More Endorsements

JUDICIAL

Judge of the Superior Court,
Office No. 31 — Katherine Mader

COUNTY

District Attorney — Steve Cooley

Clip this endorsement. Put it in your scrapbook and save it, because it may be the only time you’ll see this paper endorse a law-and-order Republican for district attorney. But what other choice is there?

Current D.A. Gil Garcetti seemed promising when he first ran for office eight years ago. A Democrat who spoke of using the office as a force for crime prevention and positive social change, he seemed willing to use the bully pulpit that goes with the office to promote those causes. He still talks the talk, particularly at election time, but his record is spotty at best.

Despite his professed belief that California’s Three Strikes law should apply only to serious felonies, for instance, he has adopted a harder line in prosecuting such cases than D.A.s in some other counties. In 1995, citing budget constraints, he dumped the D.A.’s rollout team charged with investigating officer-involved shootings, a cutback we can’t help but feel contributed to the Rampart officers’ confidence that their gun attacks on the citizenry would go unscrutinized. For that matter, we couldn’t help but notice that the budget crunch didn’t stop Garcetti from, at the same time, committing his prosecutors to pursue trademark infringement cases so important to such big-time Garcetti contributors as the Marciano brothers of Guess jeans. Time and again, he’s been loath to pursue local corruption cases, from the allegations swirling around former Councilman Richard Alatorre to the scandals associated with the Belmont Learning Complex.

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But all these failings pale when compared to Garcetti’s handling of the Rampart scandal, which has more seriously undermined the credibility of the justice system in this county than any other event in L.A.’s history. It’s hard to tell exactly what he’s done, since he refuses to talk about most things connected to the scandal, but what he hasn’t done is glaring. He’s dragged his feet about releasing the names of defendants involved in cases brought by rogue officers; he hasn’t provided any insight into why his office failed to take action when, before any of the scandal came to light, one of his own assistants dismissed a case because Officer Perez had lied on the stand; and perhaps most egregious, he’s failed to affirm in any meaningful way to the people of this city that his office is committed to truth and justice. He has, belatedly, restarted the rollout team, but in doing so he has failed to adequately address flaws in the program that rendered it ineffective in actually rooting out officer wrongdoing.

Thus we turn to Garcetti’s contenders. Environmental attorney Barry Groveman is at first glance appealing. A Democrat who both established the District Attorney’s environmental crimes unit and helped with the drafting of Proposition 65, the state’s far-reaching toxic-chemical initiative, Groveman has demonstrated knowledge of and concern with environmental issues. But he then took what he’d learned and went into private practice, sometimes defending the very kind of polluters he’d previously tried to regulate.

As a private attorney, Groveman’s clients have also included a variety of governmental agencies, most prominently the L.A. Unified School District, where his impact has been significant. He takes credit in one instance for persuading district officials to abandon a proposed school site on contaminated land. But observers point out that Groveman also led a group of attorneys whose job it was to deflect the district’s responsibility for the cleanup of toxics near Jefferson Middle School, an action critics say had the effect of exposing the children there to unacceptable levels of risk. Working behind the scenes, Groveman helped engineer last fall’s palace coup that toppled Superintendent Ruben Zacarias, a move that, depending on your viewpoint, was either long overdue, unnecessarily cruel or both. In short, while Groveman has certainly affected change at the district, it’s tended to be of the wrecking ball variety: We’ve seen less of his ability to build things back up. We also worry that he’d be supervising an office full of attorneys with vastly more prosecutorial experience than he possesses. As a city attorney he prosecuted misdemeanors, but he has little felony experience.

Groveman, a moderately liberal attorney of intelligence and energy, might be someone worth taking a chance on in ordinary times. But these are in no way ordinary times. Whoever takes over the District Attorney’s Office must move swiftly to re-establish its credibility, making clear that its mission is to make cases fairly and honestly and to punish wrongdoing regardless of the perpetrator.

Steve Cooley, the other candidate for Garcetti’s job, has many of the qualities we’d like in a top prosecutor. A head deputy district attorney who directs the welfare-fraud unit, he’s got a reputation for honesty, integrity and effective, hands-on management. He’s outspoken about the need to re-evaluate policy in light of the Rampart scandal, promising that he’d initiate immediate action if a cop were found to be lying. And he’s been highly critical of Garcetti’s glacial slowness in dealing with the crisis.

Cooley is far from perfect. He is a Republican who talks a tough line on crime and served on a Pete Wilson judicial-appointments review body. He’s never going to be the sort of outspoken advocate for crime prevention we’d like to see, nor will he give much thought to the underlying economic and social conditions that breed crime. But his positions aren’t knee-jerk. He says he would make it mandatory office policy that third-strike prosecutions not be pursued except in cases of serious felonies, and he’s opposed to Proposition 21, the draconian child-punishment law that Wilson has placed on the March ballot.

We’ve had a long string of politically ambitious district attorneys who’ve used the position as a stepping stone. At a time when the office is in crisis, we think it’s time to turn to someone — even a highly imperfect someone — who is first and foremost a good and honest prosecutor, which is why, reluctantly but unambiguously, we’re supporting Steve Cooley.

Supervisor, 2nd District —
No Endorsement

Supervisor, 4th District —
No Endorsement

Supervisor, 5th District —
No Endorsement

This year, despite all the frenetic campaigning for other offices, the three incumbents up for re-election on the County Board of Supes — Democrat Yvonne Burke and Republicans Don Knabe and Mike Antonovich — face no opposition at all. Their free ride is certainly not due to their unassailable performance, or their unchallengeable political orientations, which, in fact, vary widely. Knabe is a moderate Republican, while Antonovich is really the sole remaining Reaganite to be found in L.A. government. (Recently, he opposed his fellow supes’ ban on gun shows on county property.) Yvonne Burke is a mainstream, at times corporate, Democrat. Zev Yaroslavsky and Gloria Molina get into more scraps for more causes (some but not all of them liberal) than Burke, and hold more liberal positions (not all of which they fight for) than Burke as well.

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The bigger scandal here is that, alone of all the political offices in L.A., that of supervisor — perhaps the most powerful of all — now goes unopposed. By creating term limits for some offices (city and state) but not other (county and federal), we’ve created a two-tier system in which some levels of government are in perpetual turnaround while others almost never see a single electoral challenge. Being a supe these days is almost like being a lifetime peer: You can’t pass it down to your kids, but you can stay as long as you want. Supervisorial districts in L.A. now contain almost 2 million people, and insurgent campaigns need to buy TV time in the nation’s second largest and costliest media market. Such campaigns are prohibitively expensive, which again benefits incumbents, since there’s no statute on the books to forbid them from raising money from the folks, and the mega-conglomerates, who do business with the county. Consequently, anyone looking to run for office looks anywhere but the position of county supervisor — at least until one of the supes decides to retire.

In short, an entire level of government has ceased to be subject to the democratic control of elections. Just thought you’d like to know.

STATE MEASURES

1A — No

Proposition 1A, which would greatly increase Indian “gaming” (the genteel word for gambling) in California, results from a compact that California’s tribes signed last year with the governor and the Legislature. It would permit them to erect new casinos on tribal land, to enlarge existing ones and to install anywhere from 40,000 to 100,000 slot machines. Unlike 1998’s ballot measure, Proposition 1A would enable casino employees to form unions at work. Since it benefits Native Americans and creates decent-paying jobs with benefits, we should be for it, right?

Wrong. First off, the number of Native Americans it benefits is really quite small. Second, job creation, even good job creation, can never be the primary criterion for a public project’s merit: if it were, we should be supporting more funding for the B-2 bomber and Star Wars. Problem is, those weapons programs wouldn’t contribute to, and might actually imperil, national security. And in like fashion, the addition of 200 more casinos to California wouldn’t contribute to, and might well imperil, the quality of California life — and Californians’ lives.

Gambling is many things for many people, but looked at in aggregate, it is a mechanism for upward redistribution of income — the paychecks of working Californians ending up enriching Steve Wynn and his shareholders, or the 100 millionaires of the Morongo Tribe. For many people, it is an addiction; for others, an opportunity for corruption. (An opportunity enhanced by the fact that regulation of the state’s tribal casinos will be far more lax than Nevada’s regulation of its nontribal casinos, since the tribes have sovereignty.) Indeed, the only reason Davis and the Legislature were so eager to sign this compact was that the tribes had contributed millions of dollars to their campaigns the corruption has already begun. Nor are we encouraged that the minimum age for gambling at these casinos will be 18 — three years younger than the Nevada standard. All in all, 1A is a sucker bet for California.

12 — Yes

As everyone from Richard Riordan to Mike Davis has noted, L.A. doesn’t have much in the way of parks — in fact, less parkland relative to its size than any other major American city. Worse yet, since Proposition 13 passed fully 22 years ago, the funds for acquiring new parkland anywhere in California have largely dried up. Now that the state is experiencing a new birth of prosperity, though, the Legislature and the governor have placed a major bond issue on the March ballot to make up lost ground on parklands. Proposition 12 is a $2.1 billion bond measure for parkland acquisition and improvement, with about $1.16 billion going to the state for mountains, coastlands, rivers and other natural resources, and $940 million going to cities and counties to do with as they will. The cost to taxpayers will be about $4 a year per Californian for a period of around 25 years. It’s an important measure and a good deal, and we strongly recommend its passage.

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13 — Yes

The substance of the Safe Drinking Water, Clean Water, Watershed Protection and Flood Protection Bond Act is all there in the title. This is a $1.97 billion bond issue to provide more water to Californians by increasing underground storage, promoting better conservation and recycling. It will also go to better controlling river, lake and coastal pollution. We live, let us remember, in a semi-arid climate, and we ain’t got water to waste (although moving the primary from dry June to rainy March may cause some people to forget this fact). Vote Yes on 13.

14 — Yes

And vote Yes on 14, which is a $350 million bond to build new or enhance old libraries. The tab for the libraries will be split between the state and municipalities, with priority given to cities and counties that build joint facilities with their school districts. With urban space already built up and with schools in need of more and better after-school programs, that’s a very sound priority.

15 — Yes

The sponsors of the Hertzberg-Polanco Crime Lab Construction Bond — which authorizes a $220 million bond issue to build, just as you surmised, new crime labs — argue that cops and prosecutors need better tools and technology to do their work. So they do, but funding new and better crime labs serves blind justice as much if not more than it serves prosecutorial interests, since one of the projects the funding will go to will be more DNA testing facilities. In short, Prop. 15 will better enable the system to nail the real culprits and to exonerate the innocent — some of them, as we’ve recently seen, who are doing hard time through wrongful convictions.

16 — Yes

Currently, the state operates two residential homes for elderly and disabled veterans — one in Napa County, one in Barstow (if that’s not a two-tier system, we don’t know what is). Prop. 16 is a $50 million bond issue that will enable the state to build two new residences and renovate the Napa facility.

17 — Yes

In California, church elders, PTA Pooh-Bahs and Boy Scout troop leaders are all habitual criminals. Here’s why: It turns out that raffles are illegal in California. That’s right: raffles. The things where they give you prizes if you’re holding the right number.

Nonprofit organizations are forbidden from conducting raffles, and have been
for the last hundred years. Rather than
encourage another century of scofflaws,
the people behind Prop. 17 want you to legalize raffles for nonprofits. Now, there’s something to be said for the frisson of lawbreaking, but since no one conducting a raffle realized he or she was breaking the law, it was never much of a frisson. We can’t think of a single reason to vote against this.

18 — No

George Deukmejian is still running against Rose Bird. The purpose of Prop. 18, he tells us at the outset of the ballot argument, is to correct “two odd decisions by the Rose Bird Supreme Court.” The goal of this measure is to extend the death penalty to murderers who killed their victims after transporting them to another location, or if arson or kidnapping were instrumental to the murder. You’ve gotta give the Duke credit: It takes a real visionary to realize that the problem with California today is that there aren’t enough people on death row, and that it’s still Rose Bird’s fault. No other advanced industrial democracy has had capital punishment for years; the Republican governor of Illinois has just ordered a stop to executions because too many death row inmates were being proved innocent. But the Duke fears that California isn’t dispatching enough inmates. The fear’s understandable, since violent crime is way down. The only way to meet the Duke’s quota, it seems, is to classify more crimes as capital. This measure extends an already barbaric practice, and we strongly recommend a vote against it.

19 — No

There’s a two-tier system for second-degree murder sentences in California. Second-degree murder is generally punishable by 15 years–to–life, but second-degree murder of a sheriff or police officer is punishable by 25-to-life. Prop. 19 extends this additional police-officer protection (if it is a protection; it’s certainly not a perk) to the police officers who work for the Cal State Universities and the Bay Area Rapid Transit System. On the one hand, we certainly believe that all cops are created equal. On the other hand, we don’t think longer incarcerations are what California needs now, with existing prisons already jammed and new prisons prohibitively expensive. We also don’t think a statutory change so minuscule should have to be voted on by upwards of ten million Californians. (Note to Richard Riordan: When you’re termed out, maybe you’d like to reform the state constitution.) That’s one argument for and two against, which is enough to turn us against this somewhat silly proposition.

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20 — No

This measure mandates that half the money going to school districts from the state lottery be earmarked for textbooks. We know there’s a shortage of textbooks in many California schools, but there’s also a glut of mandates coming down from on high — in this case, from Sacramento. This one-size-fits-all approach gives no flexibility to districts where the most pressing need may be higher teacher salaries or equipment. Prop. 20 is poorly thought out. We recommend a No vote.

21 — No

Old Republican governors never die; they just grow steadily meaner. On the heels of George Deukmejian’s Prop. 19 comes Pete Wilson’s Prop. 21 — a vicious piece of mischief from the Little Marine. It’s a hodgepodge of tough-on-crime posturing directed at young people. It requires adult trials for juveniles 14 or over charged with sex crimes or murders. It reroutes juveniles 16 or older convicted in adult court from Youth Authority camps to adult prisons. It stops the sealing of records of juveniles convicted of certain serious crimes. It increases the penalties for certain gang-related crimes, and adds to the number of felonies that qualify as “strikes” under the Three Strikes law.

Prop. 21 will come up for a vote at about the same time the number of Americans in prison passes the 2 million mark. We imprison more people than the rest of the industrial democracies combined. We particularly imprison more kids. Indeed, according to Amnesty International, only six nations have executed minors in the 1990s: Iran, Pakistan, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and the U.S. All told, 19 children were executed during the decade — 10 of them in the U.S.

Many programs present alternatives to locking up an entire generation of nonwhite boys and young men. But there’s one problem: They can’t be used as political wedge issues by demagogic Republicans trying to show the Democrats as soft on crime. (In fact, Prop. 21 is so ludicrous that its opponents include Republican Senatorial candidate Tom Campbell, Republican L.A. D.A. candidate Steve Cooley, and Cardinal Mahony.) It was Pete Wilson who put this issue on the ballot, back when he still planned to run for president: It was intended to help him win the March primary. Now Wilson’s career, like Deukmejian’s, is over, but neither one can refrain from putting the kind of inflammatory initiative on the ballot that helped win elections in more violent and frightened times than these.

Crime is down, jails are overflowing, Gray Davis is more than happy to execute everyone on death row — and still Pete
the Mean and Duke the Dull think they can score political points by playing the soft-on-crime card. Vote these bastards down.

22 — No

Speaking of cruel, atavistic nonsense, here’s Prop. 22, the Knight Initiative, which saves the state from the scourge of gay marriage. Never mind that state law already stipulates that a legal marriage can only exist between a man and a woman. This is just a nasty piece of gay-bashing from state Senator Pete Knight, a homophobic dimwit estranged from his gay son. If anyone’s concerned about a threat to the sanctity of marriage, they should write Knight’s fellow Republican, Rupert Murdoch, and complain about Fox TV’s Who Wants To Marry a Multimillionaire? Prop. 22 is simply a way to demean and debase gays, lesbians, people who believe in human equality, and people who believe loving couples should have the right to stay together under the umbrella of the law.

When you consider that the three initiatives placed on the ballot by Republican electeds this March are the Deukmejian measure, the Wilson proposal, and this, you can understand why the Republicans are in trouble in California.

23 — No

Another piece of nonsense, as stupid as the Knight initiative is cruel. This measure gives voters the option to vote for “None of the Above” in candidate elections in California, but the vote will have no bearing on the outcome of the election. (That is, the winning candidate could receive four votes, and “None of the Above” six votes, and the winning candidate would still win.) Like term limits and cutting legislators’ pay, the None-Above option is a non-solution to voter alienation. Voters seeking a wider range of options, or a cleaner political process, need to look toward ending winner-take-all races in favor of proportional representation systems, or to genuine campaign-finance reform. The only state that has the None-Above option is Nevada, which remains the most politically alienated state in the nation. This proposition only deepens the problem it professes to cure.

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24 — This measure was removed from the ballot by the California Supreme Court.

25 — Yes

Californians have voted for campaign- finance reform repeatedly over the past 15 years. But the state remains one of only six states that have no spending and contribution limits at all. A series of court decisions have negated every single reform initiative, meaning that this is a state where Rupert Murdoch can write a last-minute million-dollar check to the state Republicans, or the states’ HMOs can deluge legislators with contributions to forestall a patients’ bill of rights.

Prop. 25, the handiwork of maverick Republican Ron Unz and Democratic former Acting California Secretary of State Tony Miller, is the latest stab at campaign finance reform, and unlike previous efforts, it’s been written to withstand a court challenge. The measure restricts individual and political-action committee donations to $3,000 for district and local campaigns and $5,000 for statewide campaigns. It prohibits the transfer of funds between campaign committees — historically, the way the state legislative leadership funds the campaigns of candidates in hotly contested districts. It prohibits any donations from corporations and places new restrictions on business and union PACs. It would also limit the period for fund-raising to one year before the election, so that elected officials wouldn’t constantly be trolling for dollars while in office. Soft-money donations to the parties for activities not related so specific to candidates or not involving electronic advertising (like registration, get-out-the-vote and so on) are left unregulated — that is, the sky’s the limit.

The measure also sets a series of voluntary spending limits for state and district offices — ranging from $700,000 for Assembly seats to $16 million for governor (the figures are for the primary and general combined), as well as $6 million for initiative campaigns. In return for adhering to these limits, a statewide candidate or initiative would receive state-funded credits to buy airtime, up to $1 million worth for governor and $300,000 for lesser candidates, and all state candidates, could have the state send out four bundled mailings, again, at state expense. All donations to a candidate under $100 are matched 10-to-1 by state funds for media credits.

Finally, the initiative breaks new ground on issues of public disclosure of donations and expenditures. All donations of $1,000 or more would have to be posted on the Internet within 24 hours, and all campaign ads of any kind (TV, radio, mailers, phone recordings), no matter how slanderous, would have to be posted on the Internet, too. The largest funders of every campaign would have to be listed on all ads and campaign material. When campaign ads feature individuals’ endorsements (like that of TV “consumer-advocate” David Horowitz for the utility industry’s position in a recent campaign), the fact that the individual was paid by the campaign has to be part of the ad (in Horowitz’s case, he was paid $150,000). Slate mailing, too, have to prominently list their funding sources.

Like every campaign-finance reform initiative in recent history, Prop. 25 has split the reform movement down the middle. Critics argue that its contribution caps are too high — but they were so drafted because the courts have struck down lower limits. If, in the wake of one recent court ruling, the courts now uphold the lower limits of Prop. 208, still currently being litigated, Prop. 25 specifically says that 208’s lower limits supersedes its own. Critics also argue that it does nothing to restrict
millionaire candidates (an Al Checchi or Michael Huffington, say) from funding their own races, but that’s because under the terms of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ludicrous 1976 Buckley v. Valeo decision, to do so would be unconstitutional. Finally, some reformers won’t be satisfied by anything short of full public financing of campaigns. Neither will we, but there’s no plausible chance that such a measure could be enacted in California in the foreseeable future. There’s some validity to all the above objections, but in the end, they make the perfect the enemy of the good. Yes, the contribution caps are too high, but at the moment, California has no limits at all. By the same token, partial public funding is much better than none.

Our chief concern is the potential effect 25 may have on the ability of unions to wage political campaigns, particularly since, in recent years, unions have done a stellar job of getting union and nonunion working-class Californians, including many new immigrants, to the polls. The huge, last-minute campaign contributions from the California Teachers Association and the Service Employees to decent candidates would be scrapped, but, since the offsetting (or more than offsetting) last-minute contributions from Philip Morris or Rupert Murdoch to indecent candidates would also be banned, this strikes us as a wash. On the other hand, the kind of campaigns that unions have grown very adept at in recent years — those directed at their own members, and independent expenditure campaigns targeting other groups of voters — would be unaffected. Unions’ political efforts, and clout, should emerge from 25 in pretty good shape.

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On balance, we think this measure is a significant step toward fairer elections and a cleaner political culture. We strongly urge a Yes vote on Proposition 25.

26 — Yes

Proposition 26 is the single most important measure on the primary ballot. It would end one of the most undemocratic and debilitating features of California life. Currently, when a school district asks voters to approve a bond measure so that new schools can be constructed or old ones improved, it requires a two-thirds popular vote to pass the measure. Prop. 26 reduces that requirement to a simple majority.

The current two-thirds requirement is bad law that leads to worse pedagogy. The requirement for a supermajority is rare in American law; it is something the founders consciously shunned. It takes only a simple majority of Congress, for instance, to declare war. To the opponents of Prop. 26, like the leaders of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers’ Association, however, the vote of one tax opponent can — and should — cancel out the votes of two tax supporters. How this squares with the notion that all men are created equal is not at all clear.

The practical consequences of the two-thirds requirement have been devastating for California schools, and schoolchildren. Since 1986, 94 percent of local school bond measures have received a majority vote, but only 54 percent have received the two-thirds required for passage. For years, an aging, disproportionately Anglo electorate has refused to build schools for disproportionately Latino public school children: By using the two-thirds provision, a minority has thwarted the majority’s desire, and need, for schools. Meanwhile, the scarcity of classrooms grows steadily more severe.

The two-thirds requirement may well be the single greatest threat to California’s future. We strongly recommend scrapping it, and restoring majority rule in California, by voting for Prop. 26.

27 — No

This year, half the measures on the ballot seem to have been drawn up by a splinter group of Reform Party Waco conspiracy theorists and UFOlogists. On the heels of Prop. 23’s nonbinding None-of-the-Above silliness comes Prop. 27, which permits — rather than mandates — congressional candidates to sign nonbinding — rather than meaningful — ballot declarations that they intend to serve no more than three terms in the House or two terms in the Senate. Blocked from pursuing term limits by court rulings that the Constitution lets Congress determine the terms of congressional membership, and deluded that term limits are in any way a serious effort at political reform, the proponents of this measure have offered a proposal which, if enacted, would have an impact so minute as to approach the political equivalent of absolute zero. Does the California initiative process have an affirmative-action program for flakes? Where do these people come from?

28 — No

Here’s a welcome change. Prop. 28
isn’t stupid, just evil.

This measure repeals Prop. 10, the tobacco tax that California voters enacted in November ’98. The money from Prop. 10 goes to fund childhood immunization programs, health education and smoking-prevention projects for pregnant women, and preschool programs. Prop. 28 is funded by a large tobacco chain store that distributes and markets cigarettes. The stench here is not that of cigarettes, but greed.

29 — Yes

This proposition is an alternative to 1A, the Indian Gaming measure. It, too, would authorize casinos on tribal lands, but they would be far smaller, devoid of slots, required to hold union elections for their employees, and subject to environmental regulations. It’s a far better proposal for California than Prop. 1A, but the big bucks, of course, are behind that measure. As is often the case in casinos, the fix is in.

30 — Yes
31 — Yes

Say you’re in an auto accident, and the other party is at fault, but his or her insurance company won’t pay up, or keeps offering a ridiculously small amount, or just keeps delaying. Under the Royal Globe decision of the Rose Bird Supreme Court, you could sue the other party’s insurance company. Then George Deukmejian persuaded state voters to dump Bird and her cohorts, and the conservative justices whom Deukmejian appointed in their stead reversed Royal Globe, meaning, if the insurance company stiffed you, you just had to lump it. Now, with Democrats in control of the Legislature and the Governor’s Office for the first time since the Royal Globe reversal, a bill went through last year restoring your right to sue. With that, insurance-industry giants Allstate, State Farm and Farmers shelled out for a ballot measure requiring state voters to vote the new laws up or down. Prop. 30 ratifies the law the Legislature enacted, and 31, which only kicks in if 30 passes, ratifies certain restrictions the Legislature passed as corollaries to the right-to-sue bill. The insurance companies argue that if these measures pass, the number of lawsuits against them for bad faith, holding up claim checks and the like, will soar raising your premiums. Of course, if the companies actually paid the claimants what they were owed, the number of claims wouldn’t soar at all, but it’s hard to change the habits of a lifetime. The companies have taken to the airwaves, highlighting some fraudulent claims they might be compelled to pay off if 30 and 31 pass, but the real fraudulent claims here are the companies’. They are, essentially, trying to hoodwink us into letting them continue to shortchange us. Like the state’s consumer groups, we strongly recommend a Yes vote on 30 and 31.

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COUNTY MEASURE

A — No

At present, the directors of the county’s various departments — Health, Welfare and so on — are political appointees, which they should be, since they must carry out the mandates of the elected Board of Supervisors. All their underlings, however, are civil servants. Measure A reclassifies the department heads’ top deputies out of civil service, so that they can be political appointees as well. Since these are often policy-making positions, the proposal makes some sense; we supported an equivalent measure for L.A. city government. The workings of county government, however, are nowhere near so transparent as the city’s. The supes might very well swap deputy-director appointments (my guy here, your guy there) absent the kind of public scrutiny from which the county, in fact, has long been immune. We’re against Prop. A.