Editorial: New thinking at the L.A. County Board of Supervisors

Practically the first thing the reconstituted Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors did after new members Hilda Solis and Sheila Kuehl found their footing this year was to dismantle a governance structure that had been carefully assembled over the decades by previous boards. Separate public health and mental health departments that long ago had been broken off from the office that runs hospitals and clinics were melded back together, this time into a consolidated new health agency with expansive jurisdiction that now includes affordable housing and even takes on some functions previously overseen by the sheriff. Meanwhile, the job of county executive was pared back in scope, although not in title, to be more like the less powerful chief administrative office that prepared budgets and offered the polite advice to the supervisors in years past. In weakening the job, the supervisors in turn reasserted their direct control over the massive county bureaucracy.

“Politics 101, ladies and gentlemen,” Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas explained earlier this year to civic leaders at the Los Angeles Current Affairs Forum. “Never give away your power.”

Organizational changes are not the sorts of things that readily capture the public imagination, especially when compared with the region’s vexing challenges: homelessness, poverty, drought, crime and all other varieties of human misery and dysfunction. But county government is one of society’s principal vehicles for dealing with all of those things, so the restructuring of 2015 may turn out to be a pretty big story — if it allows the county to match its expanded ambitions with an equally expanded capacity.

The timing seems propitious. The Affordable Care Act and changes in California’s version of Medicaid make funding available for a variety of needs. There is a nationwide rethinking of the criminal justice system, and consequently an urgent need for programs to assist the return of jail and prison inmates to their neighborhoods. There is a growing awareness of the role that mental illness and addiction play in feeding homelessness, endangering public safety and filling jails, and a growing consensus that the county can and should deal with those problems at an earlier stage, with diversion from the criminal justice system, and with housing and supportive services.

The county’s approach has been refreshingly multi-disciplinary in recent months. Dist. Atty. Jackie Lacey is leading an effort to divert drug users and mental patients accused of petty crimes away from the justice system and toward treatment and housing, and in doing so she has brought together county agencies that long had difficulty coordinating their programs and services. A new child protection agency, likewise created to break jurisdictional barriers, made some quiet progress this year.

But perhaps the best window onto the county’s new approach to business is its program for dealing with homelessness, which is expected to result in a strategic plan crafted after a series of public brainstorming sessions. County thinkers and leaders have embraced a social services philosophy known as “no wrong door”: Clients should be offered the services they need — or directed to them — regardless of whether they first encounter government in a hospital, a jail, foster care, perhaps even in court or on the street. Patients should no longer be sent away brusquely and told to check the county organizational chart themselves to find the department to best respond to their needs. And programs that address the needs of the homeless are to be integrated with programs for the sick, the addicted, the incarcerated and others, because those populations and those problems so often overlap.

The response to homelessness spotlights another characteristic of the county — it is fairly quiet, especially compared with its noisy and better-known cousin, the city of Los Angeles. On homelessness, for example, the city got nationwide headlines with its fairly empty declaration of a homelessness emergency and its so-far empty promise to allocate $100 million to address the issue. The county, by contrast, actually identified a similar amount of money and is preparing a strategic plan to spend it. If Southern California were Mayberry, the city might be Deputy Barney Fife, all flash and swagger.

But is the county then the quiet and competent Sheriff Andy Taylor, who is actually keeping order in town? That remains to be seen. The new board has yet to be seriously tested, having had no high-profile child deaths or other blow-ups of the type that so vexed earlier boards. Scandals and squabbles that have led to the departure of key county officials have been relatively low profile. And the economy has been kind.

Limited ambitions on the part of the previous board were a result in part of a brush with bankruptcy in the 1990s. Those supervisors understandably became more fiscally prudent. They might have blanched at the three-year, 10% pay increase for most county employees that this board agreed to earlier this year, and they might have been right.

And they might have argued that the county is just too massive to be nimble, no matter how many departments are combined. But the new board isn’t completely new — Michael Antonovich and Don Knabe both have been there for decades (although they will be termed out in 2016), and Ridley-Thomas is soon to complete his second term — so the supervisors are not without historical perspective.

As for the supervisors retaking direct control and once again being a combined executive and legislature, without the checks and balances afforded by a clear separation of powers, it’s not a move that The Times was in favor of — but in the end, what matters is whether it works. That question should be measured not by whether the board is more comfortable in its role, but whether the people they are elected to serve are better off.

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