An unfathomable drafting blunder threatens to wreck years of painstaking work to make Los Angeles County government more responsive to the needs of its 10 million people. The magnitude of the screw-up, which became public last month, is slowly coming into focus.
There may be nationwide repercussions.
At issue are two ballot measures, each of them drafted by L.A. County’s lawyers and each of them amending the county charter. Measure J, adopted by voters by a healthy margin amid the “reckoning” of 2020, commits a significant chunk of the county budget each year to repairing generations of economic and racial injustice through mandatory spending on health care, housing, job training and alternatives to incarceration.
Measure J makes L.A. County stand apart. Other state and local governments made symbolic gestures toward systemic reform during the heady and chaotic months following the police murder of George Floyd and the protests calling for government to redesign how it serves marginalized communities.
Few actually did anything substantive. But with Measure J, L.A. County put its money where its mouth is.
And then, last November, Measure J was stupidly overwritten by Measure G, which will expand the Board of Supervisors and create an elected chief executive and an ethics commission.
The goal is to make county government more accountable by finally imposing the same checks and balances that Americans take for granted in other levels of government. We elect the president, the governor, the mayor. We will now elect a county executive, and a larger Board of Supervisors will scrutinize that person’s performance.
The two important measures cover very different ground and ordinarily wouldn’t cancel each other out — except for the fact that the county’s lawyers drafted ‘G’ to be put in exactly the same place in the charter that was already occupied by ‘J.’ So when a principal part of ‘G’ becomes effective in December 2028, it will repeal ‘J.’
Don’t worry, county lawyers said in a statement. “As a practical matter, the repeal would have no impact,” given that the Board of Supervisors can just keep spending as though Measure J remains in place.
That misses the point, as the lawyers surely know. Measure J was meant to bind all future Boards of Supervisors, allowing long-term planning and budgeting for ongoing programs. Without it, future supervisors can shift spending elsewhere whenever the political winds change and it’s no longer fashionable to dismantle racial inequity.
And isn’t that where we are now? The spirit of 2020 is a distant memory. Democratic lawmakers are back to writing tough-on-crime bills, public attention has turned to fires and floods, and municipal budgets are strapped.
And more to the point, President Trump is steamrolling over anything that strikes him as “woke,” including health funding, care for the mentally ill, housing for the homeless and, most especially, “DEI” — diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives of the sort proudly championed by Los Angeles County and funded by Measure J.
As the nation’s largest local government, and with Measure J as its standard, L.A. County was a Noah’s Ark to protect and sustain the spirit of 2020 through the storms of Trumpism, an ambassador to the rest of the nation of equity and justice programs. L.A. County, standing firm, could conceivably help other state and local governments find their backbones.
But instead, the ballot measure fiasco tosses culture war crusaders an unearned win. It puts at risk the tenuous and hard-won trust between L.A.’s community activists, county officials and employees — and to some extent even law enforcement, who came together in the name of health-based alternatives to incarceration. The drafting error means the Reimagine L.A. Coalition that organized support for Measure J may have to go back to the ballot to re-do what they already did. They are understandably angry at the prospect.
And because times have changed, it’s by no means certain that voters would pass Measure J a second time. Or, for that matter, Measure G. Seven months into the bellicose second Trump administration, L.A. voters may have second thoughts about strong executive power.
LA County moves too slow and too fast
There is now tension between champions of each charter amendment, and open talk about which measure should be scrapped in order to preserve the other.
As the mayor of West Hollywood in 2020, testifying in favor of Measure J, Lindsey Horvath called on the Board of Supervisors to put it on the ballot. “Systems of care and systems of accountability must go hand in hand,” she told the board.
Four years later, as a county supervisor, Horvath led the effort for Measure G. She was correct — care and accountability, ‘J’ and ‘G,’ should complement one another.
A careless drafting error puts them at odds.
Supervisor Kathryn Barger opposed putting both measures on the ballot, arguing that they were slapped together in haste, with insufficient time for vetting.
She, too, is correct.
But it’s worth remembering that in January 2023, the Board of Supervisors commissioned a study of L.A. County governance in order to improve transparency, representation and ethics. A year and a half later, the county had not even hired a contractor to do the study. It may take a little haste to break that kind of maddening stasis.
Los Angeles County moves simultaneously too slow and too fast, and as a consequence accomplishes too little of its leaders’ lofty and laudable goals. Was it too fast ordering up Measure G, leaving the lawyers too little time to realize they were overwriting Measure J? Or too slow in putting Measure J in the charter, so that the lawyers had no idea that it was there when they put Measure G in the same spot?
The County Counsel’s Office blames the mess on the board’s clerk for not updating the charter, even though the lawyers not only wrote Measure J, but lived with it every day for three years as it was nullified in trial court and revived in the Court of Appeal in July 2023. It’s hard to believe that they wouldn’t remember it a year later, or that they had no duty to discover it, when they plopped Measure G on top of it.
A Governance Reform Task Force has been meeting to flesh out the details of implementing Measure G. Its three meetings so far seem to underscore the ongoing battles over ‘J’ and ‘G,’ well after the elections are over. At its first meeting, about a third of the members revealed that they had voted against the measure, or represented organizations that opposed it. At its second meeting, one of its members reported the drafting error that seems likely to doom Measure J, or Measure G, or both.
At the third meeting, three lawyers from the Office of County Counsel were prepared to offer the task force a preliminary report on what happened and what might be done to rectify the situation. They waited patiently through three hours of discussion about committee assignments.
And then the audio crew had to leave, and the meeting came to an abrupt end without the lawyers’ report. Apparently, nobody had thought about the audio crew. It was a very Los Angeles County moment — and another reminder that the nation’s largest local jurisdiction is badly in need of a revamp.
By Robert Greene. This article was originally published by CalMatters.