The Next L.A. / Reinventing Our Future : Governing : “It’s a wonderful opportunity. . .to pick up on the things in the crisis that worked.”

After our institutions have been strained to the breaking point by the riots, the fires and now the earthquake, maybe it’s time to wipe the slate clean and start all over again.

With the pain of this last trauma slowly receding, now could be the occasion to examine every one of our battered governmental entities, throw out the useless ones, keep those that work--and invent entirely new mechanisms capable of meeting the challenges of the soon-to-arrive 21st Century.

It’s not that Southland government hasn’t worked since the deadly morning of Jan. 17. In Los Angeles and Santa Monica--the cities hit hardest--cops, firefighters and other emergency personnel moved quickly into action. Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan, Police Chief Willie Williams and other city officials effectively grabbed hold of a government long criticized as creaky and inefficient.

But futurists, academicians and even a few politicians see in the post-earthquake period, with its unprecedented demands on local government, an opportunity to begin to plan a structure capable of meeting the demands of the future.

“I think it is a wonderful opportunity for the people . . . to really pick up on the things in the crisis that worked and that didn’t work,” said Xandra Kayden, a visiting scholar for the Center for Politics and Economics at Claremont Colleges and a leader in a new drive to modernize Los Angeles city government.

In the afflicted areas, weaknesses in the present government structure can be seen as readily as the quake damage itself.

Take, for example, the subdivisions nestled in the canyons not far from the shattered freeways of the northern San Fernando Valley.

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors approved construction of large numbers of single- and multiple-family dwellings. Favoring growth, the supervisors said their job was to provide housing and employment.

Critics, including residents of the area, objected that too many homes were being packed into a limited amount of land, and that the thousands of new residents would overtax the capacity of once-rural roads and of schools built for a smaller population. They said the supervisors were overly influenced by lobbyists for campaign-contributing developers.

Sure enough, when those subdivisions were opened, the roads quickly became packed with commuters bound for the freeways. And when the freeways were destroyed by the earthquake, the roads became impassable and the situation became impossible.

Communications futurist Tracy Weston is a USC professor, and, with Robert Stern of the California Commission on Campaign Reform, they are, in effect, dreaming up a new government for the 21st Century.

It begins with interactive television.

Cable already brings city councils, as well as Congress and the Legislature, into living rooms. With interactive TV, you will be able to tell your views to your representatives from your home, instead of traveling to City Hall. When California Channel viewers last year were given a chance to call an 800 number and express their views to a legislative committee hearing, the response was tremendous. Perhaps one day we could have instant recalls of public officials, or instant approval of voter initiatives.

Political campaigns will be revolutionized. You will be able to call up speeches, statements and commercials on your television set from a central CD-ROM library, retrieving the essentials of the candidate’s position on Santa Monica Bay from a long environmental speech. Campaign contributions and lobbyists’ spending reports would be there at the push of a keyboard button, filed on discs, available to your personal computer or interactive TV.

But there might be few reports to see; campaign spending would be limited by law. And anyway, big advertising campaigns in politics would no longer be needed in the interactive Information Age.

Interactive TV would go hand in hand with another type of people power under discussion by activists, from Los Angeles neighborhood preservationist William Christopher to liberal state Sen. Tom Hayden: the decentralization of government. Community councils would have the power to make local zoning decisions and have a say in running neighborhood parks, libraries and, to some extent, policing.

These strong neighborhood councils would work with, and sometimes in counterbalance to, mega-governments--powerful regional bodies, along with some existing city and county structures, that would be in charge of the big-picture concerns that affect us all: controlling air and water pollution, regional land development and transportation, running law enforcement and firefighting operations.

And, brought into the political system by interactive TV, their skills honed in neighborhood councils, a new breed of citizen-politician would emerge, a grass-roots resident more accomplished at the computer byte than the sound bite.

But at the heart of it is individual citizens acting in concert with their neighborhoods.

“One of the things we see working out of the earthquake is a neighborhood sense,” said Kayden, the visiting scholar. “Neighborhoods are getting more cohesive. People are getting to know each other.”