L.A. County boss faces friction on job

What would anyone expect from a former City of Los Angeles executive. All you have to do is observe the inefficiency and corruption at city hall to see where the county is headed. Layer upon layer of bureaucracy have been created which ultimately results in less accountability. The unfortunate and costly result of the creation of these little fiefdoms is higher taxes and less service to the constituents of the county.

The reason major corporations have an officer like a CEO or president is to direct the operations and report back to the board of directors who in turn report to the stockholders. The stock holders can express their satisfaction or not by supporting them or electing new directors. The board of directors can do like wise with their executive officer(s). Why can not that work for the county?

Actually there are five reasons, to answer my own question. The quintet of liege lords that make up the Board don't want what has heretofore been unlimited control of their vassals in county government usurped. They have hired an executive so let him work and if you don't like it fire him and get another, that is how the real world works.

Privatization-outsourcing is the problem. Let the County Government hire the best and brightest to run the County. Private companies are looking for one thing, how to make money. There's no new idea on how to do business.

What a waste of money. Is adding another layer of beaurocratic mess to the scenario the way to fix things? Schunhoff isn't a prize either. As for MLK/Harbor you have to hire bright people who will blow whistles on lousy doctors and bad employees. I don't think that has been done before. Status quo is allowed to continue because nobody has the guts to complain which harms patients, etc. When folks do blow the whistle or try and stop employee incompetence, they get into trouble. That needs to stop and the sooner the better.

As a County employee, it seems that the Deputy CEO's are helping sometimes, because the Departments have to listen, but sometimes they slow things down because they naturally want to ask a lot of questions, which means some other things have to wait. Routine stuff gets held up when the Deputy CEO's get deeply involved in a few big issues.

There needs to be a way to let routine stuff go through without the CEO office trying to review every detail of a letter to the Board, for example.

They should move staff from the Board offices and Board's Executive Office to the CEO. That wouldn't cost any more, and would be more efficient, but the Board wouldn't like the idea, so it probably won't happen!

Just my Opinion wrote:

Privatization-outsourcing is the problem. Let the County Government hire the best and brightest to run the County. Private companies are looking for one thing, how to make money. There's no new idea on how to do business.

Sorry, you can't privatize the government, until someone can attach a dollar value to healthy kids, clean air, nice parks, voting rights, etc.

Kathy wrote:

What a waste of money. Is adding another layer of beaurocratic mess to the scenario the way to fix things? Schunhoff isn't a prize either. As for MLK/Harbor you have to hire bright people who will blow whistles on lousy doctors and bad employees. I don't think that has been done before. Status quo is allowed to continue because nobody has the guts to complain which harms patients, etc. When folks do blow the whistle or try and stop employee incompetence, they get into trouble. That needs to stop and the sooner the better.

You're right about King/Drew, but how do you suggest we fix it? It's not good enough to just say "people should do better." As you know, problems at the hospital were not fixed, even though we went through several Health dept. heads, and the Supervisors certainly aren't held responsible for any failures! The CEO is created to be accountable for the bureaucracy, and he has the power to fire department heads and change things. If he doesn't, he'll be fired by the Board. I think that means something.

I think this needs to be given a chance to work. It has only been a short time since the new structure was put in place, and there will certainly be some wrinkles. A big plus is that many routine decisions are now removed from the BOS, which had a culture of politicizing anything that touched on one of their pet causes. Board members served as each other's enablers. Now they point fingers of blame at Fujioka, who like Janessen had to clean up the mess they made at King/Drew, not to mention the millions they wasted putting off the enevitable. The K/D mess was only a very public example of BOS incompetence.