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

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