Room on Board

Los Angeles County supervisors Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, Don Knabe and Michael Antonovich face opposition in the March 2 primary, but they are sure bets to win election for the fourth, third and seventh times, respectively.

The nation’s most populous county is overseen by just a five-member Board of Supervisors, serving staggered four-year terms. That’s about one supervisor per 2 million residents. The governors of 14 states represent fewer people.

Few challengers have the name recognition or cash to mount a successful campaign against an entrenched incumbent. Indeed, it’s been almost a quarter-century since a sitting supervisor lost an election -- to Antonovich in 1980.

Burke, 71, says that if reelected, this will be her last term representing District 2, which stretches from Carson to Culver City and includes part of South Los Angeles. This would be her last chance to show the leadership needed to turn around the deeply troubled Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center near Watts. By letting care deteriorate so badly, all five supervisors failed the desperately poor community that depends on the hospital. But the hospital is in Burke’s district and responsibility falls most heavily on her. She stood aside rather than wade into the messy racial and ethnic politics that prevented hard reforms.

The county sheriff’s deputies union has targeted Burke for defeat, but it is essentially a grudge match over the union’s failure to win the overly generous employee retirement benefits that helped get state government in so much trouble. Moreover, the candidate the union recruited -- Guy Mato, a Gardena real estate executive -- is a former sheriff’s deputy who was involved in a police brutality case in Lynwood in the early 1990s. Enough said.

Knabe’s 4th District runs from Diamond Bar to El Segundo and takes in Los Angeles International Airport as well as the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, where he has rightly focused on increasing security after 9/11. He has hospital problems as well -- finding a nonprofit group or other partner to help run the county’s well-regarded but financially struggling Rancho Los Amigos National Rehabilitation Center in Downey. Knabe took the lead two years ago in reviving a regional airport authority; now he needs to push it to play an active role in Southern California’s stalled airport plans.

Antonovich’s strongest opponent, environmental activist Lynn Plambeck, has been a gadfly on water issues in the rapidly developing 5th District, which reaches north to Santa Clarita, Palmdale and Lancaster. Developers have unfairly portrayed her as unsupportive of schools and ballparks, but Antonovich should not dismiss her warnings about the effects of growth. Last year’s uproar over the removal of a centuries-old oak dubbed “Old Glory” to widen a road suggests the need to revisit the area’s 60-year-old master plan.

Antonovich showed flexibility in accepting the politically charged but necessary step of closing a public hospital. If he can find the money, his ambitious plans to expand light rail would help ease traffic congestion.

In the meantime, anyone hoping to take on a sitting supervisor may want to renew the effort to increase the size of the board and shrink the size of the districts, making campaigns -- not to mention government -- more manageable.