Why reforming Los Angeles County supervisors may be a tough sell

Los Angeles voters will have a chance this fall to fundamentally overhaul the way their government is organized—a rare opportunity to rethink how communities are represented and services are delivered.

They could ruin it.

Interestingly, the government whose structure is subject to change is not the one in City Hall, where reform has been a perennial issue for decades, but rather in the County Hall of Administration. That’s where a five-member board of trustees has presided over county operations for more than a century, during which Los Angeles has transformed from a farming village into a growing, diverse and complex county of about 10 million people.

As esteemed Los Angeles historian Raphe Sonenshein noted in a recent essay, it is “no longer cow county.”

Despite its size and power, the Los Angeles County government is often treated as something of a secondary concern by many residents and voters, whose political attention is focused on the city and its mayor, Karen Bass, rather than on the supervisors and their work. The city’s reform efforts over the years have included restructuring the authority and oversight of the LAPD and revamping the city’s charter in the late 1990s.

Meanwhile, the county has moved on, growing ever larger yet governed by a structure designed for smaller, simpler times. Five supervisors combine legislative and administrative duties, meeting weekly to vote on policy issues and effectively overseeing services in their sprawling districts, which cover vast swaths of land and have more than twice the population of the average congressional district.

That could change in November. To the surprise of some, three supervisors voted last month to put on the ballot a reform that would expand the board to nine members and create an elected position for the county’s chief executive, giving the county, in effect, a mayor for the first time in history.

So far, most analysis has focused on the power dynamic: more overseers mean less power for each, so it’s surprising that a majority of boards support this proposal.

Read more: Los Angeles County supervisors eye rare reforms that would weaken their power

This is true, but it is only a small part of what voting means. The real implications come in the form of accountability and representation.

Through the narrow lens of racial and ethnic politics, some communities could gain if the measure passes, while others could lose influence. Today’s council includes one predominantly Latino area, District 1; one historically black area, District 4; and three areas that include a mix of affluent, suburban and rural white residents on the Westside, the San Fernando Valley and a sprawling district that reaches as far north as Palmdale and Lancaster. Here’s how the five-district map breaks down.

Currently, the county board is comprised exclusively of women: one black, one Latina, and three white.

With nearly twice as many seats — and depending on how the lines are drawn — the proposed new council could foreseeably include at least three predominantly Latino districts and one predominantly Asian American district. That means those communities would likely gain representation.

Black Los Angeles residents, by contrast, could see their political influence diminish, having kept one seat but now seeing it reduced to one of nine, rather than one of five. Similarly, white voters would likely have influence in two to four seats, but again, that would be in a larger council.

Gaining voter approval won’t be easy

That’s just the beginning of the representation issue. More significant, Sonenshein explained this week, is the way the expansion — combined with the creation of the county board — is intended to reshape the board’s work and mission.

Under the proposal, the new board would become an elected county administrator, charged with running the government the way Bass oversees the city of Los Angeles (or, say, Gavin Newsom oversees the state). That would — or at least could — strip the board of its executive duties and transform it into a more legislative and voter-driven body. The supervisors could be expected to listen more closely to voters and respond to their needs.

“Cutting the size of the districts in half,” Sonenshein said, “means changing the role of the overseers.”

Meanwhile, the new county executive, an elected official, would be accountable to voters for implementing the policies and goals on which he campaigned—and those approved by the board. Just as Bass, for example, staked her political reputation on a vow to alleviate homelessness in the city of Los Angeles, her new county counterpart would be accountable directly to voters to “make a lot of bricks fall,” as Sonenshein put it, if he falls short.

“This is what we call responsibility,” he added.

All this sounds encouraging. Who doesn’t support better representation and better accountability? But acceptance of this measure is not obvious.

Sonenshein asked to discuss the politics surrounding the fall measure, but anyone who has been involved in government reform for any length of time has seen voters reject good government measures. Opponents of these ideas often fight them quietly—no one likes to be known as an opponent of government reform—but they can be conspicuous by their silence.

Organized labor, for example, has historically viewed government restructuring with suspicion. And no wonder. Many elected officials were brought into office with union support, and the relationships are solid and established. More campaigning means more money and more effort, and that threatens to undermine the status quo, which works in union favor.

At the same time, Republicans may be wary of the current reform package, which is the brainchild of a Democratic council and which, by creating more seats in a predominantly Democratic county, gives Democrats more chances to run and win. Republicans like to run against more governments, and that presents a tempting target.

Which brings us to the difficulty of getting the message across. Expanding the board, like the Los Angeles City Council expansion proposals, relies on convincing voters that there’s a problem with their government that’s serious enough to warrant restructuring, and then convincing disgruntled voters that the solution is to double the number of bureaucrats who piss them off.

That dissonance was what doomed the City Council’s expansion effort in the 1990s. It may be enough to doom this effort as well, even if it offers a chance for Los Angeles to stop being a cow county.