Los Angeles County is trying to weaken its new ethics watchdog

By Perry Goldberg, especially for CalMatters

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Democracy rarely dies in dramatic, cinematic moments. It is smothered in the agonizingly boring minutiae of government procedure, task force and quorum rules, and appointment protocols.

The public wants to look away from this dense bureaucratic machinery. We prefer to celebrate the broad strokes of reform and ignore the plumbing.

But in Los Angeles Countypeople need to get over the urge to quit, because while the public wasn’t looking, the county quietly stacked the deck against its new ethics watchdog.

It started with Measure G, a historic once-in-a-generation referendum to improve county government. He passed in 2024 by a razor-thin margin, carried across the finish line by a coalition of voters and advocates — myself included — who recognized that Los Angeles County government was in the grip of special interests, most notably public sector unions.

I know this first hand. When I ran for Los Angeles County Supervisor in 2024, organized labor spent millions to protect the incumbent, making it nearly impossible for an independent voice to compete.

We fought for Measure G because it promised to break that stranglehold by creating a new ethics commission to oversee a government that serves 10 million people and manages a $49 billion budget. To design this new watchdog, the Board of Supervisors created a governance reform task force.

But the result was compromised in its formation.

At a November 2024 board meeting, the Supervisors had a choice: They could fill this task force with independent civic leaders and governance experts, or hand over governance to the county’s most entrenched special interests.

I watched in horror as they chose the latter. The board adopted a task force model that allocated seats to be handpicked by powerful unions.

Even worse, they quietly baked themselves into a “functional veto.” The charter dictates that no major structural reform can advance without an overwhelming majority of affirmative votes.

When you let the facility create its own surveillance, the result is entirely predictable – you get a guard dog designed to sleep.

Check out the recommendations this compromised task force is now pushing.

The real power of this new agency rests in the hands of seven ethics commissioners. On Measure G, voters called for an independent commission tasked with rooting out corruption. In practice, because of the way these commissioners will be elected, they will be deeply aligned with power.

Under the finalized recommendations, the power to appoint the foundational block of the commission is given to county politicians: the newly elected county executive, the assessor and the chairman of the Board of Supervisors. These three political appointees will select the remaining four members through a “public application process.”

This ensured tight political control over all seven seats while creating the illusion of independence.

The Ethics Commission aims to investigate the offices of the Board of Supervisors, the Executive Director and the Assessor for corruption, campaign finance violations and lobbying conflicts. When elected officials appoint their own referees, the unwritten rule is to choose “safe” allies who will avoid aggressive, headline-generating audits of the establishment.

And in a belt-and-braces way to render the commission impotent, the county is preparing to treat its ethics commissioners as glorified volunteers.

The draft ordinance offers a stipend of $250 per meeting, or $1,500 per year. This ensured that the time needed to do this job well would not be devoted to it, even if the commissioners had the best intentions.

An ethics commission means nothing if it is overseen by unpaid volunteers chosen by the politicians they investigate. The county should establish a professional monthly rent to attract uncompromising talent.

If Los Angeles County is going to get a guard dog with real teeth, the public must demand structural integrity from the start.

The county should strip appointing power from incumbents and instead adopt the model used by California’s Citizens Redistricting Commission — empowering a panel of retired independent judges to vet candidates and randomly select the initial commissioners from qualified citizens. These commissioners may elect the other members.

Leave elected officials out of the loop.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.