71-Year-Old Charter Stands in Way of City Hall Efficiency : L.A. Councilman Feuer joins the call for a revamp

It is old news that Los Angeles voters feel disconnected from what happens at City Hall. They look hard for positive change and consensus but more often they see stalemate between the mayor and the City Council. They feel excluded from the policymaking process and regard their local politicians as remote and unresponsive.

Like other urbanites across the country, Los Angeles residents yearn for a stronger sense of community, closer ties within their neighborhoods and across the city. Instead they increasingly find conflict and multiplying urban problems.

At the moment, talk of secession among San Fernando Valley residents best encapsulates these frustrations. But this dissatisfaction is long-standing and extends far beyond the Valley. It is no surprise, then, that rumblings about secession have revived flagging efforts to reform the city’s charter. That’s all to the good.

Councilman Mike Feuer, whose Valley district includes parts of Sherman Oaks, Van Nuys, Studio City and North Hollywood, is the latest to take up the cause, with support from at least six of his council colleagues. Feuer’s proposal builds on suggestions from Valley business and political leaders; he envisions a 21-member citizens commission that would hold hearings throughout the city over three years, then recommend revisions in the 71-year-old charter. Wisely, that process would depend heavily on neighborhood input and coalition building. Any charter changes would require approval by the City Council and the voters. Feuer’s proposal is expected to go before a council committee later this month.

The charter is supposed to define the framework for city government; it should set forth clear ground rules specifying how government operates and who makes which decisions. Instead, at a whopping 694 pages, the Los Angeles charter--amended more than 400 times since its adoption in 1925--is confusing and overly specific and acts to frustrate nearly every effort to accomplish change.

Few defend the existing charter; its inadequacies are all too evident. A symbol of them is the safety netting that has shrouded part of City Hall for 2 1/2 years, since the Northridge earthquake. The continuing need for the nets, which have prevented broken tiles from falling more than 200 feet to the ground, was a product of stalemate in the huge City Hall earthquake repair project, long dogged by escalating cost estimates. Only last week was it announced that the damaged skin of the 25th and 26th floors was being replaced and that the job would be finished by late September.

Much of the delay can be traced to the fact that the charter grants no one agency or official the necessary lead authority over multiple departments to manage a project of this scale. That weakness extends to most capital construction projects the city undertakes and is part of the reason that voters have grown cynical about bond measures that promise new police stations, for example, yet deliver only more bonded debt.

The charter’s weaknesses are manifest across city departments and commissions. Narrowly focused charter changes in recent years have finally granted the mayor clearer ability to fire incompetent department heads. Yet the authority for day-to-day policy guidance to departments remains tangled. Take the Police Department. Once appointed by the Police Commission, is the police chief in charge of that department? To what extent must he respond to guidance or directives from the mayor? From the City Council? The Police Commission? The charter puts the Police Commission in charge, yet its decisions can be overturned by the council. Multiply this confusion across all city departments and it is no wonder that so many residents consider city government unresponsive and city officials unaccountable.

Los Angeles’ charter was considered a triumph of progressive government when it was drafted in the wake of corruption scandals at City Hall early in the century, and it was designed to prevent the accumulation of power in a few hands. Seven decades later, that charter has produced an ineffective government. Measured change is necessary and possible. Los Angeles can be made to work again. Feuer’s proposal is only the latest with this goal. The mayor and other key leaders have long embraced charter reform. The key challenge will be to motivate Los Angeles’ understandably disaffected residents to get involved.