The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, from left, Janice Hahn (standing), Lindsay Horvath, Kathryn Barger, Holly Mitchell and Hilda Solis. Columnist Earl Ofari Hutchinson writes that voters last year approved expanding the board to nine supervisors but the board needs to change how it conducts business to really change.
Courtesy photo
By Earl Ofari Hutchinson
Contributing Columnist
Within the last few months several polls and surveys have again found what a lot of people in Los Angeles continually say about life in Los Angeles County.
That things here are worsening. The latest to document that sentiment was Loyola Marymount’s Center for the Study of Los Angeles. Its recent survey found a majority of residents aren’t happy.
The checklist of woes that they cited are familiar. Chronic and seemingly endless homelessness, monster nerve wracking traffic crawls, the skyrocketing cost of food and gas.
The wildfires that devastated Pacific Palisades and Altadena also stoked rage. And the rage cut across all ethnic lines. Nearly half said they knew someone personally affected by the fires. In this writer’s case, that included two of my cousins who either lost or suffered severe damage to their homes in Altadena.
By far though, the most pressing and distressing calamity of all is the crushing housing costs. This hits Blacks and Latino renters especially hard.
The Los Angeles City Council provided some relief with its recent cap on rent increases, but not the county.
A majority of county residents in the varied surveys said they were hard pressed to keep up with the soaring costs and increasingly poor living conditions. They point the finger of blame squarely at the county Board of Supervisors.
The five-person board heard the loud grumbles about the perceived deteriorating living conditions in the county, and their culpability for them. In 2024, they largely created and plopped on what was billed as a sweeping reform package, Measure G.
The major provisions of the measure establish an independent ethics commission, expand the number of supervisors, and an elected chief executive officer for the county. There are two immediate problems with these much-needed, and long overdue reforms.
The first is they will take time to implement, possibly years. The second is they do not strike to the heart of the real problem that has chronically plagued and characterized local governance.
That is the penchant to virtually give the company store to major developers and major corporate interests. That is why residents contend that the county is dysfunctional. And homelessness, public safety, fiscal waste and mismanagement and a bloated non-sustainable budget, are chronic problems that continue to pile up.
Let’s walk through the checklist.
Homelessness. The county has spent tens of millions of dollars, tossed up a few encampments and makeshift housing here and there, and repeatedly demanded taxpayers cough up millions on the pledge that their dollars will be used to end homelessness. Yet many county streets, parks, freeway sides and underpasses, still look Dystopian.
The prime answer is massive expansion of affordable housing followed by an equally massive investment in drug and alcohol counseling, job finding and placement, skills training and retraining, child care, nutrition and the ongoing monitoring of service programs to make a lasting dent in the problem.
That is a long, hard, uphill process. There are no quick fixes. The Board of Supervisors must understand that.
The homeless crisis does not exist in a vacuum. It has a nefarious twin that is virtually unchecked. High rents make housing and apartment affordability in the county a bad joke and swells the homeless numbers.
Next is getting a handle on the county’s rampant sprawl that has turned freeways and streets into stalled parking lots for hours on end. The answer is the continued expansion of light transit, busways, traffic signal coordination and synchronization, traffic flow monitors at major thoroughfares and carpooling incentives.
Then there is the always thorny issue of misconduct by Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. The trick is how to balance the ongoing fight for police reform, continuing to prod the department brass and the county’s sheriff oversight officials to maintain vigilance on the issue, while also dealing with citizens’ fear of gang and criminal violence. The operative words on this remain firm direction, oversight and rigorous discipline.
The supervisors must understand that there are legions of voters who are fed up with the malaise, the fog of government and the self-serving that has often enveloped the board’s actions. The taint of corruption, cronyism, manipulation, scheming and secrecy has been an ugly trademark of the board. That must end. And voters must not trust the board to reform itself.
That means clamping down on special interest deal-making in and outside the Hall of Administration, trimming a bloated county bureaucracy and sneaky tax increases that smack of old-fashioned political pork barreling.
Put bluntly, there must be a “not for sale” sign on the board. A major key to ensuring the smooth, effective, resident-friendly operation of county government is tough, hard monitoring oversight and review, and accountability of county agencies.
That starts with keeping a tight rein on the people who run those agencies. The board’s job is to make the right choices to head those agencies. In the absence of that, county agencies turn into top-heavy bureaucratic wasteful, crony-ridden entities.
The supervisors took the much needed first step in backing a limited reform measure. But it’s only a first step. If it stops there then even more residents will blame the deterioration in the quality of life in the county on the supervisors. And they will be right.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His latest book is “White Supremacist-In-Chief” (Middle Passage Press).
