Lacter/edit/aug30/dp1st
Hd L.A. Needs
More Supes
The County Board of Supervisors long has been considered the “fiefdom” of local politics and for good reason. The board has just five supervisors each representing a whopping 2 million people who are not bound by term limits and who almost never get defeated at the polls. Their constituencies are broad and their accountability limited.
But last week the supervisors shook up things a bit when they directed staff lawyers to draft an initiative asking voters to expand the number of board members from five to nine. It would be the body’s first expansion since the county’s founding 150 years ago (when the population was considerably less than 10 million).
The initiative wasn’t exactly the board’s doing. For months, a number of Latino state legislators, led by Sen. Richard Polanco, D-Los Angeles, have pushed for a larger board in part over frustrations related to rebuilding County-USC Medical Center and generating sales tax revenues to extend the Metro Line to the Eastside. Polanco had even considered a statewide constitutional amendment to address the size of county boards (though the L.A. board’s move would appear to placate Polanco enough to withdraw that proposal).
In principal, the move for an expanded Board of Supervisors is long overdue. No other local office has such an absurdly high office holder/constituent ratio; even the 15-member L.A. City Council doesn’t come close, at around 250,000. There are, in fact, 16 states in the nation where the entire populations total less than 2 million. (An expanded board would still leave one supervisor for almost 1 million residents.)
But the circumstances behind such an expansion effort seem suspect. Rather than focus on the obvious necessity of having more representation, Polanco & Co. is using two divisive issues County-USC and the subway to coerce the board into action. It seems like a peculiar gambit; even if voters were to approve an expanded board, it could be several years before the necessary elections (and administrative adjustments) make it happen, at which point both those issues will likely have been resolved.
And passage is hardly certain. As seen in last June’s unsuccessful effort to increase the number of L.A. City Council members, voters need to be persuaded of the benefits afforded by having more board members and that those benefits outweigh the additional costs of having four more supervisors.
Addendum
Just when everyone else appears to be giving up on a new NFL franchise for Los Angeles, L.A. City Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas keeps hanging in there. Most recently, he has been working with city officials on a last-minute proposal to the National Football League in an effort to resolve the impasse over who would pay for the cost of additional parking at the Coliseum.
With the NFL’s self-imposed Sept. 15 deadline looming for an L.A. deal, it’s anyone’s guess whether a re-fashioned parking proposal has much chance of getting the league’s attention. Specifics of the plan were still unclear late last week, but it is believed to involve the use of tax increments to help finance new lots as well as the use of the USC parking facilities (part of an earlier proposal that the NFL wasn’t very enthused about).
How ever it turns out, Ridley-Thomas should be applauded for at least keeping open the dialogue and the possibilities not only for having a new team but leveraging that effort for further development activity in the Exposition Park area.
