San Diego County’s pursuit of ethics reforms may also help consolidate Democratic control

San Diego County voters will see a measure on their November ballot that looks at first blush a lot like the sweeping overhaul passed two years ago by their Los Angeles County neighbors.

It won’t go quite as far. Its primary mover, Supervisor Terra Lawson-Remer, considered including an independently elected executive in her proposal, like L.A.’s 2024 Measure G did, but decided against it because there wasn’t enough support for so much change. Nor will the measure expand the five-member Board of Supervisors, as L.A.’s did.

But it will add new oversight positions, including an independent budget analyst and a program auditor.

And an ethics commission.

The primary purpose of ethics commissions is to build confidence in government by promising to root out official misconduct, or at least campaign finance violations.

Lots of California cities have ethics commissions, but among counties they’re rare. San Francisco has one, but it’s a city as well as a county. Orange County has one. Los Angeles County’s is the newest and is currently under construction. San Diego County may become the fourth.

Lawson-Remer is part of a new-ish Democratic majority on San Diego County’s officially nonpartisan Board of Supervisors. She and Nora Vargas flipped the board from its decades-long Republican majority in 2020 with the help of an earlier charter reform that introduced term limits, ousting entrenched incumbents (although Lawson-Remer’s successful campaign, rather than term limits, ended her predecessor’s tenure). 

Lawson-Remer and Vargas were both reelected in 2024. Yet Vargas quit anyway after completing her first term, for reasons that are still the subject of debate. Her departure left the board deadlocked until a special election restored the new Democratic majority.

Lawson-Remer said her reforms are meant to modernize county government. That may be so, but they’d also help her consolidate her 3-2 majority. And they’d loosen the term limits that helped create that majority in the first place, allowing her to seek one more term.

The new ethics commission is a cornerstone of the measure.

Beyond improving confidence in government, ethics commissions have a secondary purpose, more sly than the first. They are ballot sweeteners. Structural reforms — like loosening term limits — that may leave voters lukewarm suddenly gain appeal when they’re packaged with oversight of politicians, lobbyists and bureaucrats.

That phenomenon can make the ethics community deeply suspicious of ballot measures to create such commissions if they don’t include a set of best practices to ensure that members are sufficiently independent of the people they’re supposedly scrutinizing.

An ethics commission that has a veneer of independence by virtue of its title and its mere existence, but that is ultimately under the thumb of the Board of Supervisors, may be the worst of all possible situations. It could end up masking misconduct instead of weeding it out.

Ethics watchdogs were at first furious with L.A. County’s reform for that very reason. Measure G promised that the new commission was to be “independent,” but it didn’t define the word and left out key details. Once voters adopted it, an implementation task force insisted that commissioners gain sole authority to hire their own enforcement staff and legal counsel, free of elected officials’ meddling. A commissioner selection process, currently underway, divides appointments among officials but then calls on the first few appointees to select the rest themselves. Now ethics reformers embrace the change enthusiastically.

The rub is that those markers of independence require yet another charter amendment, which Los Angeles County voters must consider on Nov. 3.

The San Diego County measure similarly leaves details for later, but includes provisions that bother ethics mavens. For example, the supervisors would appoint most commissioners themselves, and could remove them. There’s no guarantee that commissioners could hire their own investigative, enforcement or legal staff.

So at least at first, San Diego’s commission wouldn’t be as independent as L.A. County’s. Lawson-Remer has promised an L.A.-style implementation task force, but they’ll probably also need an L.A.-style follow-up charter amendment, and there’s no guarantee that they’ll get it.

On closer inspection, there are other provisions that may put San Diego reforms at odds with L.A.’s as well. San Diego County currently has a powerful city-manager-style or corporate-like chief executive officer who can hire and fire department leaders without consulting the board. Supervisors must keep their noses out of department business and they have no say over CEO staff.

L.A. County flirted with that kind of strong manager system nearly 20 years ago — after snatching their chief administrator away from San Diego County — but it didn’t take. The L.A. supervisors simply couldn’t keep out of department affairs. 

That’s a major reason that Measure G created an elected executive to lead departments. The supervisors will lose their structural supremacy in favor of clearer lines of authority and a single accountable official. The format copies the federal government and its separation of powers, rather than the city manager or corporate model.

By contrast, San Diego County’s proposal would weaken its CEO and empower its board, giving the supervisors new authority over top administrators while rolling back a “non-interference” clause. It’s not a full retreat to the days before San Diego empowered its CEO, nearly 42 years ago. But it’s a subtle move in that direction. What looked at first like Los Angeles and San Diego counties being on the same organizational track now looks a lot like they’re passing each other in opposite directions.

It’s enough to make you wonder why San Diego County adopted the strong CEO model back in 1984.

But you may have guessed. Three new supervisors flipped the Democrat-dominated board to a 3-2 Republican majority and fired their administrator. Voters amended the charter to create the corporate-type CEO with sole power over department chiefs, but less job security. That’s how things remained for more than four decades until Lawson-Remer’s 2020 reverse flip and this year’s ballot measure.

The conservative 1984 reforms included no ethics commission. There were no such oversight panels in those days.

Los Angeles County, while adding an ethics commission in Measure G, messed up by not also adding a San Diego-style independent program auditor. L.A.’s reforms unwisely make its auditor-controller the new executive’s underling rather than his or her evaluator.

It’s hard to identify the lesson. If ethics commissions make elected officials more ethical, and auditing makes them more productive, perhaps local democracy operates like an ascent up a ladder, with continuous improvements. That would be nice.

Unfortunately, there appears to be no academic study showing that ethics commissions improve anyone’s behavior.

If instead elected officials and their policies simply react to changing political circumstances, perhaps democracy operates less like a ladder and more like a swinging pendulum, with no permanent advancement. That’s deflating, especially to reformers.

Or maybe the lesson is simply that there are lots of lessons — if only local governments would learn them from each other, or from their own histories.