Every other Wednesday evening for more than a year now, and likely for two more years to come 13 civic leaders meet in rec rooms and auditoriums across Los Angeles County to redesign a municipal government that operated for a century and three-quarters without one of the most basic features of American democracy: checks and balances.
The members of the Governance Reform Task Force are doing the seemingly prosaic work of studying the implementation details of Measure G, a 2024 county ballot measure that for the first time will create an elected executive and convert the Board of Supervisors — which until now has been a mish-mash of executive and legislative powers — into a strictly legislative and oversight body.
Voters will elect their first independent county executive in 2028. The Board of Supervisors will expand from five to nine members in phases following the 2030 U.S. Census and the subsequent designation of new districts.
The historic revamp will have profound implications for the Los Angeles region, including the 88 cities inside the county and numerous unincorporated communities.
Debates over democracy generally focus on voting, which is, after all, at the core of any democratic process. But democracy as practiced in the United States also has come to suggest other principles — the rule of law, protection of minority rights, separation of powers — that are meant to bolster protections that complement majority rule.
Separation of executive, legislative and judicial powers is a government design theorized by Montesquieu and John Locke during the Age of Reason, adopted and adapted by the framers of the U.S. Constitution, defended by James Madison and Alexander Hamilton in the Federalist Papers, imitated by every U.S. state, and put in place by nearly 7,000 counties across the nation.
The Age of Reason comes to California
But not in California. Counties here instead have relied on local government formats that resembled corporate boards of directors more than the federal model. They looked for ways to, somehow, remove politics from democracy. Unaccountable county government was one result. Only one, San Francisco, which is a city as well as a county, adopted a structure that mimics the federal government’s separation-of-powers model.
The result is that Los Angeles County, one of the two largest local governments in the United States (New York City has a larger budget, though Los Angeles County serves more people), starkly departs from the government organization most familiar to Americans. And that has not always served it well.
L.A. County’s small board and powerless appointed administrator have been deeply criticized at least since 1976 — the nation’s bicentennial, when democracy was celebrated as the greatest American achievement. In that year, the John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation published a report titled “To Serve Seven Million,” calling for a county government with separated executive and legislative branches to provide checks and balances, to impose a measure of accountability.
The county was always democratic, in the sense that the people elected their leaders. But that wasn’t enough.
“Democracy formally is rule by the people,” current Haynes Foundation Executive Director Raphael Sonenshein said. “But that system can’t sustain itself if it’s not well-governed.”
Los Angeles County was not well-governed, as evidenced by the failure of Martin Luther King medical center, unspeakable abuses of children at MacLaren Hall, a close brush with bankruptcy and growing homelessness.
To former supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, now director of the Los Angeles Initiative at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, the governance structure he was part of for 20 years — and which is soon to be phased out — was “arcane.”
When five people are in charge, he said repeatedly as a supervisor, no one is in charge. The resulting lack of accountability harms the people the county is supposed to serve, most notably those living in poverty or caught up in the child protection or criminal justice systems. The buck stops nowhere, as supervisors blame one another, or the bureaucracy, or individual county employees or contractors, when things go wrong and innocent people are hurt.
“You can’t run a $50-billion organization by committee,” he said. “It runs counter to any organizational logic that I can think of.”
City and county take different paths
IN 2024, supervisors Lindsey Horvath and Janice Hahn presented their plan for a revamped county government with separated powers and checks and balances. Los Angeles County voters adopted it in November.
In the same election, there was change afoot in the city of Los Angeles.
Even in Los Angeles, voters get mixed up between the city and the county, but they are two distinct jurisdictions, each with their own charters and their own histories of reform. The city has approximately 4 million residents, the county 10 million. Every voter in the city is a county voter as well, but many county voters live in other cities, or in areas that are not included in a city at all.
In the city election, voters adopted a charter amendment to finally strip the City Council of power to draw its own district boundaries, an indirect and much-delayed response to secret recordings that captured some members’ brutally self-serving and blatantly race-based redistricting ideas
Unlike the county, the city already had a formal separation of powers, with an elected mayor as chief executive empowered by reforms a quarter century earlier.
But the ugly recordings had awakened in many Angelenos a desire to redesign their government even beyond the redistricting measure
A new Charter Reform Commission held a series of hearings over nine months beginning in 2025 and proposed a host of reforms, including enlarging the council and giving it more power over the Police Commission. The City Council blocked almost everything in favor of further study over the following months amid concerns that the reforms could further gum up a city government that already struggles to get things done.
Is there irresolvable tension between democracy and responsiveness, and is L.A. County making a mistake by embracing checks and balances over the corporate model? Sonenshein, who was the executive director of one of two Los Angeles city charter reform commissions 30 years ago, said no. Local government’s legitimacy requires both representation and effectiveness, he said.
“Measure G is not a fad,” he said. “Twenty percent of counties in the nation have governments with checks and balances.”
Yaroslavsky called Measure G the most important governance reform in the county’s history, but noted that it left out most of the details. That’s because the process was backwards, by traditional standards. Voters agreed only on broad checks-and-balances strokes, leaving the details to be worked out later.
“What powers will be invested in the executive?” Yaroslavsky asked. “What will be the power dynamics between it and the board? Who will represent the county on the [Metro] board, or the Air Quality Management District, or on several other boards on which the county is represented? These and other details were left to be determined, and the time has come to make some decisions.”
In the same year that county voters passed Measure G, city voters adopted independent redistricting and U.S. voters re-elected Donald Trump to a second presidential term. Constitutional law scholar Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley law school, wrote a book ominously titled “No Democracy Lasts Forever.” Its outlook for American democracy is not optimistic.
That said, it’s noteworthy that Chemerinsky was president of the other of the two Los Angeles charter reform commissions in the 1990s, and that he and his colleagues and counterparts in both commissions worked to invigorate local democracy with neighborhood councils and other reforms.
Chemerinsky noted that residents of Los Angeles, along with Minneapolis, Washington, D.C., and many other cities around the nation, have protested Trump’s brutal overreach in enforcing immigration laws, and that elected local governments “are focused on fighting construction of ICE facilities in cities.”
They are providing a check on administration actions at a time when Congress and the courts are failing to do so. That, too, is democracy at work.
