L.A. County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky on Monday said he is “seriously considering” asking voters to approve creation of an elected county chief executive position because the five-member Board of Supervisors’ decision-making process is ineffective.

“The board functions like the Politburo did in the old Soviet Union,” Yaroslavsky said. “There’s no one person to take responsibility and make decisions. So we end up deferring crucial decisions and letting problems fester.”

The new position would require passage of an initiative on the June 2006 or November 2006 ballot. The job would be more powerful than the appointed chief administrator the county now has, and would subsume some of its duties, Yaroslavsky said, speaking at a downtown L.A. event hosted by the Los Angeles Current Affairs Forum. Yaroslavsky stressed that he was not seeking to get rid of the chief administrator’s position, now held by David Janssen.

Yaroslavsky cited the failings of county-run King/Drew Medical Center in South Los Angeles, saying the five-member board is failing county citizens. (The board recently voted to close the hospital’s trauma unit in order to better rein in a broad set of hospital-wide problems.) As the board is now structured, it is too easy for opponents to pick off board members and block needed action, he said.

In 2000, Yaroslavsky tried to get the board to place a similar measure on the ballot, but failed to do so. On Monday, he said that he doubted the board would act to put the measure on the ballot, so he would have to garner voter signatures.

“I am absolutely not going to be a candidate for the county executive position if it were approved,” Yaroslavsky said.