Reforming city government

The many scandals affecting the City Council are justifiably leading to calls for reforms, but the discussion surprisingly omits any mention of how the current structures came to be. They are the result of an intense two-year effort at reforming the Los Angeles City Charter between 1997 and 1999 that produced a document that was a compromise on virtually every issue. In fact, I recently spoke to a former Los Angeles City Council member who had never heard of this process and did not realize that the voters as part of it had expressly rejected expanding the size of the City Council.

In 1996, Mayor Richard Riordan called for a new city Charter. The Charter is like the constitution for the city. It creates the institutions of city government and allocates powers among the branches. It dictates many aspects of how the city operates, including how departments, like police and fire, are governed. It also covers three important businesses run by the city: the airports, the harbor, and the Department of Water and Power. It has many provisions concerning the city workers, including their pensions.

The Charter then governing Los Angeles was written in 1925 and had been amended 400 times. There was a consensus that it was time for a new Charter, but no agreement on what it should include or how to get it. Two prior efforts at Charter reform had failed.

The City Council responded to Riordan’s call for a new Charter by creating an appointed commission to prepare a proposal for it to consider. The Council has the authority under state law to put Charter reform proposals, including for a new Charter, before the voters. Each Council member appointed one member, as did the City Attorney and the City Controller. Mayor Riordan declined to do so. Civic leader and lawyer George Kieffer was chosen as its chair and Professor Raphael Sonenshein was its executive director.

But Mayor Riordan was dissatisfied by this approach. Tensions and distrust between him and the Council were high. He spent $400,000 of his own money to get on the ballot an initiative to create an elected charter reform commission. Under state law, that is an alternative way to produce a new Charter: voters approve an initiative to create an elected commission and then it can put its proposal directly on the ballot.

Riordan also raised $2 million from business to run a slate of candidates. Not surprisingly, the unions were worried about what this could mean and ran their own candidates. The Charter contains many provisions protecting unions, including limits on the city contracting out work and pensions for city employees. In April 1997, voters approved the initiative to create an elected commission and ultimately voters elected 15 commissioners, one from each City Council district, for an unpaid two-year term.

There then ensued a two-year period with the two commissions working simultaneously, but separately to draft new Charters. I was an elected commissioner from the Fifth Council district and was then chosen by my fellow commissioners to be the chair. Geoffrey Garfield was our executive director.

There was no consensus on any issue. The Mayor, Council members, the City Attorney, the City Controller, homeowners, the unions, and many others had their views on the major questions and virtually never agreed. Each commission resented the existence of the other and saw their tasks as quite different: the Elected Commission saw itself as writing a wholly new Charter, while the Appointed Commission saw itself as revising the existing document. The Elected Commission knew it could put what it wanted on the ballot, while the Appointed Commission knew that it was making a proposal to the City Council.

By the end of 1998, each Commission produced a draft proposal and they could not have been more different. George Kieffer and I realized that if both proposals went on the ballot, both were likely to be rejected. The supporters of one would be the opponents of the other. We worked to persuade the two commissions to resolve their differences and produce one Charter proposal for the voters to consider. An intense few months of negotiations led to exactly that, a single proposal that went before the voters in June 1999.

But everything was a compromise. For example, the Elected Commission recommended an independent commission to draw election districts for the City Council. The Appointed Commission would have left districting to the City Council. A compromise was reached to create an independent commission, but it would make recommendations to the City Council. The recent scandal has shown that this does not provide the independence needed in redistricting, but in 1999 the compromise was the only way to get the City Council to agree to a single Charter proposal.

There was a widespread sense of a need for a larger City Council. New York’s City Council has 51 members and Chicago’s has 50. The Elected Commission did polling and held focus groups and repeatedly heard the same thing: people favored having each Council member represent fewer constituents, but they did not want more politicians or more members of the City Council. We were convinced that a proposed Charter with a larger Council would be rejected. Therefore, when voters considered whether to approve the new Charter in June 1999, there were two separate initiatives, one would have increased the Council size to 21 and the other to 25. Both were rejected by the voters, though the new Charter was approved.

The Charter made countless changes to Los Angeles city government: strengthening the power of the Mayor in many ways, giving the Controller the power for performance audits, clarifying the role of the City Attorney, creating regional planning commissions, establishing a system of neighborhood councils, and much more.

As proposals are being advanced to again revise the Charter and improve city government, there likely is much to be learned from the experience from almost 25 years ago and how the current Charter came to be. The reform proposals being considered now – such as expanding the Council size and having an independent districting commission -- all were discussed during the Charter reform process. Experience, and recent scandals, might make them much more viable today.