Phantom Governments

LAKEWOOD — Imagine California's local governments as a jigsaw puzzle with more than 5,000 pieces. They include the familiar outlines of cities (474), counties (58) and school districts (more than 1,000), and a bewildering variety of special districts (3,800). Keep in mind that most of these pieces have an elected board with a constituency that can number in the millions. Now, imagine that the government puzzle is in three dimensions, since many of the pieces have overlapping borders and parallel missions, and they often provide services to each other's citizens (who pay for them as property owners, ratepayers or consumers).

Is your head hurting yet?

It will, when you look more closely at the multitude of independent special districts (at least 2,200) that stand alone as California's phantom governments: the cemetery district that awaits the passing of fewer than 5,000 souls; the 24 hospital districts (out of 74) that have no hospitals but still take in $17 million a year in taxes; and the one-of-a-kind districts so obscure that hardly anyone knows what they do.

The districts' distance from voters and state policymakers has an enormous price tag. California voters passed a $1-billion water-bond measure in 1996 and another $2-billion measure last March not knowing that just 14 of the state's 458 water and irrigation districts (not counting the behemoth Metropolitan Water District) hold well over $3 billion in "retained earnings." The voters also didn't know that some water projects to be built with bond revenue (with an annual tax bill of $135 million) will benefit districts with some of the largest reserves.

Depending on how you do the math--and the districts dispute how it's done--California's special districts may be holding on to nearly $20 billion in reserves. Some of these districts, particularly those formed to provide irrigation water, go back to the 1880s, but it was only last year that the Legislature ordered the state's Little Hoover Commission on governmental efficiency to review their operations, largely because of the chaos in one special district: the Water Replenishment District of Southern California.

(In Lakewood, where I'm a city employee, the WRD is the "poster child" for