Funding for Charter Panel Gets Key OK

Key City Council members signaled Friday that they will join Mayor Richard Riordan in bailing out the city’s penniless elected Charter Commission, effectively ending a political stalemate over how the commission will be funded.

“This is a terrific step,” said the commission’s chairman, USC law professor Erwin Chemerinsky, who said he was looking forward to putting budgetary concerns aside and “getting focused on what we were elected to do--writing the best possible charter for the city of Los Angeles.”

In breaking the stalemate that has left the commission without so much as a telephone since it was constituted more than two months ago, the council rules committee approved measures that would provide $350,000 in taxpayer money to the commission.

It also voted to authorize the commission to accept an initial contribution of $100,000 from a nonprofit foundation set up at Riordan’s behest. That foundation is expected soon to turn over $200,000 more.

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Finally, the committee voted to approve a gift of office space for the commission, solicited by Riordan from Wells Fargo Bank.

The money will be enough to see the commission through to next summer, Chemerinsky said. The source of the commission’s next and final year’s budget is unclear. But the city’s chief legislative analyst, Ronald F. Deaton, told the rules committee that by next year he expects the commission will have “so much money from private sources that they won’t have to come back.”

Rules committee chairman and council President John Ferraro predicted easy sailing for the measures when they come before the full council Tuesday, noting that the council’s strongest critics of using public funds supported the measures in committee.

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One of those critics, Councilwoman Ruth Galanter, had opposed public funding because taxpayers are already spending $1.6 million to finance the two-year effort of a separate, City Council-appointed charter reform commission.

Declaring that she was “really tired of cleaning up after Dick Riordan,” she said last week that taxpayers should not pay also for an elected panel created as the result of a Riordan-financed ballot initiative.

This week she changed her mind, saying in an interview: “With all of the important things going on in this city, this didn’t seem to be the one to have a fight over. . . . I pick my fights.”

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Galanter had been a pivotal figure in the dispute because she had also spoken out against acceptance of the first attempt at private funding from the Riordan-connected foundation by demanding to know the identities of individual private donors.

Some intricate political maneuvering followed: Riordan advisors blasted Galanter and the council generally for trying to kill charter reform. Riordan offered to ride to the rescue by privately raising the entire $1.6-million, two-year budget of the commission if necessary.

Riordan loyalists seemed to be trying to use the dispute over disclosure to drive a wedge between a frustrated elected commission and the council.

First, Riordan announced that the foundation would release the identities of its donors. But donors’ names were released without ancillary information, such as occupation and employer, that the City Ethics Commission and the council had said they wanted.

Riordan loyalists were apparently hoping that the council would reject, or at least delay, approving the donations and look so petty in the process that it would drive the elected commission to declare itself an independent state agency able to receive whatever private donations it wanted, not a city agency subject to council approval of donations.

However, the Charter Commission took notice of the omissions and asked the foundation for additional information.