L.A. County reform pushback: Zine of the times? Or just a nothingbarger?

A plan to flesh out Los Angeles County’s new elected executive position came to the Board of Supervisors on Oct. 20 and hit a wall. Hard.

At the long and tense meeting, the supervisors greeted their own Governance Reform Task Force with anger and insults, and put off until Jan. 26 a vote that would allow the 13-member volunteer group to look into thorny questions about the county executive’s power and its relationship with a larger board.

The night before, former Los Angeles City Councilmember Dennis Zine served the county with threats of legal action to block the elected executive portion of 2024’s Measure G governance overhaul from taking effect. Elected but not-yet-seated supervisor Maria Elena Durazo entered the fray with a letter laying out her concerns about the executive-board relationship. Supervisor Kathryn Barger railed against Measure G as though it was either an evil idea that hadn’t yet come to fruition or a fraud perpetrated on the voters, rather than a measure nearing the second anniversary of its adoption. County Counsel Dawyn Harrison revealed that her office had examined the legality of the elected executive position twice – once before it went on the ballot, and again, at an unnamed supervisor’s request, after it passed. 

“I never indicated it was a slam dunk,” Harrison told the board.

Now she tells us.

Three supervisors gave shout-outs to their own Task Force appointees – Chair Hilda Solis called her pick “the voice of reason” – but cast a skeptical, critical or downright disdainful eye on the rest of the membership.

“I feel as though this is a plane that is being built as it is being flown by people that don’t understand how to fly a plane,” Barger said, looking at the panel of appointees – five of whom were selected by the supervisors themselves and five of whom were selected, often with surreptitious instructions from supervisors, by the first five (an additional three represent labor interests).

Barger also claimed it would be a conflict of interest for any of the supervisors to run for county executive, and she called on the county’s lawyer and the still-in-formation Ethics Commission to investigate. She pledged not to run for the position herself and called on her colleagues to take a similar pledge.

Her staff circulated a video clip of her pledge on social media. News organizations picked it up as a swipe at Supervisor Lindsey Horvath – as it most certainly was – and as the single item of note from the contentious board meeting – which it most certainly was not.

Solis, who is running for Congress against token opposition, gave her version of the pledge at the meeting. 

“I’m not interested in running for the CEO, I’m going somewhere else, I hope,” she said cheerfully.

Supervisor Holly Mitchell issued her pledge afterward.

We have our choice of takeaways from this meeting. Perhaps it was the opening round of a political counterrevolution against the county executive position and against the fundamental American principles of separation of powers and checks-and-balances that have so far been glaringly absent from the largest local government in the United States. Perhaps Zine and his attorney, former U.S. District Judge Stephen G. Larson, are on to something when they argue that a charter county in California somehow can’t lawfully design its own government to more closely adhere to the framework envisioned by the drafters of the Constitution. Perhaps, after Solis’ departure in a little over a month, Durazo will be a third vote to send yet another charter reform to voters to weaken or eliminate the county executive before that person even takes office. 

Or maybe, instead, we were simply witnessing the five stages of grief play out at the supervisors’ loss of a longstanding format of county government that has fallen distressingly short on delivering constituents the service, support, respect and accountability for which they vote and pay.

Stage one is denial, in this case of the fact of Measure G’s passage, and of the obvious fact that under the new design supervisors will not have the large policy staffs, the power to direct county departments or the political value to potential donors or constituents that they have now. By design, they will no longer be running the county without any oversight of any kind, but will become partners in a system in which an elected counterpart to a mayor, a governor or a president will be in charge, just as such a person is in charge in 700 other counties around the nation.

Maybe we skipped stage two, bargaining, and went directly to stage three, anger. Anger was certainly on display among the supervisors, and it was oddly and unfairly directed at their own Task Force.

The group was late getting started last year because the supervisors were characteristically late in making their appointments. The Task Force met for the first time on the last possible day permitted under Measure G.

They worked overtime to get the board a plan for shaping the county executive position before Labor Day – the day when candidates for the March 7, 2028 primary could start raising campaign money. The point was to keep the work politically neutral and to shape the contours of the office before candidates begin to make promises to donors and voters.

But the board put off its vote twice and is not due to revisit it until nearly four weeks into next year, when candidates no doubt will have begun their pitches to donors and voters.

Horvath is widely considered a likely candidate. Janice Hahn has been coy but has also openly spoken about looking forward to retirement.

Either of them, and anyone else who runs, will have to make their case to voters before the March primary. Any candidate who gets more than 50% of the vote would win outright. Otherwise, the top two candidates with less than a majority would face off on Nov. 7, 2028, the day of the next presidential election.

Should members of the Board of Supervisors who are shaping the new office be ineligible to run for it, as Barger suggested?

That might make sense if it’s in voters’ best interest to limit their choices – for the most powerful position in the government of the nation’s largest county – to candidates with no county experience.

Allowing that neither Horvath or Hahn resemble George Washington, perhaps someone should have told him that it would be a conflict of interest for him to run for president because he had helped shape the office by presding at the Constitutional Convention.

The Board of Supervisors’ denial and anger aside, there are legitimate concerns about how the Task Force pursues its work.

Much of it is conducted in closed “ad hoc subcommittee” meetings that don’t appear at all to be ad hoc, meaning temporary and for a limited purpose. Members come to full (and far-flung, and seemingly endless) Task Force meetings having already heard from consultants doing public business on the public dime but out of public view.

Barger, at the board meeting, darkly accused the group of marginalizing dissenters. Member David Phelps responded that, no, the proposal he and his colleagues had put before the board had been unanimously approved by the Task Force, with no dissent. I can vouch for that, having been at every meeting but one in person. But who knows what kind of marginalizing might take place out of public view?

There are also real questions remaining about how the supervisors, once they lose their power to hire, evaluate and fire county department directors, can be held accountable for delivering services to constituents, particularly in unincorporated areas in which the county is the sole municipal government.

But the Task Force has acknowledged the issue and has set forth a work plan and schedule for researching and shaping an answer.

Barger was correct when she noted that there were few people attending the board meeting, and fewer still attending the Task Force meetings, and that the poor turnouts reflect a lack of public attention to or understanding of the sweeping governance overhaul currently in progress.

But whose fault is that? In a county of 10 million people, which five have the most convening power, the most developed political networks, the longest constituent email lists, the strongest ability to place a social media message in a radio news spot or in the headlines, as Barger did last week with her pledge? Who is best positioned to get the word out about governance reform and its implications? Los Angeles County residents are not following the rollout of their governance revamp because the Board of Supervisors has not made it a priority to clue them in, and has left it to the Task Force members to gamely do their best to reach the supervisors’ constituents with achingly pleading Instagram posts.

Solis perhaps inadvertently summed up the supervisors’ attitude toward their constituents and the vote to change county governance in her closing remarks as the somewhat shell-shocked members of the Task Force rose to leave.

“Governance is about having people respect those individuals that are elected to represent them,” Solis said.

Maybe she heard herself, because after a pause she added:

“And those individuals being accountable to the public. It works both ways.”

Attorney Stephen G. Larson’s Oct. 19 letter on behalf of client Dennis Zine alleges that:

“The provisions of Measure G that create an elected County Executive and give that officer a veto over the Board of Supervisors, a concurrence over the County’s contracting authority, and the Board’s executive and administrative powers and duties under state law are void under article XI of the California Constitution. We demand that the County immediately cease all spending directed toward placing these provisions into operation.”

The letter demands that the county not continue to pay for implementing the county executive mandates of Measure G. It calls for a county response to the demands by Nov. 18. In the absence of such a response, it says, “we will file suit in Los Angeles County Superior Court.”

The Governance Reform Task Force is scheduled to hold its 30th public meeting on Wednesday, Oct. 28 at 5 p.m. at the Kenneth Hahn Hall of Administration, Room 140 A&B, Los Angeles, CA 90012.