The most meaningful reform LA County can make post-fires is to its sprawling government

In the wake of the disastrous fires that engulfed Los Angeles last month, the most immediate reaction of policymakers has been to focus on measures to help the victims and to streamline what will inevitably be a long rebuilding process. Most of these proposals address acute and immediate regulatory and policy failures, such as misguided environmental regulations, mismanaged insurance markets and molasses-slow permitting processes for new construction.

While many of these initiatives are worthy, a much deeper problem besets Southern California, one that the haphazard response to the fires brought into high relief: the splintering of political authority for dealing with the challenges facing the region — a long-standing condition that prompted historian Robert M. Fogelson to describe Los Angeles as “The Fragmented Metropolis.”

Los Angeles County currently has 88 sub-county governments, as well as more than 140 unincorporated areas. This system of overlapping and underlapping jurisdictional responsibilities creates massive inefficiencies in trying to coordinate around pan-regional challenges — particularly climate change-exacerbated risks like fire, heat waves and drought, as well as for issues like infrastructure planning.

In the worst cases, particularly visible with the twin housing and homelessness crises, it leads to competition in which municipalities push problems away from themselves and at each other across their arbitrarily drawn borders.

In order to deal with pressing regional challenges at a deeper level, Southern California needs to fundamentally reconfigure the responsibilities and simplify the lines of authority of its regional government. In brief, it should centralize power within an expanded Board of Supervisors, headed by a directly elected and empowered executive (something voters just approved). Specifically, this new entity should have the capacity to override smaller jurisdictions and NIMBYs who are blocking effective regional planning.

To determine the appropriate boundaries and sphere of authority for the newly integrated and empowered officer, the guiding principle should be that power and authority must align with effective responsibility. If an agency or executive is held politically responsible for addressing a particular problem, such as fire risk or homelessness, it should be given the administrative power and authority to actually do what needs to be done to effectively address the policy issue. 

In practice, the most politically accountable and responsive system would be one in which a single governmental entity, answering to the voters, held authority over the region as a whole. A newly centralized system of political authority like this would enable a much more rational approach to policy-making, regional planning and distributing resources. Because problems such as fire risk, water, air quality, homelessness, housing availability and transit are all regional in scale, the authority to manage these issues should be vested at the regional level, with an executive empowered to make big decisions if and when the elected supervisors are unable to do so.

Radically remaking the scale, location and capacity of political authority in the nation’s second largest and most famously centrifugal metropolis may sound like pie-in-the-sky, but the two most recent mayors of Los Angeles, Antonio Villaraigosa and Eric Garcetti, both made exactly this case in the wake of last week’s fires, telling the New York Times they would support creating a dominant government representing the region as a whole, to replace the current crazy-quilt of municipal governments.

“For the rebuild,” Garcetti said, “it’ll be absolutely critical for us to act like we’re one city and not a collection of 88 villages.”

There will surely be howls of protest from those who enjoy living in or governing autonomous enclaves — and who blithely dismiss regional-scale problems as something for someone else to deal with. These concerns simply must be overridden in the name of the collective good.

Here is where Sacramento can offer decisive help. Rather than throwing money at a problem without a long-term strategy, Gov. Gavin Newsom can cement his legacy as a transformational governor by solving the “plumbing issue” in Southern California’s governance structure.