Supervisors May Be Too Powerful to Be Effective

Who says there’s no free lunch?

I’m buying fish tacos at Senor Fish for the first reader who can tell me the last time a Los Angeles County supervisor was run out of office. (Hint: A successful challenger appears with roughly the same frequency as Halley’s Comet).

I ask because if you followed The Times’ series on the institutional rot at King/Drew Medical Center, then you know most of the blame falls at the feet of the untouchable, all-powerful L.A. County supervisors.

They run the public hospital, in the end, and they have consistently found ways to allow incompetence and negligence to fester over the years, even as patients were dying as a direct result.

Sure, every hospital makes deadly mistakes. But there’s a reason King/Drew has been called “Killer King” in and around South L.A. Rather than confront the problems, supervisors ran for the hills to avoid being called racist for shaking up a hospital long seen as an institution operated by and for African Americans.

What’s more racist than sitting on your hands while minority patients are losing their lives in a chamber of horrors?

Not that the supes are the only culprits, as pointed out by my colleagues Charles Ornstein, Tracy Weber, Mitchell Landsberg and Steve Hymon.

There’s the small percentage of King/Drew doctors, nurses and support staff who showed up when they felt like it and did as little as possible, a disservice to patients and an insult to the majority of employees doing honest work.

Then you’ve got the derelicts and clowns who filed 122 workers’ comp claims in 10 years for falling off chairs, a coincidence that seemed to escape the notice of administrators and supervisors, even as King/Drew became the undisputed hazardous chair capital of the civil service universe.

And then you’ve got the scream-bloody-murder politicians and activists who flipped out every time the supervisors woke up long enough to suggest shutting down inept units of the hospital.

“We will be on top of your desk,” Rep. Maxine Waters warned county officials at one rally earlier this year.

I wondered at the time how many patients had to die before Waters aimed her cannon at the hacks at the hospital instead of defending them against mounting evidence of incompetence. She told me if heads had to roll, so be it.

But it seldom happened.

As Supervisor Gloria Molina now admits, “We should be embarrassed, all of us collectively, because we have failed the community.”

The failure has gone on for decades, so it’s only natural to wonder how L.A. County supervisors seem to have nearly as much job security as Supreme Court justices, easily winning reelection until they’re carried out feet first.

Thankfully, L.A. County has switched to a three-term limit for supervisors. The bad news is that it won’t kick in until 2014. Meanwhile, giving them the boot at the ballot box is harder than dethroning a king. The five supervisors control billions of tax dollars, and each one rules over roughly 2 million people, making them the most powerful local officials in the United States.

The power of incumbency includes a dandy perk in which supervisors have roughly $1 million a year to throw around like confetti, with no oversight whatsoever. It’s a can’t-miss way for supervisors to make and keep friends, and it’s not as if they’re dipping into their own pockets. That money is yours and mine.

Another terrific advantage to incumbency is that supervisors are practically invisible, and not just because they seem to enjoy conducting business behind closed doors. L.A. County has 88 towns and cities, and residents of each identify more with their city councils than with the county Board of Supervisors.

Do you know who your supervisor is?

Do you know who the current chair of the board is?

If the answers are no, don’t be ashamed. You and 2 million other people are sharing the same supervisor, so it isn’t easy to develop a personal connection. Especially when the supervisors all practice a self-serving form of polite, back-scratching politics.

Maybe it would help if the chair of the board was an elected position, like a county mayor, instead of a gavel that’s simply passed around. If that were the case, somebody might have taken ownership of the mess at King/Drew instead of five empty suits ducking and pointing down the line as the bodies piled up.

Several times in the past, L.A. County voters have failed to dump the five-supervisor system in favor of having more

supes.

“People don’t want more politicians,” says Bob Stern of the nonprofit Center for Governmental Studies.

It’s an understandable but lamebrained sentiment. Stern thinks we’d be much better off with nine supervisors, and he points out that San Francisco County, which doesn’t have one-tenth the population of L.A. County, has 11.

“With 10 million people,” says Jaime Regalado of the Pat Brown Institute of Public Affairs, “five supervisors makes for a dysfunctional system. It’s hard to dislodge them, and hard for them not to feel all-powerful, even though they might be asleep at the switch.”

Asleep? It was worse than that.

They turned and ran.