LOS ANGELES — Los Angeles is waiting for its George Washington.
Last year, voters across an area more populous than all but ten states decided to create a new office to oversee their government. Now comes the hard part: determining the scope of a position that will, by representing the nearly 10 million people of Los Angeles County, become perhaps the most powerful in American local government and immediately reshape California politics.
Now it is time to decide how much unchecked authority should be vested in an office being designed from scratch. Many of the tricky issues concern the interplay between the new executive — who will have the final say over the county’s nearly $50 billion budget and the ability to hire and fire heads of dozens of county-wide departments — and the existing Board of Supervisors, who have long held those powers for themselves…