Opinion: Term Limits stay loose

This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.

A Los Angeles judge today rejected a challenge to last year’s Proposition R, which extends term limits for L.A. City Council members to three terms. That means a max of 12 years instead of the previous eight. That’s a disappointment for fans of havoc, who would love to have seen the look on the faces of council members who planned their lives around the new term. What if it had gone the other way? Consider, for example, Herb Wesson, who publicly said no to a possible run for the Board of Supervisors, in part because he now has a long council career ahead of him. Or Richard Alarcon, who abandoned his Assembly seat when the measure passed so he could return to a long tenure on the council.

It was a tough one for the Times ed board, which has never liked term limits and generally favors proposals to get rid of them or at least loosen them. But the campaign for Prop R was so misleading it was impossible to endorse it. Voters were led to believe the measure imposed term limits for the first time, and that it served up major ethics reforms, when in fact those reforms were dubious at best and in some cases countered reforms that were adopted by the city’s Ethics Commission.

This is the first time in California, at least in a large jurisdiction, in which term limits adopted by voters were later relaxed. The hope is that council members will spend more time making decisions in the best long-term interest of the city and less on the short-term impact on their political careers.