Appointed Panel Favors Advisory Local Councils

Taking on what has become the thorniest issue in charter reform--whether to remove some powers from City Council members and give them to neighborhood councils--the appointed Los Angeles charter reform commission Wednesday tentatively decided that giving local groups decision-making authority on land use, budget and service delivery questions is too radical.

Instead, the commission embraced the concept of advisory neighborhood councils, vested with “procedural” authority. Translation: The groups would get a formal, first crack at reviewing “certain city decisions” and making recommendations to the City Council.

In another key action aimed at increasing access to government, the commission tentatively voted to recommend increasing the size of the City Council from 15 to 21 members.

Each City Council member now has the largest constituency in the nation with more than 230,000 residents. The expansion would reduce that to about 165,000--based on the 1990 census--and could offer some currently unrepresented minority communities a chance to gain office.

The proposed expansion stops far short of the 50- and 51-member city councils of the nation’s two other largest cities: Chicago and New York. But commission executive director Raphael Sonenshein, a political scientist, said he feared that without the political party structure of those cities, a like-sized Los Angeles legislature would have difficulty governing itself.

Several commissioners expressed another concern, that cost-conscious voters, who only recently expressed a limited tolerance for politicians by approving term limits, might be so upset by the prospects of paying for a dramatic City Council expansion that they would torpedo the entire effort to revise the 1925 City Charter.

The types of decisions on which neighborhood councils would advise were not specified in Wednesday’s votes. But judging from the commission’s discussion, they will ultimately include requirements that a developer appear before a neighborhood council and make his pitch for a zoning change. The commission’s idea is that institutionalizing such appearances would prompt developers to resolve conflicts early and lead to greater neighborhood influence.

“I think this is an enormous opportunity for the city of Los Angeles to include more people in the process of not only stopping things but solving things,” said commissioner Doris Isolini Nelson, a former president of the Los Angeles chapter of the League of Women Voters.

Forming neighborhood councils would be up to individual neighborhoods. But the commission voted tentatively to include as part of its proposed charter a requirement that the city create a Department of Neighborhoods whose job would be to ease the way.

Neighborhood councils with formal standing are novelties in Los Angeles, but have been used for decades with varying degrees of success by scores of cities around the country. None of these cities has the decision-making model that has been advocated by many community activists here and which appears to have captured the imagination of a second, elected charter reform commission. That commission is not scheduled to make its tentative decisions on neighborhood councils until next month. But its chairman has stated that he believes a majority of his colleagues favor a decision-making model.

Both the appointed commission, which must win approval of its proposals by the City Council before it can submit them to voters, and the elected commission, which will place its proposals directly on the ballot next spring, have vowed to try to meld their proposals in the interests of lessening voter confusion. But the apparent divergence of views on neighborhood councils appears to be a likely sticking point.

One potential area of compromise is that the appointed commission left open the possibility that if the experiment with neighborhood councils is a success and there is an appetite for it, their powers could later be increased. It would require a new commission to take another look at the matter in a few years.

The appointed commission, most of whose members were named to their posts by the City Council, voted to leave it to that body to draft ordinances that would specify whether neighborhood councilors would be elected or appointed and how neighborhood boundaries would be drawn.

The commission also rejected proposals that would have taken the once-every-10-year City Council redistricting process out of the hands of the City Council and placed it with an independent body. Instead, the panel tentatively voted to require the City Council and other city officials to appoint an independent body to advise the City Council on redistricting. Also approved were expanded public hearings as a part of the redistricting process and an explicit goal of avoiding splitting neighborhoods when drawing council district boundaries. In the most extreme current example of a split, Van Nuys is in five Council districts.