supervisors.

Supervisor Molina is trying to pin the blame on Pellman, accusing him of making phone calls that violated the state’s open meetings law and of giving the supervisors bad advice. Pellman deserves his share of the blame--the scheme was his idea to begin with--but remind us again, how many years has Molina been a supervisor?

Neither the health aides nor the taxpayers who pay them (and who pay the supervisors and the counsel) would have learned about these shady dealings if not for Times staff writer Evelyn Larrubia.

In using the state’s public access laws to request the records of the meetings, the reporter managed to expose both underhandedness and incompetence: The county denied Larrubia’s request--only to accidentally enclose the records along with the denial.

The moral? The public’s right to know shouldn’t depend on serendipity.