L.A.’s Formula for Continuing Political Inertia : Reform: The voters’ overwhelming desire to make the LAPD more responsive should be the steppingstone to overhauling the City Charter.

The landslide victory of Charter Amendment F signifies a resounding call for major reform of the Los Angeles Police Department. Already, city politicians and civic lead ers are making plans to implement other Christopher Commission recommendations. But commendable as these efforts may be, they fall far short of what is needed to revitalize Los Angeles--overhaul of the City Charter.

The central weakness of the Charter, of which we are daily reminded, is that its extreme vigilance in protecting citizens from potential abuses of power makes the exercise of effective power impossible. There is no single, leading political voice; there is no overriding civic purpose.

Under the Charter, real power resides in 15 councilmanic “mayors” who originate policy, then rule on the specifics of every project that comes up in their district. It is a formula for political inertia. Consider mass transportation.

The Warner Center was designated, in a City Council-approved transportation plan, to be one of 30 hubs in the Metro Rail system. The “mayor” of the district in which the center is located, reflecting the wishes of her constituents, opposed it. The remaining 14 “mayors,” respectful of the tradition of not doing to another what may be done to you, went along. The project remained stalled for years. Only when the Warner Center developer sued, and the court agreed, did the City Council comply with its own approved plan. Ironically, a court, not the city’s representatives, served as the city’s voice.

The fault lies not entirely with the Charter’s Progressive architects, who certainly may be forgiven for not anticipating--in 1925--the expansion of federal and state governments, the changed expectations of government’s role and the explosive growth of an ethnically diverse population. But even when the visionary shortcomings of the Charter writers justify calls for reform, there is the problem of motivation. Often only scandal, as in the case of the beating of Rodney G. King, will energize civic leaders and voters to do something. Imagine, for example, what might have happened if, a month ago, the mayor could have said to the police chief, “Get your forces on the streets now, or I will find someone who will!”

After the Watts riots, U.S. senators held a hearing in Los Angeles. The transcript does not record the laughter that surely must have been erupted behind compressed lips.

Sen. Abraham Ribicoff: As I listened to your testimony, Mayor (Sam) Yorty . . . you have really waived authority and responsibility in schools, welfare, transportation, employment, health and housing, which leaves you, as the head of the city, basically with a ceremonial function, police and recreation.

Yorty: That is right, and fire . . . and sewers.

Ribicoff: In other words, basically you lack jurisdiction, authority, responsibility for what makes the city move?

Yorty: That is exactly it.

Sen. Robert F. Kennedy then requested Yorty to sit through the rest of the testimony, which “he could safely do, because, as I understand your testimony, you have nothing to get back to.”

Nothing much has changed since then, except that the demands on city government are far greater. So is the frustration.

The relationships and distribution of power among the major, City Council, city departments, commissions and bureaucracies are no less in need of dramatic reform than the LAPD. In recent years, for example, the mayor has tried to fire several city department heads for conflicts of interest or mismanagement. Only rarely has he succeeded, not because the hearing process worked, but because the officeholder gave up and quit. The result is a loss of flexibility and a decline in the responsiveness of government.

It must be kept in mind that the Charter is not a broad statement of principles, like the U.S. Constitution, but a blueprint of how city government works. It is not politically sacred, yet the long string of failed attempts to scrap the whole thing and start over--the most recent one coming 20 years ago--suggests that the Charter has indeed undergone some sort of political deification. The unhappy result has been reform by controversial proposition, as with Propositions F and H, which created the Ethics Commission?

Sen. Ribicoff captured the problem during the 1865 hearings. He said Los Angeles “right now . . . does not stand for a damned thing. . . . You (Yorty) do not have any jurisdiction over the basic throb of life of a city from early morning until late at night.”

The process of Charter overhaul won’t rebuild a home or a corner grocery store, but it could help to bring us together as a community seeking to answer the questions of who we are and what we want our city to be. The more than 400 Charter amendments since 1925 do not add up to a damned thing. Total reform of the Charter would change that.