Orange County Supervisors are facing a real crisis in confidence from the public heading into the nation’s 250th birthday this Fourth of July.
Half of Orange County residents say their local county government has essentially been hijacked by big interests, which to me translates into county agencies that increasingly look out for themselves and politically-connected interests like developers rather than improving quality of life for residents.
Those are the stark conclusions of the latest poll from the UC Irvine School of Social Ecology, asking roughly 1,200 local residents about their views on their government institutions, released just before the Fourth of July holiday weekend.
To read the poll, click here.
“If you grade on a curve, OC may just barely pass,” said UCI School of Social Ecology Dean Jon Gould in an interview this week about the poll results. “But if you just grade straight up on merit, then all forms of government are failing in terms of residents’ trust in them.”
The report’s authors also concluded that “Orange County residents are also open to change, including expanding the Board of Supervisors and creating an elected County Executive, but many are still deciding whether reform is needed.”
It’s a reform I’ve been asking about for years, especially after 88% of LA County voters supported an expansion of their board of supervisors and the election of a county chief executive – essentially creating a countywide mayor.
Read: Santana: Time For an Elected Orange County CEO?
Keep in mind that our county government is essentially unchanged in structure since it was created in the 1880s.
“While dissatisfaction in Los Angeles translated into overwhelming support for structural change, Orange County residents remain somewhere in between: concerned about how county government operates, but not yet united behind a specific reform,” concluded the report.
According to the poll, the local institution with the most support was the local police department coming in at 60%, followed by community organizations at 52%.
Yet confidence in the bureaucrats and politicians running local government takes a steep dive after that.
Roughly four in ten residents (42%) say they have trust in the county government with a slightly lower trust level (40%) for city government.
For comparison, the federal government earned the lowest trust level of any government institution in the poll, at 25%.
Unlike views toward police, which see wide variance in support between Latinos, Asians and Whites, the skepticism toward local government is shared just about equally across ethnic and party lines, with trust dipping even further among independent voters.
Considering Solutions
When asked about expanding the Board of Supervisors and creating an elected County Executive, 47% support the proposal and 26% oppose it.
Another 27% say they are not sure — which report authors noted was among the largest undecideds on any question in the survey.
Trust in county government craters the younger you get, dropping to less than one in three residents trusting their county government who are under the age of 30.
The lack of trust for county government across ethnicity is relatively similar, with Whites (45%), Latinos (40%) and Asian Americans (44%) registering a lack of faith.
On the question of whether county government serves powerful interests over ordinary people, the groups converge almost entirely — roughly half of White, Latino, and Asian American residents share that concern, with differences of just a few percentage points.
The survey comes on the heels of Orange County supervisors voting to adopt a public budget with virtually no public debate, one that also boosted their pay by 25% while denying workers any raises.