If you work for, with, or near Los Angeles County government, or you just want to follow its business, Tuesday is the fulcrum of your week. That’s when the Board of Supervisors meets to vote on programs, policy and spending.
If you want to weigh in on a motion that will affect your organization or neighborhood, you make sure the supervisors have your letters and petitions well before the Tuesday board meeting. You arrange your members’ rides to the Hall of Administration and help them get their talking points in good order for public comment time. You will be ready because you had plenty of notice that this item was coming up. You saw it on the weekly agenda that was published last Wednesday.
But what if it wasn’t published until a supplemental agenda appeared well after the close of business on Friday, when you and all of your group’s members have gone home and settled into the weekend?
Then comes what Governance Reform Task Force member Derek Hsieh called “the Friday afternoon massacre,” when weekend plans are scrapped and frantic calls and text messages go out urging members to draft position papers and write letters. Whether or not you go through that process and then appear at the Tuesday meeting to advocate for your group’s position, you can be certain that people on the opposite side of the issue are doing it for theirs.
“Friday afternoon massacre” is actually soft-selling the problem. I rarely see the green sheet – an alternative name for the Friday supplemental agenda, and, yes, you can still get a printed version on green paper – until around 6 p.m.
Even the supervisors themselves can be caught up in the green sheet surprise. Supervisor A may spring a motion on the supplemental at 6 on a Friday evening and catch Supervisor B unawares. Supervisor B now needs her staff to study the issue and recommend amendments or compromises. She must calculate what the vote would be without her, maybe check with Supervisor C, and then decide how to weigh in.
There goes the weekend.
Los Angeles County governance reform has many origin stories, some decades old. But one is much more recent. It begins with a 2023 motion, introduced by the board’s two newest members but angrily rejected by the majority, to study a host of governance problems including inadequate notice to the public of items to be taken up at Tuesday board meetings.
The two proponents ultimately parted company on the details. Lindsey Horvath co-authored Measure G, the landmark 2024 charter overhaul that requires an elected executive, a larger board, an ethics commission, a legislative analyst, a budget analyst, and a number of other changes as well. Holly Mitchell urged its defeat.
Voters approved it.
One of its more obscure requirements is solving the Friday massacre/green sheet surprise by posting board agendas 120 hours (five calendar days) before the start of each public meeting instead of the minimum 72 hours (three days) currently required under state law.
Task Force member Gabriela Gironas aptly called it “one of the driest topics in the county.”
The Task Force met on Aug. 12 in the gymnasium of SEED LA, a South Los Angeles boarding school, to discuss the pros and cons of various agenda-posting schedules to comply with Measure G.
Scrap the supplemental agenda altogether? Keep it, but publish it five days (or six?) before the meeting instead of three, and publish a main agenda 11 days before the meeting, so that agendas for two different meetings are circulating at the same time?
There was a second issue at the Task Force meeting, intertwined with the first and at least as important. But it wasn’t on the agenda and I’m not sure how many Task Force members noticed it. It may sound peripheral, frivolous or whiny. It’s not.
The Task Force has been notoriously unsuccessful at getting the public to show up at their meetings and engage in discussion about a monumental, once-a-century governance overhaul that will profoundly affect how well or poorly essential services are delivered in the nation’s largest county and how accountable, or otherwise, elected officials will be under the new system. The meetings do have a steady following among live-streamers, with between 100 and 200 people generally tuning in to watch or listen online. But a majority of them appear to already be working in county government.
On this particular evening, five community members who heard that something important was to be discussed in their neighborhood came to the meeting in person to check things out. This was a chance to engage them, and perhaps get them talking about the process with their friends and neighbors.
They were older folks, about my age, and like me they perched on wildly uncomfortable backless red plastic bleacher benches that were clearly meant for younger rear ends and exciting basketball games, and not for adults trying to slog through two and a half hours of talk about agendas and posting requirements.
A few minutes into the meeting I could see them eying two empty and relatively comfortable-looking folding chairs on the gym floor. I had one of those chairs in my sights as well. The six of us started to size each other up and estimate who could snag the comfy seats before the others could grab them.
Just to reiterate, those backless red plastic benches – really, really uncomfortable.
And then the discussion among Task Force members was interrupted by a very loud automated announcement:
“This webinar is being transcribed and summarized.”
Members asked about the various agenda options, and sometimes failed to speak into their microphones and were inaudible. Sometimes they spoke into their mics but were inaudible anyway because of really bad room acoustics.
The five community members lost interest in the folding chairs and instead looked at each other with quizzical expressions as if to say, “What is this? Agendas? Posting? Weird audio glitches? What’s with these plastic benches? I thought we were reinventing county government.”
And then again:
“This webinar is being transcribed and summarized.” Every few minutes. Four times. Maybe five.
I was going to speak with the county residents, hear why they came and what they thought. But they understandably walked out well before the break, having heard little of value to people who are trying to understand how county government is changing and how they will be affected. Instead they got torturous seats, a largely inaudible discussion and a vivid demonstration that a county with an annual budget of more than $50 billion is unable or unwilling to get its tech act together or engage with the public.
After decades of attending county meetings I have identified this rule of thumb: If a county supervisor is attending, the facilities and technology will be flawless. Otherwise, it’s a crapshoot.
Who’s fault is this? Nevermind. The better question is, Who will be held accountable – and how – for properly engaging and accommodating the public in the future under the county’s new form of government?
This is not a separate question from how and when to post an agenda in order to provide proper public notice. It is the same question, although perhaps asked from a slightly different angle.
To the Task Force’s credit, members cautioned against making the agenda rules too inflexible and the posting process too slow. They asked about best practices in other municipalities. They talked about the relationship between the board and the new county executive. They talked about “neutrality,” a code word for making sure that Horvath, if she runs for county executive, doesn’t shape the Task Force’s recommendations to favor her candidacy.
To my gratitude and relief the executive director saw my red-plastic-bench agony and kindly offered up one of the folding chairs. Thank you. By that time, though, there were few enough people remaining in the room that anyone on those evil red seats could grab a chair.
It would have been good if the Task Force members had acknowledged publicly that Board of Supervisors meetings will no longer be as important as they are now, because many decisions will be made instead by the county executive. Nor are green sheet surprises as common as they once were, because board staff often (but not always) have public pre-meetings, known as “clusters,” to ferret out issues beforehand. It would have been good if Measure G’s drafters, two years ago, had addressed the Friday afternoon massacre simply by reminding the supervisors that they could meet on Thursdays instead of Tuesdays. But it’s too late for that now. The 120-hour requirement is law, and the plan to implement it must be in place before the end of the year.
Next: Aug. 17. “We didn’t even know how to get into this building”
Source: Governance Reform Task Force August 12, 2026 Special Meeting - Full meeting video