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# Tell truer stories about L.A. County's past and present
- URL: https://www.losangelesrules.com/los-angeles-countys-newest-true-story-takes-shape/
- Published: 2026-08-09T08:36:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-10T17:15:56.000Z
- Description: The county has provided the Governance Reform Task Force with a false history, which threatens to produce unsound policy choices.
- Author: Robert Greene
- Tags: County executive, Measure G, Governance, Governance Reform Task Force, #homepage4

A month of marathon sessions to fine-tune the job of the newest Los Angeles County elected position [began Friday](https://assets-us-01.kc-usercontent.com/0234f496-d2b7-00b6-17a4-b43e949b70a2/1194ee71-733f-4dec-8fbb-5c6f01c70404/GRTF%20Agenda%2008.07.26-FINAL.pdf?ref=losangelesrules.com), Aug. 7, with a committee’s strong suggestion for the new official’s title: County Executive.

It’s clear and to the point, and is a wise choice, given the various alternatives bandied about at the prior meeting of the county’s 13-member [Governance Reform Task Force](https://measureg.lacounty.gov/governance-reform-task-force/?ref=losangelesrules.com), conducted over several long hours of a hot July evening in a county recreation center in the City of San Fernando. 

Should it be “Chief Executive Officer,” some members wondered. But that’s the current title of the appointed official whose work is to be largely absorbed by the new elected official. That would be confusing.

What about “Judge,” the title they use for the analogous county position in Kentucky, even though it has nothing to do with courtrooms, or in Texas, where it does? Since the adoption of[ Measure G](https://measureg.lacounty.gov/?ref=losangelesrules.com), the charter amendment that began this whole process in November 2024, the position has been popularly referred to as the “Elected Executive,” so maybe use that? But that would be weird. We don’t say “Elected Supervisor," so why would we say "Elected Executive"?

As the July session dragged on and members were perhaps getting a bit punchy, one suggested returning to “Chief Executive Officer” or any other title that includes the word “Chief,” in homage to the original inhabitants of the area and their descendants and in keeping with the land acknowledgement read at the beginning of every public county meeting.

Thankfully that suggestion seems to have been put to rest by Friday at the first of [six August super-sessions](https://assets-us-01.kc-usercontent.com/0234f496-d2b7-00b6-17a4-b43e949b70a2/11c7461b-83f9-4f32-a119-b4d0bc00b0a6/GRTF%5FMeeting%5F2026%5FSchedule-08-06-26.pdf?ref=losangelesrules.com). The meeting took place in the Board of Supervisors’ spacious hearing room at the Kenneth Hahn Hall of Administration.

After dealing with the name, the[ task force discussed](https://assets-us-01.kc-usercontent.com/0234f496-d2b7-00b6-17a4-b43e949b70a2/394a53e5-3a3e-4c09-9bbd-8508591c2203/GRTF%202026.8.7%20-%20Ad%20Hoc%20Presentation%20to%20GRTF%20%28FINAL%29.pdf?ref=losangelesrules.com) a public education and civic engagement strategy to let people know what their new elected official is supposed to do.

The sooner that process begins the better, in part because candidates for the 2028 election can file to raise campaign funds next month. They ought to know something about the job they’re running for. And it’s also important so that pundits and news outlets who exclaim that the county executive will be “the second most powerful person in California” or “the 51st governor” can learn enough about the position to rein in some of the hyperbole.

An official with new political superpowers? In your dreams.

Los Angeles County is huge, as are its budget and its burdens, and the responsibility for running it will finally be focused on a single desk beginning in late 2028.

But remember that most of the county’s annual budget is already spoken for by state and federal mandates. And the Board of Supervisors will still have final sign-off authority.

Also consider that the county’s biggest-ticket items barely touch large swaths of the voter class, which are generally more concerned with streetlights, sidewalk repair, housing density, construction permits and traffic – city headaches – than dwindling Medi-Cal reimbursements, public hospital closures, a failing juvenile probation system, killer jails, crippling poverty and the other life-and-death struggles over which the county has jurisdiction but which are not part of the daily lives of the region’s more fortunate people.

For the sake of comparison,[ no Los Angeles mayor has ever gone on](https://calmatters.org/commentary/2026/06/mahan-villaraigosa-california-mayors-governor/?ref=losangelesrules.com) to serve in higher office, at least not since William Stephens’ 11 days as governor in 1909, and even that gig was appointed, not elected. Do we really think that a new Los Angeles County executive is going to have a rosier political future than the mayor?

It will be a tough job, and the task force’s goal should be to ensure that the official will have enough authority to be held accountable for county government’s performance in a way that the current supervisors are not, while ensuring that the supervisors have the proper tools and political incentives to relinquish their executive instincts and take their crucial new oversight duties seriously.

The task force’s 13 members will base their discussions and deliberations on a body of research from several sources – including a voluminous report that lays out an odd, confabulated history of county governance.

Does it matter that a [document](https://assets-us-01.kc-usercontent.com/0234f496-d2b7-00b6-17a4-b43e949b70a2/56fb671c-9b10-43b5-9bcc-575d0ba90ca1/KH-BOS%20Governance%20Full%20Report%20APR%202026.pdf?ref=losangelesrules.com) commissioned by the Board of Supervisors and prepared at public expense falsely instructs task force members (and the public) that the board created the county administrative officer position more than two decades later than it actually did? Or incorrectly claims that Gloria Molina was the board’s first female supervisor, and Mark Ridley-Thomas its first Black supervisor (sorry,[ Yvonne Burke](https://lasentinel.net/yvonne-brathwaite-burke-a-legacy-of-first-in-la-politics.html?ref=losangelesrules.com))? Does it matter that a consulting firm that presumably got its county history directly from county sources before delivering it back to the county falsely asserts that in 2007, “Los Angeles County voters approved a charter amendment that expanded the CAO’s powers and renamed the position to Chief Executive Officer (CEO)”?

It does matter. The Governance Reform Task Force is laying the groundwork for the county’s future governance. How can it do that based on make-believe history? What other untrue tales have members been told?

If county voters adopted a 2007 governance charter amendment that empowered a chief executive, why are we here? Why did we need Measure G? What’s the point of this whole exercise?

The template for the future has to be based on an accurate reading of the past. The county doesn’t seem to have that, even though it’s the county’s own past.

The innovative and influential 1938 (not 1959) decision to create a chief administrative officer is not just interesting and maybe even a little fun (involving bad hospital food, the recall of the L.A. mayor and the founder of one of the nation’s largest dairies), it’s important. 

It’s also important to know that the supervisors’ earnest and contentious six-month-long 2007 debate over creating an empowered chief executive took place during, and is directly related to, the final meltdown of a public hospital on their watch. It’s important to remember that as the board deliberated over the org chart, a patient writhed in agony and finally died on the lobby floor while county nurses scoffed at the patient’s pain and a janitor mopped up around her. It’s important to recognize that at the root of the horrendous incident, along with human callousness and ineptitude, was cataclysmic organizational failure.

It’s also important to know that the questions the supervisors asked each other as they considered finally loosening their grip on power – Will constituents still call their supervisor for service, or should they now call the executive? Will supervisors still be able to direct departments to do things? Are we building a new layer of bureaucracy that further separates people from their leaders? – turned out to be thornier and more fundamental than anyone had imagined.

They also happen to be the exact same questions asked in the exact same room nearly 20 years later by the Governance Reform Task Force as it grapples with how to implement Measure G. More familiarity with the board’s 2007 debates and the human context in which they took place just might help the task force succeed where the supervisors ultimately failed.

It’s important to know that the supervisors’ episodic clawbacks of executive power occurred as they sparred with their children’s services director over whether to protect the county from liability by keeping child death reports secret, or identify and correct deadly mistakes by sharing those reports with front-line child welfare workers.

It’s important to remember the jail deaths, the juvenile probation sexual abuses, the ongoing homelessness disaster, the desperate and cruel public humiliations of department directors. It’s important to remember the heroic and too-often thankless work of employees inspired by the county’s enormous but as-yet unmet capacity to alleviate human misery. And it’s important to understand the crucial link between that capacity, and that misery, and that heroism, and a topic as seemingly mundane and bloodless as governance reform. 

To do that, it’s important to tell true stories about the past and the present. Many people can tell them. I will do my best to tell a few.

*The Governance Reform Task Force next meets on Wednesday, Aug. 12 at 5 p.m. at the SEED School of Los Angeles County, 8400 S. Vermont Ave., Los Angeles 90044.*