COUNTY POWER BATTLE LOOMS; LINKING OF REFORM PLANS UNDER FIRE.

Byline: Troy Anderson Staff Writer

The five-member Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, long a force able to hire and fire the top administrator, has become a battleground over linking an increase in its own seats to creation of a new post for a powerful elected executive.

A proposed November 2000 ballot measure would ask Los Angeles County voters to expand the Board of Supervisors to nine members and create the office of an elected county executive who would run day-to-day operations.

Supporters of expanding the board say the proposal could give the San Fernando Valley two seats, create opportunities for greater minority representation and make board members, who now represent 2 million people each, more responsive.

Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, a west-sider who represents much of the Valley, said an elected county executive would provide a check and balance on an expanded board and stronger management of the $15.2 billion county budget.

``I've made it clear from the beginning that expansion without an executive made no sense to me,'' Yaroslavsky said. ``Having five board members run a $15 billion corporation is not the way to do things. It's the Soviet way of doing things.''

The proposal for an elected county executive puts him at odds with some Latino and Asian groups, who support expansion of the board as a means to gain extra seats for minorities, but fear the concentrated power an elected county executive would wield.

``This person will be the mayor of Los Angeles County,'' said Alan Clayton, the director of equal opportunity for the 1,300-member Los Angeles County Chicano Employees Association. ``The person will appoint all department heads, earn more than the sheriff's $210,000 salary and preside over a county with almost 10 million people.

``The person will be the second most powerful person in California, behind the governor, and one of the 15 most powerful people in the United States.''

Fernando Oaxaca, co-chairman of the Latino Coalition for Fair Redistricting and founder of the Republican National Hispanic Assembly, said, ``You might as well have a king.'' He said an elected county executive's role would be the ``imperial presidency all over again.''

Clayton and Oaxaca are among those upset about proposed ballot language that links board expansion with the county executive issue.

County Counsel Lloyd Pellman released the draft ballot measure earlier last week making voter approval of a county executive a prerequisite of an expanded board. The county supervisors will have to approve the language before the ballot measures are placed on the November ballot.

The supervisors approved Yaroslavsky's motion in August directing Pellman to write language for the ballot to head off an attempt by state legislators to place the issue on a statewide ballot.

Alan Heslop, a government professor at Claremont-McKenna College and director of the Rose Institute for State and Local Government in Claremont, a conservative think tank, said board expansion is needed because the county has grown to the point where it's absurd to have each supervisor representing two million people.

``These supervisorial districts are larger than three congressional districts combined,'' Heslop said. ``These are great baronial holdings, so large that challengers really have no chance because the campaigns are so expensive, and incumbents are vulnerable only to their own misdeeds and scandals.''

Heslop said board expansion should not be tied to creating an elected county executive's job.

``I don't believe that it stretches anyone's imagination to understand that the effort to link these may very well be associated with the idea to defeat one of them, maybe the larger board,'' he said.

Oaxaca claimed that Yaroslavsky, up for re-election in 2002, is pushing the county executive position with the idea of running for the post.

``Frankly, I see it as a power grab,'' Oaxaca said.

YarosFlavsky, a potential Los Angeles mayoral candidate in 2001, said `it's unlikely'' he would run for the job, if created, but would not comment further.

``That hasn't been my interest and, to be very candid, this is a position that if I was leaving the Board of Supervisors tomorrow, I would fight hard to get this in,'' he said.

The five supervisors' seats essentially have been lifetime jobs for the incumbents, repeatedly elected to four-year terms. Recently supervisors have been faced by activists seeking to reduce their power. The activists hope to gather 197,000 signatures to place an initiative on the November ballot, setting term limits for the supervisors. It would limit supervisors to two terms: eight years. The initiative includes language allowing for board expansion.

It costs about $1 million to run for supervisor in one district. Clayton estimates a successful county executive candidate would spend $7 million to $10 million running countywide and could be beholden to special-interest groups.

``You'd either have to be fabulously wealthy or have a tremendous ability to raise money from special-interest groups,'' Clayton said.

Clayton said he believes the board expansion proposal has a chance of passing next year because of the campaigns gearing up to push the ballot measure.

Voters have rejected similar ballot measures three times in the last three decades.

If voters approve the expansion, Pellman said, a map showing added districts would be drawn after the census in 2000, with redistricting set for 2001, anyway. Meanwhile, he said, there will be no map.

Critics of board expansion most often cite the increased cost of more supervisors with their large staffs.

``The incumbents are letting the public see that the additional supervisors will cost more so people won't vote for them,'' Heslop said. ``There's no reason the supervisors should have staffs as bloated as they have built them up (to be).''