PERSPECTIVE ON CITY CHARTER REFORM : Fairness and Efficiency Demand Change : Decentralization and at-large council members are among innovations that would strengthen Los Angeles.

Based on the current debate regarding revision of the city charter, Los Angeles residents might think that the only issue is who gets to decide what changes are placed before the voters. The most important question--what exactly do we propose to change?--has been almost totally absent from the discussion. Here are some ideas I would like to see considered.

The people of Los Angeles are far better off if we remain as one great city, provided we can find ways to make this city work more efficiently. Los Angeles has been well served by a city charter that preserves multiple checks and balances. Far too much, however, is decided by the central bureaucracies with far too much political interference.

The present city structure encourages a multitude of issues in districts to be decided by individual city council members. Broader issues, such as water and utility rates and allocation of grant funds, are decided by the full council. In theory, this is very democratic, but many issues should be decided from a broader city perspective, if for no other reason than the financial implications. In addition, when 15 well-meaning elected officials attempting to represent their own districts to maximum advantage carve up a fixed pie such as funds for street improvements, it is a zero-sum game.

One could, under charter reform, shift these decisions to an unelected bureaucracy or a mayor, but how does that ensure greater fairness and efficiency? Perhaps these decisions could be better made if we expanded the city council by adding as many as three “at large” members. The addition of a minority of the council who would need to represent the city as a whole, just as the mayor does, would guarantee fairness in those instances where it would be difficult for a member representing a competing district to speak up. With this simple addition, it is likely that the entire dynamic of the city governance would change for the better. There may be voting rights issues that would need resolution, but there is precedent for such a hybrid council arrangement. An alternative approach would be to have the council president, who has the power to make committee assignments, run at-large, rather than be elected by other council members.

A new charter also should give more power to the mayor by streamlining many of the current charter provisions that require multiple council approvals. We should make it clearer that department heads are responsible to the mayor, their performance is primarily the mayor’s responsibility to evaluate and their removal the mayor’s prerogative.

We also need a genuine reorganization of how we do business in the city. It makes no sense for all decisions to flow downtown. Once policies are in place, the efficient administration of the laws should be done at the lowest practical level. We should decentralize most service departments. We should establish regional boundaries within the city (separate from council districts) where administrative decisions are handled in a coordinated manner for local communities, such as the existing 35 community plan areas, which should have elected advisory boards. We need to use technology and new staffing arrangements to handle land use, zoning, recreation and special economic development matters. We also need to include coordination with other government entities such as the county and schools.

Finally, we need to reverse the decline in voter participation in municipal elections. The simplest, fastest and most efficient step we could take would be to shift city elections from odd-numbered years to even-, coinciding with presidential and statewide elections. There is no reason to have elections in odd-numbered years except to discourage voter participation. And any new city charter proposal should be placed before the voters in a general election to guarantee that the most voters are involved.

This is not a comprehensive list of issues that should be addressed in any serious discussion of charter reform, and even these proposals need extensive study and discussion before they are anywhere close to being adopted. It could be argued that the present structure of city government could give us all the benefits these changes would provide or that these proposals do not go far enough in centralizing power in the executive, making the legislative branch more representative and responsive or meeting the needs of neighborhoods. No set of laws will ever do that; only goodwill and serious effort will make representative democracy work.