Nonpartisan City Elections Produce a Leaderless Ship : Los Angeles: The council’s evisceration of the ethics code is a symptom of the leaderless state of city government. A return to partisan politics would help.

The Los Angeles City Council, in a defeat for the forces of good, clean government, last month gutted public financing of political campaigns, a major segment of the proposed ethics reform package. Council members intentionally side-tracked critical points of the plan, delving instead into minutiae about the legality of gifts of candy and fountain pens.

This was supposed to be the council’s finest hour. A fallen, wounded mayor and the swirl of ethics scandals in Sacramento were to propel Los Angeles to the vanguard of urban political reform, next to other progressive cities such as Seattle and New York. But the council’s rejection of the key element of an independent commission’s ethics proposal, public financing, has turned the tables. Now the council, with its self-serving pay raise, appears to be what is truly “tainted” in city government.

We are also left with the conclusion that there is a more systemic crisis going on in municipal government--a vacuum of leadership.

Councilman Michael Woo, chairman of the ad-hoc ethics committee, bemoaned the fact that trying to secure and hold a majority of council members behind the Los Angeles Ethics Act was like “herding a bunch of cats.” The situation is a testimonial to the lack of leadership, of coalition-building and of grass-roots party organizing that could have prevented this demise.

The City Council is really 15 fiefdoms ruled by feudal barons who find that appeasement of and serving local constituents are their ticket to reelection. Look only to the defeat of former council President Pat Russell, who strayed beyond her Venice/Westchester base into the grander issue of city transportation needs. A light-rail system designed for the San Fernando Valley and stretching across five council districts never got off the drawing board. In this political structure, the parts of democracy do not equal the whole and the city suffers--be it in transportation gridlock or in ethics reform. The solution is not at-large elections: These only breed under-representation of minorities. What we do need is to return to partisan elections in the existing district system, and rekindle party organizational checks that would prevent the Balkanization of Los Angeles.

The current system came about as a much-needed reform. The election of Hiram Johnson as California governor in 1910, the peak of the Progressive Era, brought back popular control of government after the corruption of the railroads and their corporate allies. Far-reaching reform legislation, including nonpartisan municipal elections, was hammered through in 1911 and 1913. Conditions today, however, call into question the validity of these nonpartisan elections. The weakening of local party grass-roots organizations, as mandated by the state election codes, means that the party leadership is unaccountable to the greater body politic and that major public policy decisions (such as ethics reform) have no particular “carrier constituency” across partisan/ideological lines and geographic district lines. Any reformist ground swell in Los Angeles must first do away with nonpartisan local elections.

On another point--the role of the individual leader--James MacGregor Burns once wrote that “leadership is one of the most obscure and least understood phenomena on Earth.” But democracy in America is built on the theory that leadership is individually tested in crisis management. While our universities do an excellent job of imparting “textbook governance,” the notion that future leaders might absorb the ethos of public responsibility in a pragmatic setting has been largely ignored. To correct this, the City of Los Angeles should create an urban fellows program like those of the California Legislature and the cities of New York and Chicago. This program would serve as a municipal training ground, putting our best and brightest minds at work on urban issues, from homelessness to city planning.

The participating fellows ideally would be paid a decent stipend from the general fund, be supervised from outside the structure of City Hall to prevent politicization of the program, and learn the structure, governance and administration of the city.

In combination, the restoration of partisan municipal elections and the establishment of an urban fellows program would greatly benefit the city, providing external accountability for politicians and a training ground for a new breed of urban leaders.