The San Diego measure, championed by Supervisor Terra Lawson-Remer, would create an independent budget analyst, a program auditor and, notably, an ethics commission — the kind of oversight body that remains rare among California counties. San Francisco and Orange County have one apiece, and Los Angeles County is still building its own. If approved, San Diego would become the fourth in the state.

Unlike L.A. County’s Measure G, however, Lawson-Remer’s proposal does not call for an independently elected executive or an expanded Board of Supervisors. She reportedly considered both ideas but concluded there wasn’t enough political appetite for such dramatic change.

Lawson-Remer is part of the Democratic majority that has controlled the officially nonpartisan Board of Supervisors since 2020, when she and Nora Vargas ended decades of Republican dominance. That shift was itself made possible by an earlier reform — voter-approved term limits — though Lawson-Remer won her seat by defeating an incumbent rather than benefiting from term limits directly.

Both supervisors won reelection in 2024, but Vargas resigned shortly after, for reasons that remain disputed publicly. Her exit left the board deadlocked until a special election restored the Democratic majority.

Lawson-Remer describes her proposed reforms as a long-overdue modernization of county government. They would also, however, help cement her coalition’s hold on the board and loosen the very term limits that helped bring Democrats to power in the first place — potentially clearing the way for her to serve an additional term.

The ethics commission is central to the pitch. Beyond its stated purpose of rooting out misconduct and campaign finance violations, such commissions often serve as political sweeteners, making broader structural changes — like adjusting term limits — more palatable to voters wary of consolidating power.

That dynamic tends to make good-government advocates skeptical of these proposals unless they include firm safeguards ensuring true independence from the officials the commission is meant to police. A commission that exists in name only, while remaining under the board’s control, could end up shielding wrongdoing rather than exposing it.

Ethics watchdogs raised exactly that concern when Los Angeles County’s Measure G first passed. The measure promised an “independent” commission but didn’t spell out what independence actually meant. It took a subsequent task force to insist that commissioners have sole authority over hiring their own investigators and legal counsel, free from interference by elected officials. That selection process is now underway, with initial appointees choosing the remaining members. Reform advocates, once hesitant, have since embraced the approach — though it required an additional charter amendment that L.A. County voters must approve this November.

San Diego’s measure treads similar ground, leaving many implementation details for later — a pattern that concerns ethics experts. Supervisors would appoint most commission members themselves and retain the power to remove them, with no guarantee that the commission could hire its own investigative or legal staff independent of the board.

That means San Diego’s ethics commission, at least initially, would likely have less independence than its Los Angeles County counterpart. Lawson-Remer has promised a similar task force process to work out the details, but there is no guarantee voters will eventually be asked — as in L.A. County — to approve a follow-up amendment strengthening the commission’s autonomy.

The two counties diverge in other ways as well. San Diego currently operates under a strong, corporate-style chief executive who can hire and fire department heads without board approval, while supervisors are barred from meddling in day-to-day departmental operations.

Los Angeles County briefly experimented with a similar system nearly two decades ago — after recruiting its chief administrator from San Diego County — but supervisors struggled to stay out of departmental affairs. That experience helped drive the creation of an elected county executive under Measure G, establishing clearer lines of authority modeled more on the federal separation of powers than on a corporate management structure.

San Diego’s proposal moves in the opposite direction, shifting more authority to the Board of Supervisors and rolling back the “non-interference” provision that has defined the CEO’s role for decades. It wouldn’t fully unwind the strong-executive model adopted 42 years ago, but it represents a clear step back toward greater board control.

That system, ironically, was born out of a similar political turnover. In 1985, three new supervisors flipped the board to a Republican majority and promptly fired the county’s top administrator. Voters then approved the strong CEO model specifically to reduce the board’s direct authority over department leadership — a structure that endured until this year’s proposed changes.

There was no ethics commission included in that 1984 overhaul; such oversight panels simply didn’t exist in local government at the time.

Meanwhile, Los Angeles County’s reform arguably fell short by not creating an independent program auditor akin to San Diego’s, instead placing the auditor-controller under the authority of the new elected executive rather than establishing it as an independent check.

Whether ethics commissions and independent auditors actually make government more honest or more efficient is difficult to prove. No clear body of research demonstrates that ethics panels improve official conduct. It may be that local governance doesn’t climb steadily upward with each reform, but instead swings back and forth with shifting political winds — a less satisfying conclusion for reform advocates hoping for lasting progress.

Perhaps the clearest lesson is that San Diego and Los Angeles counties, despite pursuing seemingly parallel reforms, have much to learn from each other’s mistakes and successes — assuming either is inclined to look.

Original source: CalMatters

The post San Diego County’s Ethics Overhaul Could Also Strengthen Democrats’ Grip on Power appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.

At Los Angeles City Hall, the City Council spent nine months studying a package of sweeping charter reforms, only to shelve most of them in late June, arguing the proposals needed more vetting. That decision came despite years of prior debate on the biggest items, including the long-discussed idea of expanding the council’s size.

A few miles away, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors is now scrambling to clean up its own 2024 charter overhaul, which created new elected positions and administrative duties but was drafted so hastily that it inadvertently undermined the county’s signature criminal justice reforms. Supervisors are now asking voters to approve fixes this November.

It’s an unusual reversal of reputations. The county, typically seen as slow-moving and bureaucratic given its size and scope, suddenly looks bold and innovative, if a bit clumsy. The city, often viewed as nimble and responsive, now looks cautious to the point of paralysis.

So which approach is the smarter one? Is it better to move fast and fix mistakes later, or take the time to get it right, even if that means disappointing voters who want action now?

These are questions other California cities and counties should be asking themselves as well. Voter patience has worn thin since 2020, a year that forced a broader reckoning over how local governments allocate resources and responsibilities. San Bernardino and Shasta counties have already sent major charter reforms to their voters in recent years, and this November, both San Francisco and San Diego County will ask residents to weigh in on their own governance overhauls.

Los Angeles County’s process moved at a pace somewhere between urgent and impulsive. Supervisors Lindsey Horvath and Janice Hahn unveiled their restructuring plan just before the July Fourth holiday in 2024, then returned from the break with a full campaign already in motion — testimony from scholars and community leaders, and even a 1972 video clip of Hahn’s late father, longtime Supervisor Kenneth Hahn, urging swift action. “You do not need to study, study, study,” he said in the recording. “They’ve been studying county government since 1851, and there’s time for change and the change and the time is now.”

The measure, known as Measure G, proposed expanding the Board of Supervisors from five members to nine, creating a new elected county executive position, and establishing an independent ethics commission, among other changes. The specifics were left to be worked out later by an appointed task force. Voters narrowly approved it in November 2024.

Once that task force got to work, problems surfaced quickly. The measure had unintentionally erased a previous charter provision guaranteeing funding for alternatives to incarceration. It also became clear that the promised independent ethics commission can’t actually be created without another ballot measure. Other loose ends remain, including questions about whether the county auditor — whose job is oversight — should report to the board rather than to the new elected executive.

Fixing these problems now requires a lawsuit and additional ballot language, all of which costs money and complicates the promise that the restructuring wouldn’t burden taxpayers with new expenses. (In fairness, Measure G’s actual language only guarantees no new implementation costs — a claim that leaves plenty of room for interpretation.)

Meanwhile, at City Hall, the council in June 2024 launched its own ambitious charter review, billed as a once-in-a-generation opportunity to modernize city government and restore public trust eroded by scandal and long-standing frustration with city services.

The city’s Charter Reform Commission got off to a slow start, partly because Mayor Karen Bass took her time appointing members. But once the commission began meeting last summer, it drew far more public engagement and media attention than the county’s task force has managed to attract.

Many of the ideas the commission floated in March weren’t new — some had been debated for decades. Expanding the City Council, for instance, was rejected by voters back in 1999. Giving noncitizens voting rights in city and school elections, lowering the voting age to 16, and adopting ranked-choice voting all surfaced in charter discussions during the 1990s but never made it to the ballot.

Nearly three decades later, the council once again punted on all of these ideas, sending them back for further study. Council members also rejected giving themselves more direct oversight of Los Angeles Police Department policy, along with several other proposed reforms.

A handful of narrower measures — covering things like contracting procedures and meeting schedules — will make it to the November ballot. But none of them amount to the sweeping transformation city leaders originally promised, and none are likely to generate much voter enthusiasm. If anything, their modest scope may deepen public frustration with City Hall’s apparent resistance to change, a dynamic likely to surface in the mayoral runoff between Bass and challenger Nithya Raman.

The council’s cautious, wait-and-see approach risks making the city look out of touch with voters demanding action. The county’s move-fast-and-fix-it-later strategy, by contrast, looks more politically savvy for now, especially since many county voters — who are often city voters too — may well be willing to approve another round of ethics and governance fixes.

Still, it’s too early to say which strategy actually produces better government. The county’s reforms are years away from being fully implemented, and it remains uncertain whether they’ll function as intended.

The city, meanwhile, still has time to take its own advice and truly study its options, crafting a more coherent and unified reform package than the somewhat piecemeal proposals that emerged from its charter commission.

City leaders would do well to keep listening to their constituents. This is Los Angeles, after all — the birthplace of the modern voter initiative and a city with a long history of political uprisings. If the council isn’t willing to reform itself, voters may eventually decide to do it for them.

Original source: CalMatters

The post LA’s Messy Reform Era Offers Lessons for California Lawmakers appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.