What will it take to run America's biggest county?

Politico

2 days ago

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.'