A Stalemate That Proves L.A. Needs a New City Charter

If there was any doubt that Los Angeles needs to change the way it conducts business, the current dispute over how to reform the City Charter should muzzle it. The mayor and the City Council are locked in a struggle that reflects the very flaws in local government that reform would aim to correct, as well as personal hostilities generated in the course of the Riordan administration and institutional structures that make achieving consensus difficult, at best. If this dispute continues, there is a real risk of “reforming” Los Angeles into an even more unworkable city, although the odds are much greater that all the current charter-reform efforts will come to naught.

At the root of the problem are quite different perceptions of political reality. In his own eyes and in those of his staff, Richard Riordan represents change in a government that is unaccustomed to change. There are new people with different goals. They see the City Council as an unworkable institution that will only get worse as the reality of term limits sets in and the next mayoral race heats up. The council, according to the mayor’s office, merely uses Riordan as a catalyst to form coalitions.

To the City Council, and to many who work in the city’s agencies, Riordan came into office promising to impose business practices on government, but he does not understand how government works and why the public sector is not--and cannot be--like the private sector. He viewed politics with disdain then; he still does.

While the Riordan administration has grown more experienced, it has not particularly grown more sensitive. It is not enough for it to say that working with the council is too stressful and use that as a justification for ignoring council members or bypassing them. After all, the council is the seat of city government.

Part of the problem is that the council is nonpartisan. There are no natural allies among its members, unless you divide by ethnicity or geography, which often means by class. The traditional method of doing business is to divide everything by 15, giving each member free rein within his or her district. But when money is scarce and tensions in the city are high, dividing by 15 is a poor way of doing business.

Another problem is the Brown Act, a “good government” reform designed to open government up to public scrutiny. It also severely limits the ability of council members, or any official body, to talk to each other in an environment conducive to consensus when there is conflict. In such conditions, trust is hard to come by.

Most council members take a professional attitude toward this reality, even toward their relationship with Riordan. The same cannot be said of the mayor.

It is a serious breach of political respect for an elected executive to go after incumbent legislators the way Riordan has targeted his foes on the council. He has tried to recruit candidates to run against them and has discouraged their potential contributors. He accuses them of disloyalty, although no one on the council owes their election to him.

The mayor’s attitude is reflected in the words of his point man on charter reform, David Fleming, who wants to elect a charter commission that would bypass the City Council and goes straight to the ballot with its reform recommendations. He has described it as taking the politics out of the process. As such, Fleming is the modern equivalent of the city’s progressive forefathers who believed that city government should be about administration, not politics.

But government works best when competing interests can find common ground through compromise, by coming to understand each other, which is politics. It works when everyone who has a stake in the outcome of a public dispute has a seat at the table. Los Angeles needs charter reform because the progressive structure enacted into law in the 1920s makes no provision for forming coalitions and creating consensus. The problem is not so much the distribution of power as it is the absence of a political process.

There are now two charter-reform commissions in the works. One is the mayor’s, a 15-person commission whose members would be elected by voters in April and whose recommendations would be voted on in a subsequent election. The other is the council’s 21-person body whose members would be appointed by every elected official (including three by the mayor) and whose proposals would be merely advisory to the council.

There is certainly room for compromise here. If the mayor would make his appointments to the council’s commission, and if the council would agree to put that commission’s proposals on the ballot after it had reviewed them and had an opportunity to place its counter-proposals on the same ballot, the mayor’s bottom line would be met: Voters would decide the fate of charter reform. The council’s bottom line would also be met: Council members would have a say in the outcome through review.

As for the city, the bottom line is that if there is no compromise, the whole process will be divisive. It would be akin to trying to treat a dysfunctional family by leaving the mother in the next room.