By Robert Greene

2026–27 John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation Fellow

June 11, 2026

 

A lawsuit to preserve a mistakenly repealed Los Angeles County charter amendment relies on a novel legal theory: Two wrongs make a right.

Or to put it another way, a single monumental L.A. county screw-up would have been bad, but it was followed up by a second county flub that was so sweepingly inept that it erased the first mistake.

Whether the court will buy the argument is anyone’s guess.

The double error concerns Measure J, a 2020 ballot measure that sets an annual spending floor for alternatives to incarceration and racial equity programs, and Measure G, a 2024 measure to expand the Board of Supervisors, create an elected executive, establish an Ethics Commission and make several other governance reforms.

Without judicial or voter intervention, Measure J will be inadvertently repealed in 2028 when the elected executive provisions, a key portion of Measure G, kick in.

The problem became public in July 2025 when John Fasana discussed it at a meeting of the Governance Reform Task Force, a 13-member panel advising the board on how to put the Measure G reforms into effect. Measure G was written without reference to the existing Measure J and filled the space in the charter where Measure J was supposed to go.

On March 30, an organization called Californians United for a Responsible Budget, or CURB, asked a Los Angeles Superior Court judge to find that Measures G and J both remain valid despite any accidental conflict. The county filed its answer on April 21, admitting its multiple mistakes while remaining neutral on CURB’s creative legal theory.

The parties are due in court on July 14 for a trial-setting conference, but attorney Frederic Woocher of Strumwasser and Woocher, CURB’s attorneys, said he is hoping to accelerate the schedule and get a quick resolution. That conference date falls past the deadline to put any corrective measure on the November ballot.

The problem exacerbates a political and policy rift. The equity and governance reforms are not mutually exclusive, but various factions have differing priorities, with some willing to sacrifice Measure G to save Measure J, and vice versa, and some not wild about either measure. CURB has been a leading advocate for closing California prisons, and many of its leaders and members were also strong advocates for Measure J, and for closing the county’s Men’s Central Jail.

Let’s go through CURB’s argument and related issues. We don’t need to spend too much time on the first mistake – the one Fasana broached at the second Task Force meeting, on July 9, 2025, and that county officials later acknowledged. That’s already been reported on in detail.

Suffice it to say that voters passed Measure J in 2020, but implementation was stalled by a lawsuit, and the amount of money it made available for alternatives to incarceration was somewhat diminished by disagreements over what the measure’s language actually meant. But the biggest problem was that the clerk of the Board of Supervisors failed to add Measure J’s provisions to the online charter document published by Municode.com, a contractor that publishes law codes for many local jurisdictions around the nation, including L.A. County.

So county lawyers say that as a result, they didn’t see the Measure J provisions in 2024 when they drafted Measure G, which transfers many of the board’s powers to the new elected executive. In transferring those powers, the measure also inadvertently eliminates the board’s minimum spending requirement in Measure J

If you want to check out the details, take a look at Article III, Sec. 11, subsection (8) in Municode’s current county charter, and then see Article III A, which takes effect in December 2028.

As for the second mistake: Besides failing to add Measure J language to the charter, county officials were five years late in jumping through a series of required legal hoops for charter amendments.

It wasn’t until July 30, 2025 that the board clerk and chair prepared a certified copy of Measure J and filed it with Registrar-Recorder/Clerk Dean Logan, as required by law. And it wasn’t until Aug. 1, 2025 that Logan’s office attested or recorded the certified copy and sent it to the secretary of state.

Under Government Code Sec. 23723, a county charter amendment doesn’t take effect until the secretary of state accepts and files it.

Until Aug. 1, CURB argues, the language of Measure J wasn’t even part of the law when voters passed Measure G in 2024. The spending requirement in Article III, Sec. 11 subsection (8) didn’t yet legally exist, so how could voters have repealed it? They couldn’t. Screw-up number two, the argument goes, rescues us from screw-up number one.

Unfortunately, there’s a third screw-up.

The county didn’t file Measure G with the secretary of state on time either. That didn’t happen until Aug. 13 of last year – two weeks after Measure J was finally certified and filed. So Measure J was in effect before Measure G after all.

CURB’s position appears to be that the late filing of Measure G doesn’t matter. What’s important is that Measure J didn’t exist when voters passed Measure G, so they couldn’t have known that one measure invalidated the other.

OK, but wait. Two more hitches. Under Sec. 23723, Measure J was “ratified” by voters back in 2020, even if it wasn’t yet in effect. Does that make a difference? It’s not clear.

The second hitch is another state statute – Elections Code Sec. 9122 – which says voter-approved ordinances “become valid and binding” 10 days after the Board of Supervisors declares the official vote. If that section applies, it means Measure J really was in effect beginning in 2020, and CURB’s argument doesn’t work..

There appears to be a direct conflict between the Government Code section and the Elections Code section. Which prevails?

At least some lawyers in the Los Angeles County Counsel’s Office argued internally (for a time, at least) that the Elections Code prevails under the Court of Appeal ruling in San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors v. Monell, a lawsuit over a charter amendment in L.A. County’s neighbor to the east.

But the Elections Code section appears to apply only to initiatives – measures that are put on the ballot by voter petition. Both Measures J and G were put on the ballot by the Board of Supervisors, not by petition.

The outcome may depend in part on how the Monell ruling is interpreted. We’ll leave that convoluted analysis for another time.

In any event, the CURB lawsuit calls on the judge to do something judges are generally hesitant to do: rule that the plain language of a ballot measure does not express the will of the voters. Courts prefer to glean the will of the voters from the wording, not despite it.

This case may be the rare exception, given that there is little evidence that voters intended to undo their own charter reform (Measure J) four years later (in adopting Measure G).

It’s noteworthy that the multiple clerical and procedural failures took place in the midst of the pandemic, when the county was struggling to manage the public health crisis while much of its 100,000-plus workforce was at home, and when public meetings and other functions had moved to untried remote platforms. It fell to the Board of Supervisors’ clerk – officially known as the executive officer (although not to be confused with the chief executive officer!) – to keep things together. Amid the chaos, there were perhaps inevitable oversights.

Still, some of the activists behind Measure J insist that Measure G was part of an intentional effort by law enforcement interests to repeal Measure J because it arguably redirects money to anti-incarceration programs that might otherwise have gone to the Sheriff’s Department.

Soon after Fasana discovered the Measures J and G problem, advocates for J discussed going back to the ballot – to repeal G. If the CURB lawsuit fails, and any ballot solution is to happen this year, time is short. The deadline for the Board of Supervisors to put a measure on the Nov. 3 ballot is early July – before the lawsuit is scheduled for its first hearing.

At the board’s May 19 meeting, Supervisor Holly Mitchell asked the county counsel to return with a report on whether a charter reform ballot measure dealing with a new ethics commission could also solve the Measure J-versus-G fiasco.