By Marc B. Haefele
 
As I write this, the Los Angeles County Supervisors,  formerly the Five Little Kings and now the Three Little Kings and Two Queens, is in closed session to pick a successor to Los Angeles County CAO David Janssen. I've looked at the list of candidates and I just didn't see anyone big enough to fill Janssen’s abandoned shoes.

Janssen is going to be a very tough act for mere mortals, such as these, to follow. He ran a nearly ungovernable mini-nation of 10 million people, as big as Delaware and Rhode Island put together--always adequately, sometimes brilliantly, always with the slender foundation of three votes on a board of five supervisors. One vote less and he needed a new job: this was the sword by which his predecessors fell.

Among Janssen’s irreplaceable skills was that of talking tough to his superiors without antagonizing them.  A fine balance there, between sounding like a know-it-all and sounding intimidated. How he did it, I’ll never know.  But the job put lines on his face over the decade and finally there was the huge loss of King Drew hospital.. So I am not really surprised he decided to leave. Telling people what to do without ruffling their feathers can be the toughest job on earth. Particularly if you report to them.

Janssen saved his official disagreements for private discussion. Which did not always make for the best news coverage of what was really going on at the BOS. But it meant that, unlike with his three immediate predecessors, one careless statement did not end his career.

Instead, Janssen maneuvered like a champion ballroom dancer (when he took office, there was a false rumor, perhaps inspired by his Astairish physique, that dancing was his avocation) so graceful his Supervisorial partners rarely noticed that he was leading.

But now that he’s actually leaving, Janssen opened up to the Times about things that had been bothering him. Such as the fact that “There isn't enough money in the world” to fix problems like the jail overpopulation, county's perpetual indigent medical populace and homelessness on the streets.  The county is charged with fending with all of these problems. But it never has the resources to halt them, in Janssen’s opinion.   Maybe. But the governor’s just-proposed health insurance plan could, if passed, at least head off the county’s impending $1.6 billion county health-service deficit. Janssen was more on target when he suggested strengthening his office, giving it more hire-fire power, more executive authority. At roughly the same time, Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky suggested a strong, elected executive for the county of LA.

Both are good ideas. The Times editorially ignored them, the Daily News editorialized, predictably,  that the last thing the county needs is “another layer of government.:”  Instead, it concluded, let’s elect us some better supes.

This brilliant notion recalled the basic 230-year-old argument against the American Revolution: the problem wasn’t really with colonial governance. It was that George V just happened to be a lousy king. Just wait for the next king and everything will be OK.

But Yaroslavsky’s and Janssen’s suggestions really didn't go nearly far enough. The American Revolution was all about putting in another layer of government--one that actually responded to the needs of Americans. LA’s county government isn't adequate to the needs of 10 million county residents. How could it be? The five-supervisor system was conceived of 150 years ago, when the county had 5,000 residents.  Now there are 18 times that many county employees. Let alone those 2 million residents per supervisor.

When I wrote about county government’s shortcomings a decade ago, this county only had around 9 million residents and a study group in Sacramento was trying to figure out a better system of county representation.  By 2000, that group was shutting down; the guy in charge wouldn't return my calls, so I never found out what, if anything, they came up with. What astonishes me now is that the larger and more unwieldy our county gets, the more the media and officialdom resign themselves to its faults. It’s as though everyone is deeply committed to its imperfection. (Marc Haefele has been covering LA politics for 25 years for the LA Weekly, KPCC Radio and other media. Haefele is a regular contributor to CityWatch.)