Supervisors Vote to Consolidate Hiring Under a Single Agency : Personnel: The move puts an end to a decentralized system that involved 33 offices. Antonovich and Molina trade bitter charges in debating the issue.

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted Tuesday to re-create a Department of Human Resources that will combine the personnel departments of 33 far-flung agencies that have operated independently for the last eight years.

In a sometimes-heated hourlong debate, the existing decentralized system was criticized as inefficient, ineffective and discriminatory. The American Civil Liberties Union and a citizens group led by retired Rep. Augustus F. Hawkins urged the board to create the department and adhere to the same policies for all of the county’s 84,000 employees.

Hawkins said his congressional office was flooded over the years with complaints about the county’s hiring system, which he said fostered cronyism. “People were being rejected (for jobs) for peculiar reasons,” Hawkins said.

The new unified department, supporters said, will make it easier for job seekers to apply for work and for officials to oversee hiring practices. Under the decentralized system, job-seekers had to contact 33 separate offices spread all over the county. The centralized systems offers job hunters a one-stop approach to the various county agencies.

But Supervisor Mike Antonovich, who helped break up the centralized personnel department as part of a wave of conservative reforms in the 1980s, said a monolithic personnel department leads to needless red tape and delays. He said a decentralized system gives department heads greater flexibility and independence in fulfilling their personnel needs and is more cost-effective. He cited a report that said the new department will cost taxpayers an additional $1.2 million annually.

And as his stunned colleagues sat with their mouths agape, Antonovich compared the re-creation of a countywide personnel department to the communist system of central planning in the former Soviet Union and China.

That provoked Supervisor Gloria Molina to unleash a verbal assault in which she accused Antonovich of red baiting. “It’s just like him. He doesn’t understand the needs of the common man,” Molina said. “You act like a conservative when you feel like it . . . but you are the biggest spender on the board.”

She told her colleague that if he really wanted to save the county money he could stop using a county helicopter to get to meetings and events in his district.

Antonovich attempted to respond to Molina’s attack, but board Chairwoman Yvonne Brathwaite Burke gaveled the row to an uneasy draw and the board went on to approve formation of the department, with only Antonovich dissenting.

Antonovich later said he was shocked by Molina’s outburst and defended his helicopter travel, saying it is necessary to “provide the hands-on approach” to governing that he promised voters. His district is larger than the other four supervisorial districts combined.

The new department will feature a hot line to inform callers of job openings and an ombudsman to field community complaints.

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The county’s chief administrative officer will continue to handle negotiations on collective bargaining with the county’s unions, but all other personnel functions will be handled by the new human relations department.

While applauding the board’s action, members of the citizens group said some issues are still unresolved.

The Hawkins group said it will ask the U.S. Department of Labor to audit the county’s personnel records, which the group said in a prepared statement “should illustrate personnel abuses by many of the 33 county agencies.”

With that in mind, the ACLU filed a sweeping request for county records under the California Public Records Act. “The past system was a patronage system under another name,” said Ramona Ripston, executive director of the ACLU of Southern California. “People should be hired on merit and not by who knows who,” Ripston said, although she could not cite any specific cases of improper hiring.