Los Angeles decides it is sick of scandal

WHILE AMERICA LALALALACEOand the world attempt to process the remarkable , Los Angeles is reckoning with a political earthquake of its own. Los Angeles County is home to nearly 10m people, making it more populous than all but ten states. Its five supervisors wield a $50bn budget. What happens in this sprawling conglomeration of suburbs and highways affects a quarter of all Californians. And, as in the rest of the country, Angelenos voted for change.Unlike in many Midwestern and east-coast population centres, county governments in California are helmed by five supervisors, who combine executive, legislative and quasi-judicial powers. In “each supervisor is an autocrat in their district”, says Fernando Guerra, director of the Centre for the Study of at Loyola Marymount University. That is about to end.Voters narrowly chose to expand the board of supervisors to nine, elect (rather than appoint) a county chief executive and create an ethics commission to increase oversight of the whole shebang. The measure’s passage marks the first time voters have approved board expansion since 1913, when the county adopted its charter and its population hovered somewhere near 500,000. In the city of Los Angeles, which is run by a mayor and a powerful city council, voters overwhelmingly favoured ballot measures to implement independent redistricting of the council and school board, as well as to strengthen the city’s ethics commission. The sum of these results is a repudiation of the corrupt and ineffective politics that has dogged Los Angeles in recent years.The decisions to overhaul the structure of local government are largely a reaction to a series of scandals that have made Los Angeles seem like more like a James Ellroy novel than a functional city. Four former or sitting city-council members have faced criminal charges in as many years for embezzlement, bribery or lying to the feds. In 2022 of three other council members and a labour leader rocked the city. The infamous tape revealed the group of Hispanic power brokers making racist and disparaging remarks about other ethnic groups as they discussed how to slice up the city during redistricting. Three of the four quickly lost their jobs, and the final holdout just lost his bid for re-election.Their ousting did not placate Angelenos. The ballot measure that will create an independent redistricting commission is meant to combat the kind of back-room politicking caught on tape. For structural reform to happen “there usually has to be something…that has really got people agitated”, says Raphael Sonenshein, the executive director of the Haynes Foundation, which supports research on governance and democracy in Los Angeles. The last time saw such a reckoning was in the 1990s, when the Rodney King riots prompted police reform, among other efforts.What will the county’s measure achieve? The five supervisors are known as the “five little queens”. Their fiefs of roughly 2m constituents each will be nearly halved in size when four new colleagues join the board in 2032, after the next census reapportionment. Governance wonks hope that budgets will be better allocated for issues like homelessness and that supervisors will be more responsible to their voters. “Local government works best when…elected officials have to pay attention to their constituents,” says Mr Guerra. “When districts get too big, that just cannot happen.”Zev Yaroslavsky sat on the county board for 20 years, and the city council for 20 years before that. He argues that the most consequential reform is actually the creation of an elected county chief executive. He likens County’s government to a business without a or a state without a governor. The county’s size and wealth demand a different system, he reckons, and a leader that can take decisive action rather than dithering. The person who is elected to that position will be among the most important—if not the most important—local-government executives in the biggest state in America, he argues.Many bits of the reform have yet to be worked out, including how exactly the county will pay for the new positions (taxes have been ruled out). Mr Yaroslavky relishes those details, while knowing that they will make others’ eyes glaze over. “Governance makes a difference,” he says, even if “it’s boring as hell”.