Among the many items cluttering the ballots of Los Angeles County voters this November is a county charter amendment which few will read in full and even fewer will understand.
That’s Measure E, reproduced here for your perusal: “PROPOSED COUNTY CHARTER AMENDMENT. COUNTY OF LOS ANGELES ETHICS COMMISSION AND COMMUNITY INVESTMENT BUDGET ALLOCATION CHARTER AMENDMENT. Shall the measure amending the Los Angeles County Charter to provide greater independence and structure for the County of Los Angeles Ethics Commission, Office of Ethics Compliance, and Ethics Compliance Officer, including appointment processes, qualifications, term, duties and responsibilities, and to continue uninterrupted the County’s commitment to community investment and alternatives to incarceration, as specified in the charter amendment ordinance, be adopted?”
Whether you made it all the way through that or not, the question before voters presents a package of changes to the county charter — think of it as the county’s constitution — involving two distinct buckets of issues: one pertaining to the county’s ethics bureaucracy, and another about continuing the funding of “community investment and alternatives to incarceration.”
That latter bit is actually an attempt by the county government to correct a problem caused by the county government rushing the overhaul of the county charter back in 2024 with Measure G.
As described by Steve Scauzillo, when Measure G was put on the ballot two years ago to replace the county charter with a new one, “what voters did not know was that the measure mistakenly blotted out Measure J, approved by voters in 2020,” which “requires L.A. County to allocate 10% of its general fund each year for alternatives to incarceration, such as mental health and substance abuse treatment placements.”
This second bit of Measure E, then, is an attempt to put Measure J into the new county charter. But Measure J was bad policy in 2020, which is why we opposed it at the time, and it’s still bad policy in 2026.
As a general rule, ballot box budgeting is simply irresponsible.
If the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors wants to fund “alternatives to incarceration” or “access to capital for small minority-owned businesses, with a focus on Black-owned businesses,” they can vote on those things as part of the normal budget process without having to work around some arbitrary policy ideas from 2020.
Rather than subject whole swaths of spending to a vote of the general public, most of whom have neither the time nor interest in learning about the county budget, county supervisors can do their jobs and approve or disapprove spending accordingly.
Tying the hands of current and future county supervisors, as Measure J does, is simply poor governance and it isn’t needed.
Whatever the merits of the changes to the ethics bureaucracy, they are inconsequential to how Angelenos should vote on Measure E.
Measure E bundles plausibly fine ethics policy changes with the restoration of really bad policy.
Vote no on Los Angeles County’s Measure E. Keep the madness of 2020 out of the county charter.