10-07-2025
- Politics
- Los Angeles Times
LA County's charter reform accidentally repealed anti-incarceration ballot measure
Last November, voters approved a sprawling overhaul to L.A. County's government.
They didn't realize they were also repealing the county's landmark criminal justice reform.
Eight months later, county officials are just now realizing they unwittingly committed an administrative screw-up for the ages.
Supervisors Lindsey Horvath and Janice Hahn co-authored Measure G, which changed the county charter to expand the five-person board and elect a new county executive, among other momentous shifts.
But nobody seemed to realize the new charter language would repeal Measure J, which voters approved in 2020 to dedicate hundreds of millions towards services that offer alternatives to incarceration.
'We can confirm that due to an inadvertent administrative error by a prior Executive Officer administration, Measure J was not placed in the County's Charter after its passage in 2020,' said County Counsel in a statement. 'As a result, when the voters passed Measure G, they repealed Measure J effective December 2028.'
The mistake appears to stem from a failure by the county's executive office to update the county charter with Measure J after it passed in 2020. County lawyers then failed to include the Measure J language when they drafted the 2024 ballot measure.
So when voters approved Measure G, they accidentally repealed Measure J, according to the county.
The screw-up was first discovered by John Fasana, a former Duarte Councilmember who sits on the county's governance reform task force, which is tasked with implementing the government overhaul. He said he first raised the issue with the county in early June.
'Someone goofed,' said Fasana, who was appointed to the taskforce by Supervisor Kathryn Barger. 'I couldn't believe it when I saw it.'
Megan Castillo, a coordinator with the Reimagine LA Coalition, which pushed Measure J to the ballot in 2020, said she was disturbed to learn last week that the fruit of years of advocacy would soon be wiped away accidentally.
'It shouldn't be undermined just because folks rushed policy making,' said Castillo. 'We know more voters were for Measure J than Measure G. It's disrespectful to the will of the people to find this could unintentionally happen.'
Measure J requires that 10% of locally generated, unrestricted L.A. County money — estimated between $360 million and $900 million — be spent on social services, such as housing, mental health treatment and other jail diversion programs. The county is prohibited from spending the money on the carceral system — prisons, jails or law enforcement agencies.
Castillo said she was worried the repeal would result in a 'deep economic fallout' for these programs with county money potentially diverted to costs required by Measure G, like the salaries of new politicians and their staff. Measure G bars the county from raising taxes meaning this money will have to come from elsewhere in the county budget.
Castillo said she first brought the issue to the attention to deputies for Hahn and Horvath last week.
'They are shocked as well,' said Castillo.
Supervisor Lindsey Horvath, who led the charge on Measure G, said in a statement a proposal was coming to correct the 'County bureaucracy's error related to Measure J.'
'This measure was the result of a hard-fought, community-led effort that I wholeheartedly supported—and remain deeply committed to upholding,' said Horvath. 'This situation makes clear why Measure G is so urgently needed. … When five people are in charge, no one is in charge, and this is a quintessential example of what that means.'
Supervisor Kathryn Barger, who opposed the overhaul of the county charter, saw it a little differently.
'It also reinforces one of the key concerns I had about Measure G from the start. When major changes to the County Charter are pushed forward without sufficient time for analysis, public input, and transparency, mistakes become more likely. Oversights like this are exactly what can happen,' Barger said in a statement. 'This error could–and should–have been caught before voters were asked to make a decision.'
Supervisor Hilda Solis said she was 'surprised and concerned' to learn about the error but was confident the funding envisioned by Measure J would 'continue unaffected.'
The Times reached out to the other two supervisors and has yet to receive their responses.
County attorneys said in a statement they were working with the executive office to 'address this situation' and ensure the executive office 'timely codified' charter amendments going forward. They emphasized that, despite the looming repeal of Measure J, the county will continue to align its budget with the goals of the measure.
Derek Hsieh, head of the Assn. for Los Angeles Deputy Sheriffs and a member of the governance reform taskforce member, called the mistake a 'cluster—.'
'I think the voters and county employees would like to know when the Board of Supervisors knew about this mistake and what they plan on doing to fix it,' said Hsieh, who was an outspoken opponent of both Measure G and Measure J.
The union, which represents sheriff's deputies, had spent more than $3.5 million on advertising on TV and social media to fight Measure J. The union had also joined other county labor unions to challenge the measure in court.
'There's absolutely no question both by the will of the voters and a decision by the California Supreme Court that Measure J is the law of the land,' said Hsieh.
The screw-up became public Wednesday night at the task force's second-ever meeting. Fasana told his fellow members who had gatherered at Bob Hope Patriotic Hall downtown he had found 'a major issue.'
The news created something of an uproar in meeting that was supposed to focus on more mundane bureaucratic matters. Some members said they wanted to wait to discuss it until everyone had been briefed on what exactly he was talking about.
Others said they didn't understand how they could talk about anything else.
'To me all the work we're trying to move forward with stops because there's a problem —a significant, fundamental one,' said Derek Steele, who was appointed by Supervisor Holly Mitchell.
'We may actually need to take Measure G back to the people,' said Steele. ' We need to make sure we have a solve for this.'
Both Mitchell and Barger opposed Measure G, arguing it had been put together too hastily and gave too much power to an ill-defined county executive.
Sara Sadhwani, who was appointed to the task force by Horvath, said she found the accidental repeal of Measure J 'incredibly concerning,' but found the way the news had been delivered to the task force 'obstructive.'
'It raises so many questions for me and raises concerns about who is operating in good faith on this task forcem,' said Sadhwani. 'If this was a good faith effort, wouldn't we have agendized this issue, instead of dropping a bomb that people have no knowledge of.'
The taskforce has asked for a report from the county's attorneys for their next meeting.
Jaclyn Cosgrove contributed to this story.
