Charter Reform Stalemate Helps Secessionist Cause

On a recent night I walked out of Parker Center, police headquarters, onto Los Angeles Street toward my car, parked in The Times’ garage a few blocks away.

As a veteran of the neighborhood, I knew what to do when I hit 1st Street: turn right, walk fast toward Spring Street and then turn left toward the garage. This is the well-lighted path. Taking darkened 2nd Street, the doorways of its abandoned buildings already filled with the homeless, would substantially raise the odds against making it to the car.

I get paid for such journeys. Why, I wondered, would anyone do it for free? In particular, why would the dozen or so Los Angeles residents I had just left come down to the dreary neighborhood and spend the evening in the depressing atmosphere of the Parker Center auditorium, working in obscurity as volunteer members of a commission rewriting the Los Angeles City Charter?

Was it like this for the framers of our Constitution, more than two centuries ago? Granted, their Philadelphia meeting places were incomparably more elegant than the Parker Center auditorium. Still, did anyone in the taverns of Philly and New York give a damn about their work? And did the journalists covering the framers of the Constitution regard their assignments as a dead-end beat?

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In L.A. we have two commissions trying to frame a new city charter. One, composed of the men and women meeting weekly in Parker Center, was elected by the people this spring. Mayor Riordan, hoping for a new charter that would increase mayoral power, inspired the election and poured money into electing a sympathetic commission. But his foes in organized labor, comfortable with their cozy relationship with the City Council, beat Riordan at the ballot box and won a majority of the commission seats.

The second commission was appointed by the City Council in an effort to either prevent any charter reform, or to write a new charter that would leave intact the power of the council and unionized city employees.

I will not bore you with intricate battling and maneuvering between these groups as they begin their tasks. All you need to know is that the commissions, and City Hall insiders, are so consumed by the petty scrapping that they have lost sight of why the bodies were created.

Like the framers of the Constitution, the charter commissioners were expected to find a way to prevent the disintegration of the city which, after all, is an uneasy union of diverse and unfriendly regions.

The biggest breakaway threat comes from the San Fernando Valley, where residents of small towns and farms were forced to become part of the city of Los Angeles early in the century to permit big landowners to receive water from the Owens Valley. Separatism and suspicion of downtown, whose business barons promoted the water project, have been part of Valley politics ever since.

The resentment reached a crescendo in recent years, culminating in a powerful secession movement. Last week, state legislation paving the way for a Valley city moved surprisingly close to Gov. Wilson’s desk. The Senate may vote this week on the bill, which removes the City Council’s veto power over secession.

If the bill becomes law and Los Angeles voters approve Valley secession, expect separatists in Venice and the harbor area to move down the same path. These communities were also forced into joining Los Angeles by the maneuvering of the old downtown bosses.

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Backers of reform hoped that the commissions would prevent the breakup of L.A. by coming up with a system that would give communities and neighborhoods representation they do not have under the present system.

The commissioners’ inability to reach that goal is good news to the secessionists. “Charter reform was an answer to secession,” said Richard Close, co-chair of Valley Vote, the main San Fernando Valley breakaway organization. “The paralysis that is taking place will substantially help Valley secession because it will prove that the only way to get change, the only way to restructure L.A., is for Valley residents to form our own city.”

Whether or not their proceedings were the talk of the taverns, the framers of our Constitution left a legacy of a mighty United States of America. That is why they are revered today, more than 200 years later.

The city charter commissioners deserve praise for working hard under difficult conditions. But hard work leaves a legacy only when there are results.

As it stands now, the legacy of the charter commissioners is likely to be a fractured L.A., broken up into several cities, all working against each other, none as strong as the original.