The overhaul of L.A. County government begins now
In November, Los Angeles County voters approved Measure G, which promised to transform county governance. The process that will implement its reforms begins now with the creation of the Governance Reform Task Force, and L.A. County leaders, residents and media need to be engaged because, as the saying goes, 'The devil is in the details.'
For too long, the county has underserved the people of Los Angeles. With nearly 10 million residents, our county is more populous than 40 U.S. states, yet it is governed by only five supervisors, each overseeing about 2 million people. The result has been reactionary leadership that maintains the status quo when the challenges we face require speed and innovation.
Read more: Editorial: Voters just passed L.A. County's most important government reform in decades
At its core, Measure G is about ensuring that the county can meet our greatest challenges. After all, the design of a government shapes the behaviors of those who govern us. The Board of Supervisors will be expanded, over time, to nine members from five. And an elected county executive will provide for the separation of executive and legislative powers, and a more accountable county government.
Take for example the devastating January fires. The Palisades and Eaton fires tore through the cities of Los Angeles, Malibu, Pasadena and Sierra Madre. The largest devastation in terms of deaths, homes lost and residents displaced was in the unincorporated neighborhood of Altadena. Instead of having one voice and one plan leading fire response and recovery at the county level, residents must navigate a maze of district by district bureaucracy to put the pieces of their life back together. Imagine if there was just one elected county executive guiding one regional strategy — this is the future we can create.
Read more: Your guide to Measure G: Expanding the L.A. County Board of Supervisors, electing a county executive
Now let's consider homelessness — the most pressing issue facing the county year after year. Despite spending billions of dollars each year, the county has yet to move the needle far enough in addressing the issue. When an audit was mandated by U.S. District Judge David O. Carter, the county learned of eye-popping inefficiencies and nepotism, leading it to pull its funding from the city-county Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, and leading to the resignation of the agency's chief executive. Is this effective governance? Is this the best we can do?
In their recent book 'Abundance,' Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson point to the need for proactive government in fostering innovation and breaking stagnation that places such as Los Angeles face. But ending the status quo won't be easy. So many entities will resist change — agencies that have been allowed to underperform, vendors who overcharge, nonprofit organizations whose million-dollar contracts with the county may change — because an opaque county system is working for them.
Read more: Two workers fired from LAHSA had accused top executive of improper behavior
Right now, the vision and continuity of the county change on an annual basis along with the rotating chair structure of the five-member board. Most actions get decided based on district preferences instead of the regional greater good. But as the founding fathers noted, government works best with checks and balances. The county supervisors, as the legislative branch, should have a healthy level of friction with an executive to keep them accountable to the people. Measure G's addition of an elected county executive establishes those checks and balances. This change is critical to the leadership needed to tackle major crises such as homelessness and emergency response.
The new task force will also define the scope of a new independent ethics commission mandated by the measure.
Read more: Los Angeles homeless chief to resign after the county guts her agency
Measure G is not just governance reform — it's also democratic renewal. Los Angeles County's form of government hasn't changed since 1912, when our population was just 500,000 and women didn't have the right to vote. To have world class transportation countywide, to transition to a green economy, to lessen disparities between rich and poor requires innovation.
As the task force begins the process to implement the voter-approved Measure G, we need the voices of all 88 cities and our hundreds of neighborhoods to help define the future of county government. Tune in for our livestreamed meetings, email your ideas to the task force and be sure to get involved as the task force develops and rolls out a community engagement strategy in the coming months.
We can't afford to waste this opportunity. As a member of the task force, I welcome your participation in shaping the county we all deserve. This thrilling process starts Friday — join us.
Sara Sadhwani is a politics professor at Pomona College and was appointed by Supervisor Lindsey Horvath, co-author of Measure G, to serve on the Governance Reform Task Force. measureg.lacounty.gov.
If it's in the news right now, the L.A. Times' Opinion section covers it. Sign up for our weekly opinion newsletter.
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
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Yahoo
17 hours ago
- Yahoo
Democrats should debate messaging less (and policy more)
In the months since Kamala Harris's defeat, Democrats have debated the party's political and policy mistakes. This argument has centered in part on (Vox co-founder) Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's bestselling book, Abundance. Those political columnists argue that Democrats have failed to deliver material plenty: Blue states don't provide their residents with adequate housing, and federal Democrats have struggled to build anything on time and budget. Klein and Thompson attribute these failures partly to flawed zoning restrictions and environmental review laws. In making this case, they echoed the analysis of many other commentators, policy wonks, and activist groups, while also lending their ideology tendency a name: abundance liberalism. Some on the left distrust this movement, seeing it as a scheme for reducing progressive influence over the Democratic Party — and workers' power in the American economy. In this view, Democrats must choose between pursuing abundance reforms and 'populist' ones. The party can either take on red tape or corporate greed. A new poll from Demand Progress, a progressive nonprofit, suggests that the party should opt for the latter. The survey presented voters with a hypothetical Democratic candidate who argues that America's 'big problem is 'bottlenecks' that make it harder to produce housing, expand energy production, or build new roads and bridges.' The candidate goes on to note, 'Frequently these bottlenecks take the form of well-intended regulations meant to give people a voice or to protect the environment — but these regulations are exploited by organized interest groups and community groups to slow things down.' It then presented an alternative Democrat who contends that 'The big problem is that big corporations have way too much power over our economy and our government.' By a 42.8 to 29.2 percent margin, voters preferred the populist Democrat. This is unsurprising on a couple levels. First, advocacy organizations rarely release polls that show voters disagreeing with their views. Demand Progress's mission is to 'fight corporate power' and 'break up monopolies.' It did not set out to disinterestedly gauge public opinion, but to advance a factional project. And this is reflected in the survey's wording. The poll embeds the mention of a trade-off in its 'abundance' message (signaling that the candidate would give people less 'voice' and the environment, less protection) but not in its anti-corporate one. Had the survey's hypothetical populist promised to fight 'well-intentioned, pro-business policies meant to create jobs and spur innovation,' their message might have fared less well. This said, I think it's almost certainly true that populist rhetoric is more politically resonant than technocratic arguments about supply-side 'bottlenecks.' According to the Democratic data firm Blue Rose Research, Harris's best testing ad in 2024 included a pledge to 'crack down' on 'price gougers' and 'landlords who are charging too much.' But that doesn't have much bearing on whether Democrats should embrace abundance reforms for two reasons. First, the political case for those reforms rests on their material benefits, not their rhetorical appeal. And second, Democrats don't actually need to choose between pursuing abundance liberalism and populism — if by 'populism,' one means a politics focused on redistributing wealth and power from the few to the many. The Demand Progress poll aims to refute an argument that Abundance does not make. Klein and Thompson do not claim that politicians who promise to combat regulatory 'bottlenecks' will outperform those who vow to fight 'corporations.' And I have not seen any other advocate of zoning liberalization or permitting reform say anything like that. Rather, the political case for those policies primarily concerns their real-world consequences, rather than their oratorical verve. The starting point for that case is a diagnosis of the Democratic Party's governance failures. Klein and Thompson spotlight several: Big blue states suffer from perennial housing shortages and exceptionally high homelessness rates. In 2023, the five states with the highest rates of homelessness — California, Hawaii, New York, Oregon, and Washington — were all governed by Democrats. Democrat-run states and cities also struggle to build public infrastructure on time and budget. Seventeen years ago, California allocated $33 billion to a high-speed rail system. It still has not opened a single line. San Francisco has struggled to build a single public toilet for less than $1.7 million. New York City's transit construction costs are the highest in the world. At the federal level, similar difficulties have plagued Democrats' infrastructural ambitions. For example, the Biden administration invested $7.5 billion into electric vehicle charging stations in 2021. Analysts expected that funding to yield 5,000 stations. Four years later, it had built only 58. Klein and Thompson attribute these results partly to zoning restrictions and environmental review laws. The former prohibit the construction of apartments on roughly 70 percent of America's residential land, while the latter empower well-heeled interests to obstruct infrastructure projects through lawsuits. Abundance argues that this is a political problem for Democrats in at least three ways: First, the party's conspicuous failure to contain the cost-of-living in New York and California undermines its reputation for economic governance nationally. Second, the public sector's inability to build anything efficiently abets conservative narratives about the follies of big government. Third, and most concretely, Americans are responding to high housing costs in blue states by moving to red ones — a migration pattern that's about to make it much harder for Democrats to win the Electoral College. After the 2030 census, electoral votes will be reapportioned based on population shifts. If current trends persist, California, Illinois, and New York will lose Electoral College votes while Florida and Texas gain them. As a result, a Democrat could win every blue state in 2032 — along with Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — and still lose the presidency. Klein and Thompson therefore reason that enacting their proposed reforms will aid Democrats politically by improving the party's reputation for economic management, boosting confidence in the public sector's efficacy, and increasing blue states' populations (and thus, their representation in Congress and the Electoral College). Therefore, you can't refute the political argument for 'abundance' policies with a messaging poll. Rather, to do so, you need to show 1) that 'abundance' reforms will not actually make housing, energy, and infrastructure more plentiful, or 2) that making those goods more plentiful won't actually increase support for the Democratic Party, or 3) that people will keep moving away from blue states and toward red ones, even if the former start building more housing. For the record, I think the substantive case for the abundance agenda is stronger than the political one. I'm confident that legalizing the construction of apartment buildings in inner-ring suburbs will increase the supply of housing. I'm less sure that doing so will win the Democratic Party votes. A lot of Americans are homeowners who don't want tall buildings (and/or, lots of nonaffluent people) in their municipalities. But that isn't the argument that Demand Progress is making. The Demand Progress survey is premised on the notion that Democrats must choose between an 'abundance' agenda and a 'populist' one. But this is mostly false. There is no inherent tension between vigorously enforcing antitrust laws and relaxing restrictions on multifamily housing construction. To the contrary, there's arguably a philosophical link between those two endeavors: Both entail promoting greater competition, so as to erode the pricing power of property holders. (When zoning laws preempt the construction of apartment buildings, renters have fewer options to choose from. That reduces competition between landlords, and enables them to charge higher prices.) More fundamentally, abundance liberalism is in direct conflict with traditional environmentalism. More broadly, abundance is compatible with increasing working people's living standards and economic power. The more housing that a city builds, the more property taxes that it can collect — and thus, the more social welfare benefits it can provide to ordinary people. And this basic principle applies more generally: If you increase economic growth through regulatory reforms, then you'll have more wealth to redistribute, whether through union contracts or the welfare state. This isn't to say that there are no tradeoffs between 'abundance' reforms and economic progressivism, as some understand that ideology. For example, individual labor unions sometimes support restricting the supply of socially useful goods — such as housing or hotels — for self-interested reasons. Some populists might counsel reflexive deference to the demands of such unions. Abundance liberals generally would not. But policies that make a tiny segment of workers better off — at the expense of a much larger group of working people — are not pro-labor in the best sense of that term. More fundamentally, abundance liberalism is in direct conflict with traditional environmentalism. The first aims to make it easier to build green infrastructure, even at the cost of making it harder to obstruct fossil fuel extraction. Many environmental organizations have the opposite priority. Yet fighting to limit America's supply of oil and gas — even if this means making infrastructure more expensive and scarce — is not an especially populist cause, even if one deems it a worthy one. Ultimately, abundance liberalism is less about how Democrats should message than about how they should govern. It's useful to know whether a particular analysis of the party's governance failures is politically appealing. But it's more important to know whether that analysis is accurate. Democrats can rail against corporate malfeasance on the campaign trail, no matter what positions they take on zoning or permitting. If they operate from a false understanding of why blue states struggle to build adequate housing and infrastructure, however, they will fail working people. Critics of abundance liberalism should therefore focus on its substance. To their credit, many progressive skeptics have done this. I think their arguments are unconvincing (and plan to address them in the future). But they at least clarify the terms of the intra-left debate over abundance. Demand Progress's poll, by contrast, only obscures them.
Vox
20 hours ago
- Vox
Democrats should debate messaging less (and policy more)
is a senior correspondent at Vox. He covers a wide range of political and policy issues with a special focus on questions that internally divide the American left and right. Before coming to Vox in 2024, he wrote a column on politics and economics for New York Magazine. In the months since Kamala Harris's defeat, Democrats have debated the party's political and policy mistakes. This argument has centered in part on (Vox co-founder) Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's bestselling book, Abundance. Those political columnists argue that Democrats have failed to deliver material plenty: Blue states don't provide their residents with adequate housing, and federal Democrats have struggled to build anything on time and budget. Klein and Thompson attribute these failures partly to flawed zoning restrictions and environmental review laws. In making this case, they echoed the analysis of many other commentators, policy wonks, and activist groups, while also lending their ideology tendency a name: abundance liberalism. Some on the left distrust this movement, seeing it as a scheme for reducing progressive influence over the Democratic Party — and workers' power in the American economy. In this view, Democrats must choose between pursuing abundance reforms and 'populist' ones. The party can either take on red tape or corporate greed. A new poll from Demand Progress, a progressive nonprofit, suggests that the party should opt for the latter. The survey presented voters with a hypothetical Democratic candidate who argues that America's 'big problem is 'bottlenecks' that make it harder to produce housing, expand energy production, or build new roads and bridges.' The candidate goes on to note, 'Frequently these bottlenecks take the form of well-intended regulations meant to give people a voice or to protect the environment — but these regulations are exploited by organized interest groups and community groups to slow things down.' The Rebuild The lessons liberals should take away from their election defeat — and a closer look at where they should go next. From senior correspondent Eric Levitz. Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. It then presented an alternative Democrat who contends that 'The big problem is that big corporations have way too much power over our economy and our government.' By a 42.8 to 29.2 percent margin, voters preferred the populist Democrat. This is unsurprising on a couple levels. First, advocacy organizations rarely release polls that show voters disagreeing with their views. Demand Progress's mission is to 'fight corporate power' and 'break up monopolies.' It did not set out to disinterestedly gauge public opinion, but to advance a factional project. And this is reflected in the survey's wording. The poll embeds the mention of a trade-off in its 'abundance' message (signaling that the candidate would give people less 'voice' and the environment, less protection) but not in its anti-corporate one. Had the survey's hypothetical populist promised to fight 'well-intentioned, pro-business policies meant to create jobs and spur innovation,' their message might have fared less well. This said, I think it's almost certainly true that populist rhetoric is more politically resonant than technocratic arguments about supply-side 'bottlenecks.' According to the Democratic data firm Blue Rose Research, Harris's best testing ad in 2024 included a pledge to 'crack down' on 'price gougers' and 'landlords who are charging too much.' But that doesn't have much bearing on whether Democrats should embrace abundance reforms for two reasons. First, the political case for those reforms rests on their material benefits, not their rhetorical appeal. And second, Democrats don't actually need to choose between pursuing abundance liberalism and populism — if by 'populism,' one means a politics focused on redistributing wealth and power from the few to the many. The political case for 'abundance' policies is rooted in their real world effects, not their rhetorical appeal The Demand Progress poll aims to refute an argument that Abundance does not make. Klein and Thompson do not claim that politicians who promise to combat regulatory 'bottlenecks' will outperform those who vow to fight 'corporations.' And I have not seen any other advocate of zoning liberalization or permitting reform say anything like that. Rather, the political case for those policies primarily concerns their real-world consequences, rather than their oratorical verve. The starting point for that case is a diagnosis of the Democratic Party's governance failures. Klein and Thompson spotlight several: Big blue states suffer from perennial housing shortages and exceptionally high homelessness rates . In 2023, the five states with the highest rates of homelessness — California, Hawaii, New York, Oregon, and Washington — were all governed by Democrats. At the federal level, similar difficulties have plagued Democrats' infrastructural ambitions. For example, the Biden administration invested $7.5 billion into electric vehicle charging stations in 2021. Analysts expected that funding to yield 5,000 stations. Four years later, it had built only 58 Klein and Thompson attribute these results partly to zoning restrictions and environmental review laws. The former prohibit the construction of apartments on roughly 70 percent of America's residential land, while the latter empower well-heeled interests to obstruct infrastructure projects through lawsuits. Abundance argues that this is a political problem for Democrats in at least three ways: First, the party's conspicuous failure to contain the cost-of-living in New York and California undermines its reputation for economic governance nationally. Second, the public sector's inability to build anything efficiently abets conservative narratives about the follies of big government. Third, and most concretely, Americans are responding to high housing costs in blue states by moving to red ones — a migration pattern that's about to make it much harder for Democrats to win the Electoral College. After the 2030 census, electoral votes will be reapportioned based on population shifts. If current trends persist, California, Illinois, and New York will lose Electoral College votes while Florida and Texas gain them. As a result, a Democrat could win every blue state in 2032 — along with Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — and still lose the presidency. Klein and Thompson therefore reason that enacting their proposed reforms will aid Democrats politically by improving the party's reputation for economic management, boosting confidence in the public sector's efficacy, and increasing blue states' populations (and thus, their representation in Congress and the Electoral College). Therefore, you can't refute the political argument for 'abundance' policies with a messaging poll. Rather, to do so, you need to show 1) that 'abundance' reforms will not actually make housing, energy, and infrastructure more plentiful, or 2) that making those goods more plentiful won't actually increase support for the Democratic Party, or 3) that people will keep moving away from blue states and toward red ones, even if the former start building more housing. For the record, I think the substantive case for the abundance agenda is stronger than the political one. I'm confident that legalizing the construction of apartment buildings in inner-ring suburbs will increase the supply of housing. I'm less sure that doing so will win the Democratic Party votes. A lot of Americans are homeowners who don't want tall buildings (and/or, lots of nonaffluent people) in their municipalities. But that isn't the argument that Demand Progress is making. There is no actual trade-off between soaking the rich and making it easier to build stuff The Demand Progress survey is premised on the notion that Democrats must choose between an 'abundance' agenda and a 'populist' one. But this is mostly false. There is no inherent tension between vigorously enforcing antitrust laws and relaxing restrictions on multifamily housing construction. To the contrary, there's arguably a philosophical link between those two endeavors: Both entail promoting greater competition, so as to erode the pricing power of property holders. (When zoning laws preempt the construction of apartment buildings, renters have fewer options to choose from. That reduces competition between landlords, and enables them to charge higher prices.) More fundamentally, abundance liberalism is in direct conflict with traditional environmentalism. More broadly, abundance is compatible with increasing working people's living standards and economic power. The more housing that a city builds, the more property taxes that it can collect — and thus, the more social welfare benefits it can provide to ordinary people. And this basic principle applies more generally: If you increase economic growth through regulatory reforms, then you'll have more wealth to redistribute, whether through union contracts or the welfare state. This isn't to say that there are no tradeoffs between 'abundance' reforms and economic progressivism, as some understand that ideology. For example, individual labor unions sometimes support restricting the supply of socially useful goods — such as housing or hotels — for self-interested reasons. Some populists might counsel reflexive deference to the demands of such unions. Abundance liberals generally would not. But policies that make a tiny segment of workers better off — at the expense of a much larger group of working people — are not pro-labor in the best sense of that term. More fundamentally, abundance liberalism is in direct conflict with traditional environmentalism. The first aims to make it easier to build green infrastructure, even at the cost of making it harder to obstruct fossil fuel extraction. Many environmental organizations have the opposite priority. Yet fighting to limit America's supply of oil and gas — even if this means making infrastructure more expensive and scarce — is not an especially populist cause, even if one deems it a worthy one. The 'abundance' debate is primarily about policy, not politics Ultimately, abundance liberalism is less about how Democrats should message than about how they should govern. It's useful to know whether a particular analysis of the party's governance failures is politically appealing. But it's more important to know whether that analysis is accurate. Democrats can rail against corporate malfeasance on the campaign trail, no matter what positions they take on zoning or permitting. If they operate from a false understanding of why blue states struggle to build adequate housing and infrastructure, however, they will fail working people. Critics of abundance liberalism should therefore focus on its substance. To their credit, many progressive skeptics have done this. I think their arguments are unconvincing (and plan to address them in the future). But they at least clarify the terms of the intra-left debate over abundance. Demand Progress's poll, by contrast, only obscures them.
Yahoo
a day ago
- Yahoo
What will it take to run America's biggest county?
LOS ANGELES — Los Angeles is waiting for its George Washington. Last year, voters across an area more populous than all but ten states decided to create a new office to oversee their government. Now comes the hard part: determining the scope of a position that will, by representing the nearly 10 million people of Los Angeles County, become perhaps the most powerful in American local government and immediately reshape California politics. Now it is time to decide how much unchecked authority should be vested in an office being designed from scratch. Many of the tricky issues concern the interplay between the new executive — who will have the final say over the county's nearly $50 billion budget and the ability to hire and fire heads of dozens of county-wide departments — and the existing Board of Supervisors, who have long held those powers for themselves. 'It's a fundamental change to the culture of county government because it's pulling the executive authority out of the Board of Supervisors. And the question is, how do you do that?' said Raphael Sonenshein, who headed a Los Angeles city charter reform commission in the 1990s and is now executive director of the Haynes Foundation. 'People are only now beginning to think about what an important design question it is.' Members of a 13-member task force met for the first time Friday to begin the three-year process of redrawing how the county is governed, which will also include creating an ethics commission and adding four new supervisors' districts. But their biggest challenge revolves around setting up the county executive role in time for it to be filled by voters in November 2028 in an election that is likely to draw a slew of ambitious politicians, civic figures and business leaders from the country's second-largest metropolitan area. Elected county executives are common around the country — helping to administer areas encompassing such major cities as Chicago, Houston, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Miami and Seattle — but remain a novel concept in California. Since the mid-19th century, local governments across the state's 58 counties have been led by five-member boards of supervisors without an elected role above them. 'It doesn't take rocket science to know how politicized [the county executive role] will be,' said Drexel Heard, a former executive director of the Los Angeles County Democratic Party. 'That person will absolutely become the most powerful person in Southern California.' For decades, reformers have been looking to reshape the Board of Supervisors, which has long faced criticism for its lack of accountability. Known as the 'five little kings' — or more recently, the 'five little queens' — each member now represents around two million constituents, the size of approximately three congressional districts. But reform efforts either fizzled out before making it to the ballot or were rejected by voters. Things changed last summer, when three of the current five supervisors moved forward with Measure G, a charter amendment that rode a wave of public concern about corruption in the region's local government to win a narrow victory in November. 'LA County has long been governed under a system that I believe no longer reflects the realities that we face today,' Supervisor Lindsey Horvath, who spearheaded the drafting of Measure G and campaign to pass it, said at the task force's inaugural meeting on Friday. 'I want to thank the voters of Los Angeles County who decided that this reform was necessary and made it happen, because all of us want to see change in how we do this work.' During last fall's campaign, the main critics of Measure G noted that it wasn't clear what kind of meaningful checks and balances there would be on the new executive. LA County already has an appointed CEO who manages the budget, a professional administrator who serves at the board's pleasure. The new post, however, would be directly elected by voters to a four-year term. (The CEO job will likely disappear.) 'Until now, you had a culture where the board could give the executive as much authority as they wanted to give the executive,' said Sonenshein. 'With the elected executive, they're not going to have that option. It'll be an office that stands on its own.' Measure G laid out many of the new executive's responsibilities, including to approve the budget and oversee county departments that run health clinics, jails, parks, foster-care services, beaches, libraries and more. In unincorporated areas of Los Angeles, county government also provides police and fire services and sets land-use policy. But much about the executive's role has yet to be determined. 'They couldn't write every single thing into the charter amendment — it would have been a mistake to try to do that, because they would have left something out,' said former Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, who served on the board from 1994 to 2014 and is now the director of the Los Angeles Initiative at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. 'So they did the broad-brush stuff ... but they still need to address the details. And there are a lot of details.' That responsibility falls to a task force of 13 members, a motley bunch that includes West Covina's former mayor, the president of an SEIU local, a North Long Beach pastor, a Pomona College political scientist and a digital-marketing executive who has worked on influencer campaigns for Google Play and Taco Bell. Five of the task force's members were appointed by the current board (one from each sitting supervisor) and three by labor unions, with five at-large members chosen from among residents who applied. They will have to decide how much authority individual supervisors retain over services within their districts and how much is transferred to the executive. It will also determine how many jobs and appointments the new office will control, from the hundreds of staffers currently working for the CEO, to board seats — on everything from the LA Metro transit authority to the regional air quality board — currently filled by supervisors. The biggest looming constitutional question may involve the executive's veto power. While the text of the measure states that the executive can reject any motion or legislation passed by the Board of Supervisors, it doesn't specify whether the board has the ability to override that veto. 'Let's say you had a vote on county-wide renter protections, and you've got a board that is in favor of it but a county executive who is not,' said Mike Bonin, director of the Pat Brown Institute at Cal State LA and former member of the LA City Council. 'Let's say it's an 8-to-1 vote in favor of it — does the county executive get to veto that and nullify it?' When the new task force met on Friday at the county's Hall of Administration in downtown Los Angeles, members laid out their big-picture plans for moving forward on different aspects of implementation, starting with the ethics commission. Nothing concrete was decided at the meeting, including even how frequently to convene or meet next. 'It kind of feels like the first day of class,' said David Phelps, a city planning commissioner in the San Fernando Valley who also owns a comic book and collectibles shop, in his introduction at Friday's meeting. 'Thank you for putting that trust in us. I feel the weight and the gravity of this moment — I did not take this lightly.' During the public-comment period, one commenter said he had opposed Measure G because the executive role did not have a listed term limit. 'That's pretty much dictatorship,' he said. 'We don't want somebody in the CEO's position that has higher power than anybody else in the land.' A county executive will be inaugurated in December 2028, and much about the new office will be shaped by how its first occupant chooses to wield the potential symbolic power that accompanies it. Bonin likened it to George Washington setting important precedents for the American presidency, like voluntarily serving just two terms and refusing honorifics like 'His Excellency.' 'I have a hard time imagining that anybody who is going to go through the time, the effort and the indignity of running for office — for an office that represents more people than most governors — is not going to want to assume as much power as possible and make the role as big as possible,' said Bonin. Being able to mold the new office is likely to be a significant draw for plenty of ambitious LA-area politicians and officials who see a post representing one quarter of Californians as a natural stepping stone to a statewide office. Real estate developer Rick Caruso would have the money and name ID to be a formidable contender, although he is known to also be considering a run for governor or mayor, both of which will be on the 2026 ballot. Miguel Santana, the president of the California Community Foundation who has held roles in LA city government overseeing the budget and helping chart homelessness strategy, is also seen as a potential candidate. Members of Congress (like Janice Hahn) and former Cabinet secretaries (like Hilda Solis) have already returned from Washington to run for seats on the Board of Supervisors. Given the partisan gridlock in the U.S. Capitol — and the fact that, with Sens. Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff settling in in the U.S. Senate, that it's unlikely either seat would open up any time soon — other Los Angeles-area members of the California delegation might consider coming home for a far more powerful role. Then there are the members of the current board, three of whom are in their final terms. Horvath, a first-term Democrat who led the charge for Measure G, says she 'has given it some thought' but is currently running for reelection and focused on Measure G's implementation. 'There's not a lot of people who run for office who would shy away from the capacity to be the second most powerful elected official in the state of California, just behind the governor,' said Bonin. Regardless of who runs, the new executive role will be a boon for California's political industry. Between that race and those to fill the expanded Board of Supervisors races in 2032, it means a flurry of big, expensive campaigns. 'If you are an LA-based political consultant,' observed Mike Trujillo, an LA-based political consultant, 'you are going to be a kid in a candy shop.'
