Voters Have Chance to Enlarge Council, Put Lid on Contributions

The Los Angeles City Council could grow by two members while the cost of electing its members could shrink by thousands of dollars as the result of ballot measures approved for voter consideration in citywide elections later this year.

The City Council Wednesday voted 9 to 6 to place on the April ballot a measure to allow the council to expand from 15 to 17 members, a change urged by Mayor Tom Bradley and others who would like to see two new districts made up largely of Asian and Latino residents. Advocates hope that this would lead to the election of representatives of those ethnic groups.

The council also added more teeth to a series of campaign spending limitations originally proposed by Councilman Ernani Bernardi. The latest refinement, offered by Councilman Joel Wachs, would prohibit council members who have received contributions of $1,000 or more from a group or an individual during the previous four years from voting or lobbying on issues that would help those contributors.

The council, with Bernardi’s support, voted 8 to 7 to put Wachs’ proposal on the June ballot, while Bernardi’s package, which restricts campaign contributions to candidates for all city offices, will remain on the April ballot.

The ballot measures represented a double-barreled defeat for Councilman Gilbert Lindsay, the oldest member of council, who argued that the limits on political contributions are easily dodged and merely offer voters an illusion of reform. Lindsay also has fought against the council expansion plan, which would could significantly alter his downtown district with its high proportion of Asian and Latino residents.

The main ingredients of Bernardi’s campaign finance measure are a $500-per-election ceiling on contributions to council candidates and a $1,000 maximum on contributions to candidates for citywide election. Wachs argued that Bernardi’s curbs would not go far enough.

In order to stop influence-peddling at City Hall, which Wachs believes is widespread, he argued that a conflict-of-interest law is needed to discourage contributions that he believes are tied to votes.

“I just think that unlimited contributions are the worst evil we have today,” Wachs said, adding that such contributions “have significantly affected decisions of the council.”

Under Wachs’ proposal, major contributors--those giving more than $1,000 to a council member in a four-year period-- would have to more fully reveal their business and financial associations to the city clerk and the clerk would be required to maintain a list of the contributors and their financial ties.

If council members accepted $1,000 or more from anyone during a four-year period, they would be prohibited from taking part in, or even encouraging, any official decisions that would have a financial effect on the contributor.

Bernardi introduced the subject of campaign funding reform early this month, and since then has agreed to considerable fine-tuning by his colleagues for the sake of achieving a council consensus that would put something before the voters. Wednesday’s council session brought one more change in the form of an amendment by Councilman Howard Finn.

Finn’s amendment, which was adopted by the council, revises the way in which the Bernardi plan would restrict the amount one contributor could make to all candidates running for city offices during a given election.

Finn’s formula would limit the size of one person’s contributions to council candidates to $500 multiplied by the number of City Council offices being contested in that election. Additionally, it would limit a person’s contributions to citywide candidates to $1,000 multiplied by the number of citywide offices being contested.