When California turned a state in 1850, it had fewer than 100,000 residents and 27 sparsely populated counties. A number of have been bigger in land space than some states.
Nevertheless, its inhabitants was exploding with Gold Rush immigrants and nearly instantly they started urgent the Legislature to create new counties so they might extra simply entry providers akin to submitting mining claims.
Over the following 57 years, 27 counties turned 58 counties — one in every of which, Glenn County, was carved out of Colusa County in 1891 and named for my cousin, Hugh Glennthe state’s largest farmer till his homicide in 1883. All or components of 12 new counties have been fashioned by dividing up immense Mariposa County. The 58th, Imperial, was fashioned in 1907 from the japanese portion of San Diego County.
In the course of the late nineteenth century and effectively into the twentieth, California counties had a number of comparatively easy features, akin to rural regulation enforcement, highway upkeep and sustaining property data. Nevertheless, in the course of the latter a part of the twentieth century, federal and state governments created an array of well being and welfare packages and California opted to have counties handle them, slightly than the state itself or cities, as another states did.
Counties turned bifurcated as each brokers of the state and suppliers of native providers, and people roles have been typically in battle as a result of the previous was inescapably mandated whereas the latter was extra necessary to native voters and taxpayers.
The creation of greater than 400 included cities within the 1900s additionally difficult native governance. Cities diverted streams of property and gross sales tax revenues from counties and likewise tended to have concentrations of social ills — poverty, crime, drug dependancy and homelessness — that county-managed well being and welfare packages have been supposed to deal with.
Thus, California’s counties and cities, notably in extremely urbanized areas, have typically developed into adversaries slightly than companions in coping with problems with excessive public and media visibility.
What occurred final week in California’s most populous county and its largest metropolis, each named Los Angeles, exemplifies the intergovernmental tensions. The catalyst, after all, is homelessness, which sits atop Californians’ checklist of points.
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The state has spent greater than $20 billion in recent times to take care of homelessness however the ranks of the unhoused have continued to climb and now strategy 200,000by far the most important inhabitants of any state each quantitatively and comparatively. Gov. Gavin Newsom repeatedly accuses native governments of dragging their ft on creating efficient packages to take care of it.
In Los Angeles, metropolis and county officers have squabbled for many years over duty, and within the Eighties town even sued the county. Thirty-two years in the past, they agreed to type a joint company, the Los Angeles Homeless Providers Authority, however the infighting by no means stopped. In recent times, it has change into extra intense.
For the final 5 years, federal Choose David O. Carter has presided over a lawsuit filed by the LA Alliance for Human Rights, demanding to understand how the authority has spent homelessness funds. Carter has excoriated the company for a scarcity of motion and a scarcity of transparency, and it has additionally gone by way of two scathing audits.
Final week, the five-member Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted to tug out of the joint company and create its personal division to take care of homelessness, spurning pleas from metropolis officers, together with Mayor Karen Bass. Metropolis and county officers are additionally squaring off over newly amended laws, Senate Invoice 16that might require counties to offer more cash to cities for homeless shelters.
Homelessness is simply one of many many points that poison relations between metropolis and county officers. The rational response can be a statewide reconfiguration of the duties that acknowledges Twenty first-century realities and reduces the friction.
It’s not prone to occur, so the rivalry will proceed to fester.
