Change Agent: Lindsey Horvath and the massive reform of LA County governance

When the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously in early 2023 to commission a study on governance reform, Lindsey Horvath thought change was on the horizon.

The youngest and newest member of one of the most powerful governing bodies in America, Horvath was anxious to challenge the status quo despite her relatively thin political resume. A former West Hollywood City Council member, the then-40 year old had become an LA County supervisor only a few months prior. Her peers now included a former state legislator (Holly Mitchell), a former U.S. Representative (Janice Hahn) and a former U.S. secretary of labor (Hilda Solis).

But Horvath was unintimidated and felt she had been clued into some serious problems with the county’s governance during her time on the campaign trail. Over and over again when she met with voters during her campaign for supervisor, she heard complaints that the board, with its five members each representing about 2 million constituents, lacked appropriate representation for a county as populous and diverse as Los Angeles.

Indeed that general structure – which gave rise to the supervisors’ fitting nickname “the five little kings” (or “five little queens” with an all-female board) – had been in place for more than 100 years. The last major change to county governance was made in 1912, before women even had the right to vote in the United States. Horvath thought it was high time for a change.

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, aka the “five queens.” Image via the LAC YouTube channel.

Early in her tenure, Horvath met with Mitchell to discuss their shared interest in increasing representation on the board, engaging the community and bringing more transparency to the county budget process.

“I didn’t come into this office touting that I had all of the answers. Kind of the opposite. I think public service is a lot about listening,” said the unassuming Horvath, a driven and direct millennial politician who seems to eschew bombast without sacrificing ambition.

“Supervisor Mitchell had expressed her desire for change to me even before I was elected, that she had seen things from a county perspective that were quite different than how she saw things from a Sacramento perspective,” Horvath said.

On January 24, 2023, Horvath and Mitchell brought to the board a proposal to establish an independent governance reform committee tasked with a meeting with stakeholders and coming back to the board with recommendations for updating county board governance. The measure failed on a 2-3 vote, with only Horvath and Mitchell voting aye.

But the pair didn’t give up. They returned a month later with a second proposal, calling for the county to solicit proposals to study governance reform in the county. That proposal was approved unanimously on February 28, 2023.

“I thought this process, especially because we were unanimous on the board, would lead to swift action,” Horvath said.

Then, to Horvath’s horror and consternation, nothing happened. A year passed and the county didn’t even hire a consultant to start on the governance study. Horvath saw that the cause of the holdup was a microcosm of the entrenched problems in the county. Layers of bureaucracy. A glacial procurement process. No single person responsible for ensuring the whole system works.

Horvath had hoped that when the supervisors voted on the governance study that it would lead to recommendations that could be put on the ballot in 2024, to coincide with a presidential election sure to garner the attention and participation of Los Angeles’ notoriously distractable voters. In Spring 2024, when she and her staff examined the electoral calendar, they realized that if they wanted to get something on the ballot they’d have to act quickly – and on their own.

“I thought this process, especially because we were unanimous on the board, would lead to swift action.”

That was origin of Measure G, the revolutionary ballot measure approved by Angelenos in November 2024 that reshaped the nation’s most populated county by expanding the board of supervisors from five to nine members, made the county executive an elected official and created a county ethics commission.

The measure represents not only one of the most significant governance reforms in California history, but also a breakthrough in Los Angeles County political gridlock, where changes of this nature had been discussed ad nauseum but always failed.

Reform of this gravity and consequence likely would rank as a crowning achievement for many lifelong, career politicians. Horvath pulled it off after just her first two years in big-time politics.

Horvath was quick in her conversations with Capitol Weekly to attribute Measure G’s success to the efforts of others. Some also could chalk it all up to a matter of simple good timing and growing support for change – any change – in County governance. But others are not so shy about giving her the credit.

“She got it done because she is very compelling. She is very earnest. She is very dedicated. Once she sets her mind to something, she gets to work about it,” said former Assemblymember Christy Smith, a friend and political ally of Horvath’s. “She doesn’t exclude people who disagree with her. She tries to bring people into the fold and works really hard at it and is, I think, the ideal kind of politician to have taken this on.”

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Residents have talked about reforming Los Angeles County’s governance structure, including expanding the Board of Supervisors and creating an elected county executive, for decades.

Governance reform was the subject of failed 1962 ballot measure, Proposition D, as well as a 1970 study by the Los Angeles County Citizens’ Economy and Efficiency Committee. It was discussed in a 1973 report by the Los Angeles Grand Jury and three years later in a 1976 report of the Los Angeles County Association, the same year two other ballot measures, Proposition A, to elect a county mayor, and Proposition B, to expand the board, also failed.

Two decades later, in 1990, the Los Angeles County Citizens’ Economy and Efficiency Committee again revisited the idea of governance reform. In 1992, Proposition C, to enlarge the board of supervisors, failed. Board expansion again failed twice more in 2000, with the defeat of another Measure A and Senate Constitutional Amendment 7, by former Sen. Richard Polanco.

Similar SCAs by former Sen. Tony Mendoza in 2015 and 2017 also failed. The Los Angeles County Civil Grand Jury and the Los Angeles County Citizens Redistricting Commission reexamined the issue once again in reports on governance reform published in 2016 and 2021, respectively.

“In any given moment, numerous powers that be would like to see the status quo maintained because they are the ones that have power and authority,” said Sara Sadhwani, assistant professor of politics at Pomona College in Claremont, who has studied governance reform issues in Los Angeles. “The movement to shift that balance of power has always been met with a struggle as has been true time and time again in American history.”

Horvath, however, was undeterred by the history. She claimed her seat on the Board of Supervisors by defeating Bob Hertzberg, the gregarious former Assembly Speaker and state senator known as “Huggy Bear” for his penchant for hugging, well, everyone.

Horvath got her start in politics well after Hertzberg was an established name not only in Los Angeles County, but all of California. In 2004, she founded the Hollywood chapter of the National Organization for Women, roughly two years after Hertzberg’s left the Speaker’s office.

She believes her victory over such an entrenched political figure signals that her supporters expect her to upend the current the state of affairs.

“I just met somebody this week who said they were proud to vote for me, even though they knew Bob Hertzberg and had worked with him over a number of years, because they expressed that his time had sort of come and it was done and that they were looking for something different,” Horvath said. “Even if they had respected the work that he had done, they were ready for change. That’s been a recurrent theme. It was certainly recurrent during the campaign, which gave us momentum. But I heard it repeated to me since I’ve been in office and I’ve taken that as a reminder of why I was elected in the first place. People didn’t want things to stay the way they were. They wanted to see significant change.”

At the same time, she also felt the board’s unanimous vote in favor of pursuing a governance reform study indicated widespread support for change. But she also faced the dual challenges of figuring out what reforms to pursue and then how to ultimately get them before voters.

“In any given moment, numerous powers that be would like to see the status quo maintained because they are the ones that have power and authority….The movement to shift that balance of power has always been met with a struggle as has been true time and time again in American history.”

As luck would have it, while Horvath was running for supervisor in the fall of 2022 and hearing from voters how the board lacked adequate representation, the California Community Foundation had gathered a group of six local academics for a year-long study of research-based reforms to help the city of Los Angeles.

The study was commissioned in the wake of a string of criminal cases and other scandals at Los Angeles City Hall, culminating in the disclosure of secret recordings of three City Council members and the leader of the county labor leader making racist comments, which collectively seemed to erode public trust.

The study was focused specifically on reforms to help the city of Los Angeles – and it resulted in two successful ballot measures in the city, measures DD and ER – but offered Horvath a jumping off point for exploring ideas to improve the county. Early on, she enlisted the help of two academics involved in the study, Sadhwani and Fernando Guerra, a professor of political science and Chicana/o Latina/o studies at Loyola Marymount University, who provided the supervisor with their research findings on the ideal sizes of political bodies. Both later endorsed the measure.

“They had a pulse on what concerns people have in Los Angeles and wanted to see changed in their local government structures,” Horvath said. “They had a pulse on what people did and didn’t have an appetite for. But most importantly, they had a pulse on where some of the deficiencies existed in governance structures that existed that we might overwise look to.

“For example, one of the key components of Measure G is to have an independent ethics commission. The county has never had anything like that before. The city has an ethics commission, but it doesn’t always work in exactly the ways that people want it to work. So, it’s not just enough to say, ‘We want this,’ but to be thoughtful about how it’s being done.”

Horvath hired the polling firm Fairbank, Maslin, Maullin, Metz & Associates, otherwise known as FM3, to survey Angelenos in late May and early June of 2024 on their thoughts about reforming county government, expanding the Board of Supervisors, directly electing the county executive and establishing an independent county ethics commission.

In an early July report on the findings, FM3 found that “the vast majority (of voters) favor changes to LA County government in order to prevent corruption and reduce the influence of special interests, improve governance, increase transparency and accountability and improve representation of the County’s near ten million residents.”

Polling indicated that nearly nine in 10 Angelenos (88 percent) generally thought the county needed reform, with three quarters of voters supporting a charter amendment ballot measure to expand the board, create the ethics commission and elect the county executive.

“FM3 polling affirmed what I felt in my bones,” Horvath said, “that the community was really ripe for change, that they wanted to see change happen, and that they wanted their leaders to act in their interest.”

But she still needed to get the proposal on the ballot.

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Qualifying a measure in Los Angeles County through the petition process for the November 2024 election would have required supporters to collect 238,922 valid signatures and turn them into the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk by early May.

Horvath couldn’t have gone that route with the time she had. But she never would have considered it even if it was an option. Setting aside how difficult and expensive signature gathering is in general, let alone for an issue as unexciting as governance reform, the supervisor thought it was inappropriate to expect voters to bring an issue like that to the table. Something as fundamental as how county government operates, she thought, ought to come from the government itself.

So, Horvath made it her mission to garner support on the board for putting measure on the ballot.

Horvath knew three other supervisors were genuinely interested in governance reform (Hahn, Mitchell and Solis) and two of them (Hahn and Solis) were in their final terms, which could make them more open to big changes as they looked to burnish their political legacies. Thinking strategically, Horvath decided to reach out to Hahn, whose family history with the county runs deep, to see if she’d be interested in co-sponsoring a motion. Horvath’s staff reached out to Hahn’s and Hahn readily agreed to join the cause.

On July 9, 2024, Horvath and Hahn presented a motion directing county counsel to draft a proposed charter amendment reconstituting LA county’s governance structure for placement on the November ballot. Both Sadhwani and Guerra came to testify, but Horvath opened the proceedings by sharing an archive clip of Kenneth Hahn, the longtime former LA County supervisor whose name graces the supervisors’ administrative building and Janice Hahn’s father.

“You do not need to study, study, study,” the bespectacled and balding supervisor said from the dais, jabbing his finger repeatedly in the low-resolution video from 1972. “They’ve been studying county government since 1851 and there’s time for change. And the change and the time is now.”

It was a good bit of political theater on the part of Horvath, framing the “big” proposed reforms, as Janice Hahn called them that day, in the context of one of the county’s most revered leaders.

“LA County is the largest county in the nation, more populous than 40 states, home to one out of every 34 Americans,” said Janice Hahn, representative of the county’s Fourth District, during her introductory comments. “And yet LA County has a smaller governing body than counties half our size. Each of us supervisors are responsible for representing the diverse interests and opinions of 2 million people, people who want to see us. They want to hear from us. They want to speak to us. I alone represent 32 mayors and over 150 council members.

“And I know that everyone on this board works as hard as they can to represent our massive districts. But I think we would all admit it’s not easy and especially I don’t think it’s fair to our constituents. They deserve more people representing them and I think it’s time to add more seats to this dais.”

Solis immediately signaled her support for the proposal, assuring its passage. Then Mitchell spoke up, voicing her concern that nine members of the board would not be enough. She defended the process that still had not produced a governance study more than year later.

“You do not need to study, study, study….They’ve been studying county government since 1851 and there’s time for change. And the change and the time is now.”

That study, she argued, was critical to determining the right size for a board expansion.

“I’m not sure how this motion settled on nine given that we have not yet had the opportunity to receive a data-informed recommendation on the number of representatives for our 10-plus million population,” Mitchell said. “Again, the process we were engaging in was for the board to take the data-driven recommendations and make a decision about what we thought we should bring to the table. And again, while I believe that expanding the board is part of the solution, I don’t believe that expansion alone will solve some of the greatest challenges with LA County’s governance.

“In fact, changing our structure without evolving how we do business could lead to greater fragmentation internally and greater confusion externally about how constituents can engage in the county’s policy and budget development processes. Expansion must be considered alongside other reforms that could create more inclusive and truly transparent county processes.”

If Mitchell’s stance on the proposal was in doubt for anyone, she surely eliminated it over the next several minutes as she asked numerous, detailed questions about funding and the timing of reforms and who would have jurisdiction over what.

She concluded, “I just think that there’s too much at risk for us to take a bite at the apple that’s not absolutely ideal and meets the overall comprehensive, expansive governance reform needs of a county of 10 million.”

Supervisor Kathryn Barger, the board’s lone Republican, was similarly skeptical, saying at one point, “I really am unclear on how what’s being brought today will provide better representation because I believe when you look at the charge of this board, everyone is silent on unincorporated communities. I know in my districts I’ve incorporated town councils which are elected by the community leaders. So, when decisions are made in my unincorporated areas, I make sure that they feel that they have a voice because the unincorporated feels that they are always slighted at the expense of decisions made by this board, not taking into consideration that we are basically the mayor and the city council.”

After more than 3 ½ hours of debate and public comment, the proposal was put up to a vote, passing 3-0, with Mitchell and Barger abstaining. Measure G was born.

“It felt absolutely amazing to see this board of all women supervisors who had, in their own ways, contributed to the conversation that we were having as a county about the need for governance reform and structural reform,” Horvath said. “To see that we were taking this opportunity in this unique moment of all seats being occupied by women, people who actually didn’t have the right to vote the last time the county charter had been changed back in 1912, it’s not lost on me that the makeup of other boards past or future wouldn’t have been able to do what we were able to do.”

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With the board’s vote, a campaign for all intents was now on, with just 119 days until the election.

“We were on a compressed timeline,” Horvath said. “We needed that decision to happen, but more importantly we needed to make sure this wasn’t just on the ballot. We had to make sure that there was an education component to help people understand what opportunity was going to be at their fingertips.”

The supervisor suspected fundraising would be tough, and it was. So, from the outset, she focused her efforts on organizations she knew would be supportive and amplify the proposal’s message. The AAPI Equity Alliance, a collation of more than 50 community organizations serving 1.6 million Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in Los Angeles County, quickly emerged as a critical ally.

AAPI Equity liked the proposal, in part, because even though one in six Angelenos are AAPI they’ve never had a representative on the Board of Supervisors. The organization also produces an influential and widely read voter guide in LA County, which prominently endorsed Measure G.

“Measure G was really critical for our communities to have greater and more democratic governance,” said Manjusha “Manju” Kulkarni, executive director of AAPI Equity, which supported the measure with ads and text banking and by attending community events and participating in media interviews. “And so we felt that the increase in the number of supervisors would lead to more democracy in Los Angeles because it would enable community members to have more access to a local representative and be able to have their needs addressed and have representation potentially that knows and understands their issues in a more in-depth way.”

Activity on the campaign trail was light, although there loomed a sense that the Black community was concerned that the proposal could unfairly dilute its collective power. But there were no fractious community events or nasty debates on talk radio. The campaign was measured, quiet even, almost everywhere.

“I just think that there’s too much at risk for us to take a bite at the apple that’s not absolutely ideal and meets the overall comprehensive, expansive governance reform needs of a county of 10 million.”

About the only time tensions really arose was when the supervisors had to discuss the proposal more a few weeks after the motion to draft the measure was approved. On July 23, 2024, the board agenda called for the supervisors to officially vote on placing the now-drafted measure onto the ballot.

“We can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good,” Horvath said to open the discussion. “This is why instead of spending on consultants for years to come, with a proposal that sits on a shelf somewhere, we are prepared to ask the voters what they think and know whether they want this change.”

Barger responded, “The devil is in the details. Something this significant and historic shouldn’t be entered with the comment of ‘It’s not perfect.’ We have an obligation to our voters to make sure that when we do this, we do it right, especially whether it be the size or even the scope of how this is rolled out.”

Barger criticized the proposal from several angles, suggesting the process was not inclusive or transparent and wondered aloud why the board wasn’t waiting to complete the study it unanimously approved when the reforms proposed in the measure won’t even take effect for at least four more years.

“The motion authors are speaking of urgency and the need to push forward with reform now instead of waiting until the board approved consultant review and assessment is completed,” Barger said. “And I do agree with you Chair Horvath, it did take too long. Absolutely. This is something that we should have a sense of urgency to make sure that we do it right and get all the facts.”

Barger made a motion to strike from the measure the plan to elect a county executive, which was seconded by Mitchell, who made her opposition to the plan clear yet again.

LA County Supervisor Holly Mitchell. Photo by AP.

Quoting the African proverb “if you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together,” Mitchell said she and her colleagues “have a responsibility to break it down and go deep into the details…We have a responsibility to make it as clear and fair and honest as we can,” adding that she had “a growing concern that as we continue to debate this issue, we continue to conflate multiple issues. And I will continue to say that without study, planning and model maps, we won’t have the information we need about how to appropriately balance voting rights of communities of interest.”

Barger’s motion failed on a 3-2 vote. The measure was placed on the ballot, also on a 3-2 vote, with Horvath, Hahn and Solis supporting, but not before several members of the Black community spoke out against the plan during public comments.

“Pete White, Los Angeles Community Action Network,” said one speaker. “LA CAN opposes the proposed expansion ballot measure not because the black community does not believe in and fight for representative government and agree in concept on expansion as a pathway towards direct democracy. We oppose because this proposal does not check off any of the basic boxes. Why nine districts? How much does it cost? Why the rush to divide communities? Why an acknowledgement of the proposal being flawed, but promises to fix later? Six years to finish, bring it back to the community. You can’t make a bad ballot initiative better. No community in Los Angeles knows better the impact of failed or deliberate policy. Racial covenants. Redlining. Deindustrialization. The war on drugs. Homelessness. Organized abandonment. In our community, we must get it right the first time because second chances are nonexistent and deleterious impacts are deadly.”

By election day Horvath honestly didn’t know how Measure G would fare with voters. She spent that evening with friends, when the first election results came in showing that the measure was failing by a small margin. It was down the day after the election too. But on the third release of voting results, the tally started to favor the measure, and it kept going up from there. On November 11, 2024, the Measure G campaign declared victory.

Measure G ultimately passed with nearly 52 percent of the vote, a margin of a little more than 104,000 votes.

“I was elated,” Horvath said. “I was so in awe of the work that so many groups did to come together and make sure we didn’t miss this moment.”

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On November 26, 2024, the Board of Supervisors met to establish the Governance Reform Task Force to implement Measure G. Mitchell opened the discussion by congratulating Horvath on the victory.

“I know that this became frankly very personal. I know that given the time and energy and resources that you put into it, I want to congratulate you on your success,” she said. “That is very important. I also have been very public about my opposition to the measure for reasons that I have repeatedly stated. My concern about lack of specificity and our disagreement on whether the measure is truly cost neutral. And so I want to congratulate you. We have talked all day about that the voters have spoken. And what is important for my perspective on a go forward basis is making sure that we continue to uphold what was promised in Measure G.”

The task force is now up and running, led by Chair Marcel Rodarte, executive director of the California Contract Cities Association, and Vice Chair Nancy Yap, executive director of the Center for Asian Americans United for Self Empowerment. Sadhwani, the Pomona College assistant professor who advised Horvath on Measure G, is also a member.

The task force is the primary body responsible for overseeing the long process of implementing Measure G, which includes establishing a countywide ethics commission in 2026, electing a county executive in 2028 and expanding the Board of Supervisors to nine members in a staggered process starting in 2032, to coincide with decennial redistricting. Beginning in 2034, a new Charter Review Commission will meet every 10 years to review the County Charter and recommend updates as it deems necessary.

“I didn’t realize until we actually got to work how big it is,” said Rodarte, the task force chair. “This is historic stuff. When we look back at the county’s founding and all of these incredibly historic moments in time through the county’s history, this is one of those moments. … I kind of joke, this is the kind of stuff we should have streets named after us, the task force. This is huge. It’s a game changer in county governance, and I would expect that the work that we do is going to be looked at later by other counties, not only in California but across the country, to say ‘We need to do something similar because Los Angeles County, the largest county in the country, did this and so we should do this too, because it means better representation for our folks.’”

There is, however, at least one significant problem to address before all others. Due to what Mitchell called an “inexcusable administrative failing” by county executives and lawyers, Measure G also inadvertently repealed 2020’s voter-approved Measure J, which dedicates hundreds of millions of dollars toward programs that offer alternatives to incarceration.

“I’m certainly testing the boundaries of what it means to be a supervisor and will continue to do so because people are increasingly frustrated by what the status quo has delivered for them in terms of the reality that they face.”

While the administrative goof fueled criticism of Measure G, Horvath saw it as more proof that her historic measure was necessary.

“This situation makes clear why Measure G is so urgently needed,” she said in a statement. “When five people are in charge, no one is in charge, and this is a quintessential example of what that means.”

The Board and the Measure G task force are trying to come to some sort of resolution on how to ensure Measure J stays in effect and funded, with nothing certain as of yet.

In the meantime, Horvath’s attention is now also focused elsewhere: homelessness, wildfire recovery and ICE crackdowns by a confrontational federal government.

“My district has been very active this past year with the kinds of crises that we’ve been facing,” Horvath said.

Still, she’s following the task force’s work, knowing Measure G will forever be linked to her and her political future. Horvath reportedly is considering a run for mayor of the city of Los Angeles against the incumbent, former Assembly Speaker Karen Bass. There’s also talk she could be a candidate for the elected county executive position.

Horvath acknowledged to Capitol Weekly that she’s been approached about both a run for LA City mayor and the soon-to-be-elected county executive position. But she said for now she’s focused on seeking re-election as a supervisor, a role she relishes.

“I’m certainly testing the boundaries of what it means to be a supervisor and will continue to do so because people are increasingly frustrated by what the status quo has delivered for them in terms of the reality that they face,” she said. “I feel it’s my responsibility to use this role to the best of my ability in service to those who need help the most, who are really ready for change.”