Los Angeles County Board Of Supervisors

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors has voted unanimously to rename the San Fernando Valley Juvenile Hall after retired Chief Probation Officer Barry J. Nidorf. Nidorf, who retired in March, was instrumental in leading the Probation Department through seven years of rough fiscal waters, including a near collapse of the county government in 1995 and many years of budget cuts.

Expressing optimism about Los Angeles County's fiscal future, Chief Administrative Officer David Janssen presented a proposed annual budget Monday that for the first time since a 1995 brush with bankruptcy would not require cuts in services and jobs to close a projected deficit. The $13.2-billion annual spending blueprint--a whopping 5.

Expressing optimism about Los Angeles County's fiscal future, Chief Administrative Officer David Janssen presented a proposed annual budget Monday that for the first time since a 1995 brush with bankruptcy would not require cuts in services and jobs to close a projected deficit. The $13.2-billion spending blueprint--a whopping 5.3% larger than last year's annual spending plan--actually restores a few critical services for the first time in years, thanks to an influx in state and federal moneys.

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors ordered authorities to investigate why three youths, who committed no crime beyond their failure to testify against their father, were jailed in juvenile hall for 12 days and brought to court in handcuffs and leg chains, county officials said Tuesday. Judge Lance A. Ito, who ordered the children taken into custody after they escaped foster care twice, would not comment on the case.

The Board of Supervisors, meeting behind closed doors, voted 4 to 1 to name attorney Mark Saladino the county's treasurer and tax collector, replacing Larry Monteilh, who is retiring after 30 years of county service. The 40-year-old Saladino, now principal deputy county counsel, will head a sprawling financial bureaucracy that manages not only the county's treasury, but also its investments.

The humdrum drone of the Board of Supervisors' usual deliberations was punctuated Tuesday by a sharp ideological debate over the 1st Amendment and police conduct. The occasion was a motion by conservative Supervisor Mike Antonovich to direct county lawyers to file briefs supporting police officers suing citizens who they allege have lodged false misconduct complaints against them.

County Supervisor Mike Antonovich unveiled a motion Friday to begin privatizing Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti's beleaguered child support agency. "The system is broken, and the time is past due for it to be fixed," said Antonovich, citing litanies of stories of erroneously billed parents and uncollected child support.

In March 1987, Orange County developer Baldwin Builders Inc. did something it had done only twice in four years: It contributed money to a Los Angeles County supervisor, in this case $5,000 to Mike Antonovich. One month later, brothers James and Alfred Baldwin, who headed the firm, applied to Los Angeles County for permission to develop 1,500 homes across an environmentally sensitive, 1,270-acre tract of the Santa Monica Mountains.

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors agreed Monday to pay Unisys $20 million to cover some of the losses the company has incurred in building the county welfare department's new computer. The firm initially sought $25 million to cover its cost overrun, but agreed to lower the price because, its executive vice president said, it wanted to show good faith in its dealings with the county.

Lawmakers and environmentalists called Monday for land-use and campaign reforms in response to Times stories detailing how the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors approved much more development in the western Santa Monica Mountains than was originally called for in the area's General Plan. Nearly 40% of the subdivision plans filed for the area since 1981 were bigger than the original General Plan allowed. In one case, 204 homes were approved for a property designated for 37 homes.