The five members of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors are some of the most powerful elected officials in the country, administering a sprawling local government with an annual budget of over $43 billion. But if voters pass Measure G on the November ballot, county government would undergo sweeping changes that would reduce that clout substantially.
Supervisor Lindsey Horvath, a champion of the charter reform measure, says the changes would help modernize LA County’s government.
“These changes are not radical. They are long overdue and they are desperately needed,” said Horvath in June when she introduced the reforms with her colleague Supervisor Janice Hahn. “Five elected leaders serving 10 million people, as both the executive and legislative branches of government, simply makes no sense.”
There are three big reforms within Measure G. One would increase the number of county supervisors from five to nine, with each supervisor representing just over 1 million people instead of the 2 million that they do now. Board expansion is supposed to make the body and its individual members more responsive to constituents.
Another would create an elected county executive — in a sense a county mayor — with the power to hire and fire department heads and craft a countywide public policy agenda.
“Supervisors can focus on the role of representation, taking away the executive authority from supervisors and making them a legislature of nine members,” says political scientist Raphael Sonnenshein, a supporter of the measure.
Measure G’s least controversial provision would create a county ethics commission, a reaction to recent political scandals in LA local government.
As she campaigns for Measure G, Horvath says it’s the best opportunity to change LA County government in generations.
“It's sort of like a 21st Century opportunity to be the founding fathers of how government can work for you now,” says Horvath.
But Measure G has opponents, both in and outside of county government, including Supervisor Holly Mitchell. She has raised concerns about the cost of adding four new supervisors and their respective staff to the county payroll.
Mitchell also says the ballot measure has been rushed to voters with little discussion about how new district lines would be drawn and how different ethnic communities would be fairly represented on the expanded board, a point Mitchell has emphasized in board meetings.
“I will say that without study, planning, and model maps, we won’t have the information we need about how to appropriately balance voting rights of communities of interest, and to really authentically guarantee what we say is important to all of us, which is diverse representation,” said Mitchell at a July board meeting.
Measure G supporters say taxes won’t be raised to pay for board expansion, and that there’s time to figure out details like new district lines once it passes.
Horvath also has little patience for the argument that the measure has been developed in haste and without community input.
“The changes that are proposed in this charter amendment have been studied and discussed since at least the 1970s, if not before,” says Horvath. “What we are proposing are things that have been studied to death.”
If Measure G does pass, don’t expect immediate changes. The first county mayor’s election wouldn’t happen until 2028, while the Board of Supervisors expansion would need to wait until after the next U.S. Census in 2030.