Charter Reform No Panacea for What Ails Los Angeles

What is troubling about the current debate over charter reform is the lack of any serious discussion of the limits and complexities of a wholesale rewriting of the city’s constitution. Simplistic portrayals to the contrary, a new charter is no panacea for such L.A. ailments as inadequate public services, low citizen participation, weak civic loyalties or ineffective elected officials. When voters go to the polls Tuesday to decide Proposition 8, they need to understand what charter reform can and cannot accomplish.

A new charter cannot relax state fiscal constraints on local government. Propositions 13 and 218 sharply limit the ability of local officials to raise revenue, affecting municipal-policy priorities and the delivery of services. To accommodate these initiatives, city officials pursue commercial over residential development, angering residents and producing a grass-roots backlash, because businesses such as strip malls bring in sales-tax revenue, while property taxes are handed over to the state. Accordingly, state constitutional reform, not charter revision, is the more relevant forum for addressing the fiscal health of local government.

Nor can charter reform resolve the fragmentation of power and policy between the county, its 87 cities and numerous special districts. Restructuring city government is no solution for the county’s health-care and welfare crises. It will not improve decision-making at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, or accelerate completion of regional projects such as the Alameda Corridor. While City Charter provisions govern the election and terms of the Board of Education, it is state, not municipal, law that sets the parameters of school-board decision-making. Here, too, state-level reform is the appropriate vehicle for redressing the region’s excessive governmental fragmentation.

A new charter is not a ready antidote for low citizen participation and weak civic identity. Voter interest and participation in L.A. civic life appear to be at an all-time low, as the upcoming election regrettably may demonstrate. Yet, the current charter is not the primary cause. In the 1920s, when Los Angeles last rewrote its charter, there was a lively, participatory civic culture despite a clearly inadequate 1880s-era charter that rested nearly all powers in the City Council, relegated the mayorship to a largely ceremonial post and, after 1909, elected council members citywide rather than by district.

Despite these evident structural deficiencies, seemingly discouraging citizen participation, 35 slates of candidates in 1923 competed for the honor of rewriting the charter. There were numerous candidate forums extensively covered by the city’s eight major newspapers. Voter turnout in the 1923 Board of Freeholders election approached 40%. Later, 59% of the city’s voters trooped to the polls to approve the charter.

Creating and sustaining a participatory civic culture depend far more upon inspired leadership and a rich associational life--involving civic and grass-roots organizations, political parties and the media--than the structure of city government. Early Los Angeles enjoyed such a vibrant civic infrastructure: mayors who used the bully pulpit to address pressing public issues despite their limited formal authority; influential civic, business, labor organizations and political parties; active neighborhood-improvement associations and social clubs, and fiercely competitive newspapers that concentrated on local affairs. For complicated reasons having little to do with the charter, this once-vibrant civic infrastructure largely has collapsed and there is little immediate prospect for its return.

Nor is a revised charter a magic wand ensuring mayoral effectiveness. As the experience of mayors in Los Angeles and other cities attests, effectiveness involves far more than mere parchment powers. In L.A.’s so-called weak-mayor system, Tom Bradley and Sam Yorty were effective because they knew how to work with the City Council and media. Conversely, in New York’s strong-mayor system, Abraham Beame and David N. Dinkins were ineffective chief executives. Granting L.A. mayors greater power over bureaucracy--for example, by abolishing appointed commissions and making general managers directly accountable to the mayor--will not reduce their need to work fruitfully with the council to pass laws and budgets. The best chief executives exercise personal leadership skills--vision, courage, the ability to build public support and legislative alliances--regardless of their formal powers.

Charter reform can have unintended and unwelcome consequences. Drafters must consider multiple--and frequently conflicting--objectives, calculate the relevant trade-offs and anticipate the complex dynamics created by major structural changes. For example, in the current charter debate, two distinct reform trajectories are evident: a decentralizing thrust, empowering neighborhood councils with respect to local planning and land-use decisions, and a centralizing one, strengthening the mayor’s control over bureaucracy.

Both approaches seemingly aim to weaken the City Council, yet they ultimately work at cross-purposes. Giving neighborhood councils real authority to decide how local land will be developed also weakens the mayor and bureaucracy, setting the stage for more conflict between the grass roots and City Hall. Probable tinderboxes will be large-scale projects like LAX expansion, which promises citywide economic benefits yet imposes costs--traffic, noise, air pollution--on communities like Westchester. As the experience of other cities suggests, the more land-use authority given to local councils, the more actively will developers try to influence local board-member selection.

The guiding principle of charter revision today, as was the case in the 1920s, should be: Do no harm. There is much that is admirable about the 1925 charter, one of the most progressive documents of its day. For example, the semi-autonomous proprietary departments--water and power, harbor and airports--long have served as potent tools of economic development and are needed today to revitalize a still-sluggish economy. Given the stiff challenges of utility deregulation and the global marketplace, L.A.’s crown jewels require charter protections and flexibility to allow them to operate as businesses rather than as convenient ATM machines used by elected officials to balance the municipal budget.

Still, the current charter needs re-examining. The goal should be to make city government more effective, efficient and responsive. Amended more than 400 times since 1925, the charter has grown from 100 pages to nearly 700. Along the way, lines of authority between the mayor, City Council, appointed commissions and departments have become blurred. Appropriate authority needs to be carefully rethought. Both the size and method of electing the 15-member council may need to be reconsidered. To encourage grass-roots responsiveness yet counter district parochialism, the council could be enlarged, with several of its new members elected citywide. A mixed system of district and at-large elections is already a feature of government in one-third of the nation’s 20 largest cities. Finally, there needs to be serious study of how to revitalize neighborhood participation in governance. Whether proposed neighborhood councils should be elected or appointed, possess real powers or be advisory, will be touchstones of the charter-reform debate.

Charter-reform opportunities only come around once every 20-25 years. That moment again is at hand and should be seized, but only if Angelenos realize that it is no panacea and needs to be done with great deliberation.