Editorial: Redrawn supervisor districts can’t give L.A. County the representation it needs

The new district lines for the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors took effect last Wednesday, but it will be at least another six months and an election before it’s quite clear what they mean for the board’s direction. Backsliding from the county’s current progressive policies is among the possibilities, because the new districts improve the chances that candidates less interested in government reforms will be elected to the board. Opinion Editorial: A 5-member L.A. County Board of Supervisors without an exec is absurd When he was a Los Angeles County supervisor, Zev Yaroslavsky had a quip about county government that his successor, Sheila Kuehl, likes to quote: A county of 10 million people run by a five-member Board of Supervisors is absurd. The recipe for continuing badly needed progressive reforms on a larger, more representative board would be for dedicated activists and service providers to double down on the creative organizing and involvement that pushed the current supervisors to action on, for example, closing rather than expanding Men’s Central Jail and providing care-based alternatives to incarceration rather than trying to make incarceration marginally less horrid.