L.A. City Charter Reform: First, Shaky Gains Are Made

Last week the Los Angeles City Council took well-deserved heat for its nonsensical zoning decisions barring an Orthodox synagogue in one neighborhood while green-lighting a sex club in another. The week before, a Times analysis of the council’s recent decisions documented that almost half its time is devoted to deciding minute zoning matters and doing favors for constituents. Is this how the 15 people who administer the city’s $4-billion budget should spend their time? Surely there’s a better way.

If the L.A. charter reform efforts now underway do nothing else, they have generated pointed and worthwhile questions about why city government operates as badly as it does.

Those questions go well beyond the council’s operation. For instance, would splitting the city attorney’s office into an elected criminal unit to prosecute misdemeanors and an appointed civil unit to represent the city better serve the needs of departments and area residents? Should the mayor have real executive authority over the city government, including the power to fire errant department heads and control budgets? And why can’t the city keep its streets free of potholes?

The two charter reform commissions have already done more than just ask thoughtful questions. But can they do enough? Will these commissions, one appointed by the council and the other elected by the voters last spring, display the independence necessary to produce the major reforms needed to really improve city government? And can they then cut through pervasive public cynicism and generate enough voter interest to enact their recommendations?

With the two groups now well along on their study and hearing schedule, some city watchers have already ruled out meaningful change. They point to the hard opposition by several council members to diminution of their power, noting the council must ratify recommendations of the appointed panel before they go to the voters. (The elected commission’s proposals go directly before the voters.) Public employee unions, developers and homeowners associations also have an abiding interest in maintaining the existing charter, to preserve their clout.

But pessimism about reform seems premature. There are solid reasons to believe it can be achieved. After petty skirmishes over the summer between Mayor Richard Riordan and the City Council, the elected group now has the public funding it needs to operate. That funding, in turn, has reduced the sniping between the two commissions, and there is evidence of meaningful cooperation.

The groups are sharing resources, and their leaders have informally set a goal of producing one set of recommendations rather than two. This makes sense and, if those proposals are meaty, as we hope, that consensus could pressure council members to support reform and prod disaffected voters to go to the polls.

It is those voters, more than any other players in this historic process, who hold the key to reform in this clunky city. A new charter won’t come into being unless public interest emerges long before the April 1999 charter election. And as one commissioner put it, that interest won’t appear unless charter reform becomes a topic for dinner table conversation. Now there’s a concept.