City Council: L.A.’s Micro-Managers

Los Angeles City Council members are more likely to focus on whether an agency should be given permission to hire three janitors than to look broadly at problems such as homelessness and crime, a Times review of recent council voting shows.

As micro-managers of a $4-billion-a-year bureaucracy, council members vote mainly on administrative matters--many of them strikingly routine--and on the doling out of favors to constituent groups.

Sometimes these favors are so small that they make political sense but economic nonsense--costing the city a lot more to process than they are worth.

Only one council action in four deals with the business of making new laws or setting policies for the city, and an even smaller fraction is concerned with resolving questions of land use, the review of nearly 1,000 votes over two months shows.

The council’s role as the bureaucracy’s top administrator, a key to its members’ political power, is being seriously threatened for the first time in a generation, as two commissions consider overhauling the City Charter, the 1925 document akin to a constitution that designates the council rather than the mayor as head of government.

The most-talked-about proposals would shift more administrative authority to the mayor in the interests of streamlining. But critics worry that a shift to an official who is elected at-large could make it more difficult for ordinary residents and community groups to influence bureaucratic decisions--something they try to do now by contacting their council members.

“Everybody who’s savvy in the city of Los Angeles knows that you call your councilman’s office to circumvent the [bureaucracy’s] rules,” City Councilman Mike Feuer said recently.

Seven of eight charter commissions that have looked at the pros and cons of increasing mayoral power--from the 1930s to the 1970s--have decided that it would be worthwhile, according to an analysis by the staff of the current, appointed charter revision commission.

But in each case, the 15-member council proved a zealous guardian of its prerogatives. None of the proposals made it past voters, who must approve charter changes.

As the latest charter revision efforts get underway, aimed at a 1999 vote, City Council President John Ferraro says it is time for a change. “A lot of these administrative things should be in the mayor’s hands,” he said during a briefing on The Times’ findings, which he said ring true. “A legislative body shouldn’t have to deal with these.”

In advocating that “the mayor should have more power,” however, Ferraro, a 31-year council veteran, predicted that it will be difficult to get his colleagues to go along.

The Times’ analysis considered all of the council’s 989 votes in January and September of this year. The months were chosen arbitrarily in the expectation that they would be typical. May was excluded as atypical because that is when the council makes most of its decisions on the mayor’s budget.

Council’s Limited Role

Approving the budget is one of the council’s most important functions. But the council has a smaller role than most legislatures in the budget process. The state Legislature and Congress can hold up proposed budgets indefinitely while they push for changes. But if the City Council does not act promptly, the mayor’s budget becomes law without its approval, said the city’s chief legislative analyst, Ronald Deaton.

Jeffrey Druyun, the legislative analyst who specializes in the budget, said the council takes about 300 budget-related votes in May, making changes totaling $30 million to $50 million in a $4-billion budget. “Paper is flying at budget time,’ he said. “Man, you’d think you were in a Midwestern blizzard.”

In light of the council’s bitter squabble over whether Councilman Mike Hernandez should resign for using cocaine, one surprising aspect of the voting analysis was evidence of an extraordinarily high degree of day-to-day cooperation and consensus among members.

Only one of the 989 votes resulted in a defeat for the measure’s proponent, and even that was later substantially reversed, suggesting that council members generally give colleagues what they want in the expectation that the nod will be returned.

The review of council votes found that one-third involved administrative matters, many of which were routine, such as authorizing city agencies to apply for federal grants or giving them permission to hire workers to fill jobs for which the council had appropriated funds. (Reserving the right to periodically “unfreeze” jobs in the course of a year can also be viewed as a budget-related action because it gives the council a brake on spending, in case revenue projections are unmet.)

Some of the council’s administrative actions were spectacularly minuscule. For example, the council was called upon to approve bylaw changes for a community group that advises the Bureau of Sanitation on how to manage its Japanese garden at a water reclamation plant in the San Fernando Valley.

Some were completely irrelevant, as when the council gave permission to have a country music star’s name engraved in the Hollywood Walk of Fame a month after the ceremony had taken place.

The council’s authority over even the smallest administrative matters gives members enormous clout in influencing the bureaucracy. City bureaucrats are keenly aware that aggrieved lawmakers can make life difficult by burying even a routine contract proposal in a council committee, and are thus inclined to cooperate when members flex political muscles to get trees trimmed or potholes fixed for constituents who complain.

Councilman Feuer told the appointed charter commission recently that he would prefer to be out of the tree-trimming business, but homeowner groups in his Westside-San Fernando Valley district make it clear to him they are far more concerned about his performance on issues like that than they are about his views on subjects such as gun control.

The councilman said he is concerned that if the council loses power to control the bureaucracy, aggrieved constituents will find themselves at the bureaucracy’s mercy.

Robert Yates, the city’s retired general manager for transportation, told the same commission there is cause for concern, because bureaucrats have been known to turn down reasonable requests that do not meet one-size-fits-all criteria.

A quarter of all of the council’s votes are to do favors for constituent groups. The favors commonly involve declaring that an event is “special” enough to block traffic temporarily or waiving fees so that a community group can hang banners from light poles for free.

A few of the favors are big. The biggest involved $60,000 in city services and salaries to support a Mexican independence day celebration downtown.

But most involved several hundred dollars in services or fee waivers to churches, synagogues, schools, block clubs, community centers and even country clubs.

They were authorized by the entire council at the behest of the member from the involved district.

Community groups also received direct gifts. Councilwoman Rita Walters, for example, won approval for $499 to help a group of senior citizens in her district take a trip to San Diego.

Hernandez got an endorsement to give $30 in city services to a bone marrow donor fair in Highland Park.

His was one of four contributions of $100 or less that were remarkable because the cost of processing such contributions--according to a calculation by the mayor’s office--exceeds $300 apiece.

‘Mayors’ of Own Districts

One in four council actions deals with passing laws, confirming mayoral appointments, approving matters related to bonds, setting policies, staking out official positions on state or federal legislation or dealing with budget-related matters.

One vote in six deals with land use questions.

Functioning in effect as mayors of their own districts, council members have the authority to overrule planning and zoning decisions made both by the bureaucracy and by citizen commissions.

This power gives them both a pipeline to campaign contributions from special interests such as developers and the authority to implement land use changes in the general interest by, for example, reducing the disproportionate number of liquor outlets in South Los Angeles.

Acting in what amounts to a judicial capacity, the council regularly hears appeals from those who feel aggrieved.

For example:

A Venice homeowner wanted to build an addition that would have made his house 32 feet tall in a 30-foot zone. Turned down by the zoning board, he appealed to the council. He lost when the council member for his district, Ruth Galanter, opposed him.

Likewise, Chan Kou Wu lost an effort to void a $1,175 assessment that had been tacked on to his tax bill to repay the city for cleaning up what officials described as his weed-strewn lot. He said he had already cleaned it up. But Councilman Richard Alarcon, the only member of the Public Works Committee to show up for the hearing, was unpersuaded. He decided the assessment should stand and the full council agreed.

On a matter involving ego rather than money, a petitioner fared a little better. The Motion Picture and Television Fund wanted to name its private driveway “Steven Spielberg Drive” in honor of the film director, who is one of its heavy contributors.

But because a stop light was contemplated at the driveway’s intersection with a city street, city officials had jurisdiction. To the mortification of the motion picture fund, they suggested the more modest “Spielberg Driveway.”

The motion picture fund counter-proposed “Spielberg Drive” and, in its wisdom, the council decided that’s what it should be.

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Council Votes

A Times analysis of the L.A. City Council’s 989 votes over two months shows that it decides many administrative questions. The wisdom of allowing the council so much power over the bureaucracy is at the center of debates about revising the city’s 1925 charter. Here are percentages of council votes on questions of various kinds:

Administrative: 32%

Constituent favors: 26%

Policies and legislation: 27%

Land use: 15%