Election of County Executive Proposed

Criticizing Los Angeles County’s “Soviet-style system” of government as outdated and unsuitable for its 10 million residents, Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky said Monday that he would push for the creation of an elected county executive answerable to voters instead of the Board of Supervisors.

A shakeup in the structure of county government would allow important decisions to be made faster by one person at the top who could later be held accountable rather than waiting for five supervisors to come to a consensus, Yaroslavsky said.

Executive decisions are now made by the Board of Supervisors, which meets once a week -- a system that Yaroslavsky compared to the former Soviet Union’s Politburo. Yaroslavsky instead proposed that a county executive, operating similarly to the way a mayor runs a city, should make many of those decisions.

“You won’t have to wait a week to decide whether we’re going to declare a local state of emergency after a rainstorm,” Yaroslavsky said at a lunch sponsored by the Los Angeles Current Affairs Forum. “We need a system where one person is responsible and accountable.... When you have five people responsible, no one is responsible.”

Yaroslavsky said he was consulting with political scientists on how best to draft a proposal but that he had not yet decided whether to push for a ballot initiative.

Sometimes dubbed the “five little kings,” the Board of Supervisors manages a vast government with an $18-billion budget and 85,000 employees. Members preside over massive districts that each serve about 2 million residents -- more than the populations of 14 states -- and oversee the county’s law enforcement, health and social services.

It is unclear whether a plan to limit the power of county supervisors by creating a strong, elected executive could garner enough support from county supervisors or voters to succeed.

Press deputies for Supervisors Mike Antonovich and Gloria Molina said their bosses would be open to the suggestion. But similar proposals have suffered repeated defeats.

Voters rejected a ballot measure calling for an elected executive in 1992. The most recent proposal died without county supervisors voting on the issue in 2000.

But Yaroslavsky said that the board’s recent experiences in dealing with patient care problems at Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center convinced him that the county needed to revive the issue. A Times investigation last year found that King/Drew’s problems dated back well over a decade and that piecemeal fixes had failed to prevent problems from festering, including several questionable deaths over the last two years. Last month, a national healthcare accrediting group withdrew its seal of support for the hospital.

“We suffer from a lack of an elected executive in terms of timely decision-making, decisive decision-making,” Yaroslavsky said. “I think 20 years ago, an elected executive would have moved earlier on King/Drew.”