For Supes, Ceremonial Trumps the Substantive

With so many big stories in the news, all of them critical to the welfare of Los Angeles County, I dropped in on a Board of Supervisors meeting Tuesday to see which tough and thorny issue they would tackle first.

The housing crisis? The horrific consequences of releasing inmates early from grossly overcrowded county jails, as documented in Sunday’s Times? The raging immigration debate and its many implications for Los Angeles County, which has more illegal immigrants than any other county in the nation?

The meeting began at 9:30 a.m. with two supervisors missing and no explanation for their absence, but that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Mike Antonovich and Gloria Molina were the no-shows, which cut down on the usual parade of citations, commendations and photo ops that make the start of each weekly session feel like a Russian circus.

If you have never attended a supes meeting, trust me on this: It wouldn’t seem out of place to have someone juggling during the show, with Shriners in fez hats riding around in tiny cars.

Within an hour of the start, Supervisors Don Knabe, Yvonne Brathwaite Burke and Zev Yaroslavsky had greeted and honored the reverend who delivered the invocation, the county employee of the month, the Boeing C-17 fleet (which had reached “the C-17 Globemaster III million-hour milestone”), representatives of the ALS Assn. of Greater Los Angeles, foster care heroes, the Artesia High boys basketball team, the Long Beach Poly girls basketball team and the Cal State Long Beach co-ed cheerleading team.

There is no harder-working man in county government than the photographer whose job is to record the ceremonial handshakes and awarding of the scrolls. I’m surprised he isn’t out on RSI disability.

With the absence of Antonovich, there was no pet-of-the-week presentation, the signature achievement of his 26-year stint on the board. So I had that to be thankful for.

Not to be catty, but I couldn’t help notice that after the supervisors introduced the groups they themselves sponsored, they sometimes ignored those being honored by other supervisors. While Yaroslavsky paraded foster heroes, for instance, Burke was shuffling papers and Knabe, who had practically done cartwheels for the co-ed cheerleading team, was staring blankly into his laptop screen.

During this spectacle, roughly three dozen county staffers milled about shifting their weight, catching up with each other in whispered conversation and waiting for something to happen that might require them to pay attention.

Wouldn’t it be better if supervisors handed out these scrolls, plaques and other dust collectors in their district offices one or two evenings a month? That way, honorees wouldn’t have to take time off from school or work and travel great distances, only to be ignored by half the people in the room. And supervisors could use valuable public meeting time for matters of greater substance.

One foster family drove to Tuesday’s meeting from Lancaster with four disabled little girls.

“A sacrifice in and of itself,” Yaroslavsky noted.

Yes, but they went home with a scroll.

It’s really an ingenious political operation when you think about it. L.A. County supervisors are invincible, tossing around citations and millions of dollars in discretionary funds to seed their own reelections but avoiding tough choices and answering to no one for the resulting debacles.

The King/Drew fiasco exposed by The Times, in which patients lost their lives because supervisors didn’t have the will to challenge incompetent hospital administration, got supervisors squirming, but only a little. They can always point to another supervisor, the state, the system, anyone but themselves, or they can simply claim the solutions are in the works.

“There’s no accountability,” says Bob Stern of the Center for Intergovernmental Studies.

It’s the same with dangerously overcrowded jails, the disastrous lack of oversight of conservators and other entrenched problems that affect millions of lives. And yet the only two supervisors up for reelection next month -- Yaroslavsky and Molina -- appear to be in no danger of losing their jobs.

It’d be better, says Cal State Fullerton political analyst Raphael Sonenshein, to have more supervisors with smaller districts. As it is, each supervisor represents 2 million people. What would help even more, Sonenshein said, would be to have a single county executive who gets much of the credit or the blame for everything, the way L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa does.

But in the past, voters have given such proposals thumbs down, arguing that more politicians cannot possibly be a good thing. It’s a short-sighted view, but understandable after just one visit to a board meeting.

Sure, a tiny bit of business was conducted Tuesday, such as approval of a $300,000 payout to “the family of a man who died while in sheriff’s custody.” Then they moved on to other deaths.

Knabe honored, among others, a woman from his district who “was an avid player of the slots in Vegas.” It goes without saying, except in Knabe’s case, that she and the others on his list “will be sorely missed by all.” I’m surprised the supes don’t have a different color guard brigade come out each week to play taps and pick up several citations.

Burke, who followed Knabe, was not to be outdone.

“I move that when we adjourn today, that we adjourn in the memory of Thaddaeus Watson, my cousin,” Burke said.

She had several more deaths to announce, including a celebrity.

Burke: Floyd Patterson, heavyweight ...

Knabe: I would like to join that one as well.

Burke then added a few more before Yaroslavsky made sure not to miss the boat on Patterson.

“I’d like to be added,” he said.

Wonderful, a consensus.

“I remember as a boy listening to broadcasts of his boxing matches,” Yaroslavsky continued. “I wasn’t much of a boxing fan, but I was a fan of his.... I think he was the first heavyweight to reclaim the championship after losing it.”

Knabe: Right after the Olympics.

Yaroslavsky then ran off several death notices of his own, including one woman who used to “take her pony into the city and offered rides to children for pennies.”

But there was one group of dead folks they never got around to discussing: The 16 people allegedly killed by guys who were supposed to be in jail but had been let out early because of county budget cuts.

The Get Out of Jail Free Program also resulted in charges for 518 robberies, 215 sex offenses, 641 weapons violations, 635 drunk-driving incidents, 1,443 assaults and 20 kidnappings during time the alleged perpetrators should have been locked up.

Why were those inmates released early? Not enough cells to keep them all. Why not? Not enough money to build new ones or pay additional staff, according to Sheriff Lee Baca. And what are the supervisors doing about this problem, which has been festering for many years?

They’re working on it.

While I stewed, Burke and Knabe each returned to the mike for a second round of death notices.

I couldn’t tell whether they had forgotten these folks initially, or if perhaps they had dropped dead since the meeting began.

I wasn’t feeling too good myself.