Editorial: Supervisors try a new twist on a perpetual problem

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors has tried many ways to govern, having at times a weak chief administrator, a strong one, direct board control over all 30-plus departments, or indirect control for some and direct for others. On Tuesday, the supervisors are expected to adopt a new plan in which they will divvy up the departments, so that Mark Ridley-Thomas will oversee the Department of Health Services, for example, while Kathryn Barger takes charge of Mental Health and Janice Hahn has Public Health. County offices and departments such as the sheriff, art museum and the public defender are to be similarly parceled out.

The supervisors have tried this idea before too. They later dropped it and are now giving it another shot.

L.A. County is so populous — with 10 million people — and its government is so huge — with a workforce of more than 100,000 and an annual budget approaching $30 billion — that it would be tough to run even if it had a structure somewhat more rational than five elected co-equal supervisors with no independent executive. The county is essentially a state, and it needs a governor — an independently elected executive rather than a five-headed part-executive, part-legislative board.

For the present, though, the supervisors are charged with making the most of the structure they have. The new distribution of departments should be judged by how well it works for the residents who rely on the county and pay its bills in the form of property and sales taxes.

There are potential pitfalls, although the board, to its credit, seems aware of them.

How much deference should supervisors give each other under the new plan when it comes to the oversight of departments for which they are collectively responsible? Suppose, for example, that a majority of supervisors don’t believe a supervisor is doing a good enough job overseeing the Fire Department. Do they gang up and wrest it away, or do they defer because they don’t want that supervisor similarly attacking their handling of their own assigned departments?

It’s not a merely academic inquiry. In recent decades county residents suffered and some died at least in part because a majority of supervisors took a hands-off approach to Martin Luther King, Jr. Medical Center, which was being improperly managed but was seen as being the responsibility of the supervisor from the 2nd District. The unspoken rule was that no supervisor would mess with MLK, and that, in turn, each would oversee the hospitals and clinics in their own districts without their colleagues’ interference.

That was a deference based on political district and race. Rather than enhancing accountability, it diffused it to such an extent that the board took no meaningful action, and the hospital lost its accreditation and closed in 2008.

The supervisors have struggled to overcome that destructive deference without unnecessarily antagonizing one another. They will have to redouble their efforts as they distribute departments among themselves. If a constituent of Sheila Kuehl’s district, for example, complains about the way things are being handled in the Fire Department, it would be simply unacceptable for Kuehl to respond, “Sorry, that’s Barger’s department, not mine.” Regardless of their internal organization, all five supervisors are responsible for all of the operations of all of county government, and must be held equally accountable.

In October, several state lawmakers conducted a joint legislative hearing in Los Angeles on the structure of county government, and former L.A. Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky recounted for the senators the shameful Martin Luther King Medical Center episode. If there had been an independently elected chief executive officer, Yaroslavsky said — just as every state and most large cities have — that person would have been clearly accountable to the public for the county’s performance and would never have allowed the situation to degenerate to the point that the hospital had to be closed.

Similar arguments have been made about problems in the county’s child welfare system, in the jails, in mental health and other operations. Discussions about the structure of government may seem wonky or mundane, but they deal with matters that have life-and-death consequences.

In the final analysis, Los Angeles County government must undergo a more drastic restructuring, with an independent executive and a more legislature-like board that sets policy and oversees its managers but otherwise stays out of day-to-day county operations. Until lawmakers or voters are ready to demand that change, the supervisors must keep trying to make their current unworkable structure work, and the public must keep trying to figure out how to hold them accountable.

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