L.A. County's 4th District supervisor race election voter guide

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At least two of the names on this year’s ballot for Los Angeles County supervisor in the 4th District will probably be familiar to voters.

Incumbent Janice Hahn, a longtime politician hailing from one of California’s most prominent political families, wants another term. Alex Villanueva, the controversial former L.A. County sheriff, wants to win Hahn’s seat after regularly clashing with the board during his term as top cop. And John Cruikshank, the mayor of Rancho Palos Verdes, thinks he can beat them both.

The three are vying to represent the county’s 4th District, home to more than 2 million residents across roughly 400 square miles. It’s geographically bigger than most American cities and more populous than many states.

Hahn and Villanueva are registered Democrats, though the Los Angeles County Democratic Party has tried to distance itself from the former sheriff, and Cruikshank is a Republican. The seat is nonpartisan.

At stake in this election, the three candidates agree, is not just the quality of life for 4th District residents but conditions countywide. Though most constituents have only a foggy sense that they have a county government — and even less of a sense of what it does — the seat of supervisor is one of the most powerful positions in California politics, the envy of many higher-profile politicians who have to rally a small army to get anything passed.

Each of the five county supervisors has real sway over a $43-billion budget and a workforce almost as large as the population of Berkeley. It’s the reason the all-female board has been dubbed the “Five Little Queens” — their decisions have a tangible impact on the 10 million people who call L.A. County home.

On March 5, 4th District voters will decide whom to put at the helm.

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Where is the district?

The district spans roughly 400 square miles across the southern and southeastern parts of Los Angeles County. It encompasses parts of 32 cities, including Long Beach and Torrance.

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Who are the candidates?

Janice Hahn

Incumbent Hahn comes from one of the most prominent families in California politics.

The Kenneth Hahn Hall of Administration, the heart of county government, is named for her father, the supervisor who helped bring the Dodgers to Los Angeles. Four blocks away is a City Hall building bearing the name of her brother James Hahn, the only Angeleno to be elected city controller, city attorney and mayor. Her uncle Gordon Hahn served on the state Assembly and City Council.

Like the rest of the family, Hahn has held her share of influential seats. After starting her professional life as a teacher, she kicked off her political career with a seat on the city’s charter reform commission, which modified the governing document. She went on to serve three terms on the City Council representing the 15th District before being elected to Congress in California’s 36th and, later, 44th districts.

Tiring of the partisan dysfunction after five years in Congress, Hahn — a resident of San Pedro — resigned in 2016 to run for supervisor.

After two terms, she is defending her 4th District seat against Villanueva, who is vying for a comeback after he was voted out as sheriff in 2022.

Alex Villanueva

An Air Force veteran, Villanueva spent the bulk of his career with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. Even as a young deputy, Villanueva exhibited a taste for elected office. At age 29, he lost a run for the San Dimas City Council. The year after that, he ran unsuccessfully for L.A. County sheriff, pledging to fix a department whose morale had hit rock bottom. In 2015, he narrowly lost a seat for La Habra Heights City Council.

After retiring as a lieutenant, Villanueva made one more bid in 2018 to lead the Sheriff’s Department, pledging to get federal immigration agents out of jails and brandishing his status as a Democrat. He stunned political observers with an upset victory over Sheriff Jim McDonnell — the first time in more than a century that the incumbent was voted out.

But the wave of progressive support that propelled Villanueva into office soon turned against him, as he clashed with county colleagues and left-leaning groups over issues including the size of his budget and what he called “attack dog” oversight groups tasked with monitoring him. In 2022, he became the second incumbent sheriff in a row booted out by voters, losing in a landslide to former Long Beach Police Chief Robert Luna. After he left office, a county oversight panel recommended in 2023 that he not be rehired after finding he discriminated against Inspector General Max Huntsman, The Times reported Wednesday.

John Cruikshank

The third 4th District candidate will be most familiar to voters of Rancho Palos Verdes, whose population is about 40,000.

After seven years in city leadership — as a council member and as mayor — Cruikshank is looking to make the leap into county politics.

A USC graduate and El Segundo native, Cruikshank argues that his swath of the county needs fresh eyes watching over it. The longtime owner of an engineering firm, Cruikshank says a career spent breaking complex problems into smaller, solvable chunks will help him analyze the biggest issues plaguing the region; namely, homelessness and public safety.

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What’s their pitch to voters?

For Hahn, the message is simple: Don’t change direction now.

She’s the candidate with decades of government experience. She’s the one steering the county through its myriad problems — too many mentally ill constituents wandering the streets in crisis, too many people living outside, too many rent-burdened residents poised to join them. Her work isn’t done, she says.

“The battle to create transformative, positive and lasting change on behalf of the hard-working people of L.A. County must go on,” she said in response to a Times questionnaire.

Meanwhile, Villanueva and Cruikshank argue that the only change under her leadership has been the negative kind: more homelessness and more residents feeling unsafe.

”I’m running to save L.A. County,” Cruikshank said in his questionnaire response. “... I could no longer sit back and watch our beautiful county be destroyed by politics.”

Villanueva has been making a similar pitch — in slightly more colorful language. He had painted L.A. County as crime-ridden, dirty and dangerous, a “magnet to the entire nation’s indigent.” At fault for the disarray, he says, are long-term politicians like Hahn and their paralyzing “political indecision.”

“The window for fixing what ails Los Angeles is shrinking,” he wrote in his questionnaire. “It’s time to make 2024 the year to break free from career politicians and their stranglehold on elected office.”

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All three candidates have spent time in elected office. What do they have to show for it?

Hahn has sailed through her two terms nearly controversy-free, a reliable vote in support of union labor and progressive policies.

Among her accomplishments, Hahn counts hosting buybacks that took hundreds of guns off the street; implementing L.A. Found, a program that provides trackable bracelets to families of people with Alzheimer’s disease and other cognitive impairments; and spearheading the return of beachfront property to the descendants of a Black family whose land was seized a century ago — a deal celebrated nationally by reparation advocates. The family recently sold the Bruce’s Beach property back to the county for nearly $20 million.

It has earned her a healthy endorsement list: A roster of prominent politicians support her campaign — including all four of her colleagues on the Board of Supervisors — as do many big labor groups, including SEIU Local 721, which represents many county workers. (So far, the union representing roughly 8,000 deputy sheriffs has endorsed neither Hahn nor Villanueva, their former boss.)

Villanueva’s time in county leadership was bookended by controversy. Soon after entering office, he rehired a deputy sheriff who was fired after allegations of domestic abuse and stalking. As his term wound down, Villanueva launched a questionable corruption probe into then-Supervisor Sheila Kuehl, one of his fiercest critics. In between, he sparred with other supervisors, bucked attempts at oversight and, at one point, had an emergency helicopter landing pad built above his La Habra Heights home without authorization.

Villanueva said his critics paint an overly negative view of his administration. In reality, he says, he had a number of policy successes in his short time as sheriff, including working to make the department more diverse, booting federal immigration agents out of county jails and taking steps to spare the inmate population from being ravaged by COVID-19. As the little-understood virus spread, Villanueva ordered the department to cite and release people whenever possible, instead of jailing them in close quarters.

Cruikshank said many of his political accomplishments similarly stemmed from his leadership during the pandemic. As mayor of Rancho Palos Verdes in 2020, Cruikshank fought to keep local businesses open during the lockdown and reduced financial burdens for businesses based out of people’s homes, he said.

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Homelessness

Like anyone running for local office these days, the three candidates agree on one point: Homelessness has spiraled out of control countywide. But when it comes to the question of how to get people off the street, they are at odds.

If given another term, Hahn said, she would push to expand Pathway Home, a new county initiative to remove homeless encampments, similar to the city’s Inside Safe program. She also wants to see protections with teeth for rent-burdened residents, including pushing cities to pass ordinances that limit rent hikes and preserving quickly disappearing mobile home parks.

Villanueva and Cruikshank, meanwhile, have accused the current crop of politicians of being overly permissive with the homeless population.

While both said they want to dramatically expand the stock of shelters and treatment facilities for people with severe mental illness, they took a stricter stance on those who refuse services.

Villanueva said he wanted to “regulate public space” in the county — which he has dubbed the “homeless capital of the world” — by requiring people living on the street to either go to a shelter or face possible misdemeanor charges. California politicians, he said, have been struck by “paralysis by analysis” when it came to getting people off the street.

Cruikshank said he wanted to see conditions put in place for people seeking services. If they want shelter and were struggling with substance abuse, they would need to agree to get treatment for drug and alcohol addiction, he said, or face a location “not that comfortable,” such as a tent city. If they want housing but couldn’t land a job, they would need to commit to a “retraining facility.”

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Public safety

Villanueva says the politicians — and their push to reform criminal justice — has enabled anarchy. Cruikshank says he’s running to “make crime illegal again.” Hahn wants to make sure the Sheriff’s Department has the budget it needs.

When it comes to public safety, all three have the same priority: fill the Sheriff’s Department’s many vacancies as quickly as possible.

About 1 in 5 sworn positions are effectively vacant as of December, according to department data. Candidates say this has forced deputies to work unreasonable amounts of overtime. Villanueva has been particularly vocal about the vacancies, pointing to the alarming rash of suicides within the department as a sign that staffers are desperately overworked.

It’s no surprise that Villanueva, a longtime law enforcement official, has made crime the animating issue of his campaign. In press interviews, he has painted his district as being under an onslaught of crime, comparing going to the supermarket as a “life-or-death struggle.” He frequently tweets about retail theft.

While Villanueva has described crime as rampant in the 4th District, data from the Sheriff’s Department paint a more measured picture. In the first 11 months of 2023, overall crime rose in the areas patrolled by the sheriff’s stations in Norwalk and Cerritos from the same period in 2022. But it dropped in Lomita, Avalon and Lakewood and remained mostly unchanged in the Pico Rivera station area.

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