Panel Unveils Key Proposals for Charter

Los Angeles’ appointed charter commission, one of two groups trying to rewrite the city’s constitution and wrestling with a host of important problems such as whether to give more power to the mayor, released a 30-page summary of its key recommendations Wednesday, the first step in a process intended to drum up public comment on the document in coming months.

Many of the individual recommendations already have received considerable public attention, but Wednesday’s document represents the first time that either the appointed or elected commission has collected its work into a single package and submitted it to the public.

The appointed commission has made plans for an ambitious public outreach campaign, visiting communities, placing ads on television and radio and holding meetings with top city officials as it tries to gauge the reaction to its package of proposals.

“We are seriously seeking reaction to these recommendations,” said George Kieffer, chairman of the appointed commission. “It’s a last call for input from stakeholders.”

Sometime in the fall, the two commissions are expected to join in putting on a citywide constitutional convention, open to the public. No date has yet been set.

The appointed commission’s members were selected largely by the City Council, and its recommendations will be forwarded to the council, which has the ability to place them on the ballot as written, tinker with them or reject them altogether. In many of its recommendations, however, the appointed commission’s work closely parallels that of the elected commission, which has the ability to send its package directly to the voters.

Both commissions, for instance, are recommending giving the mayor the power to fire department heads, and both appear to be moving to curtail the City Council’s authority to overrule the actions of city commissions. Both also have endorsed creation of neighborhood councils, although the two panels are far apart on how those councils would be composed and how they would function.

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The chairmen of the two groups--Erwin Chemerinsky heads the elected panel, and Kieffer heads the appointed commission--met this week to review the appointed commission’s preliminary findings. Afterward, Chemerinsky said he was struck by the large number of areas where the two panels are in accord.

“Overwhelmingly, the two commissions are in agreement,” he said Wednesday. “There are a few areas of disagreement, but they are far, far outweighed by the areas in which we agree.”

In its release Wednesday, the appointed commission said its work was guided by three goals: to encourage participation in local government, to clarify the roles of key officials so they can be held accountable, and to provide the city with a simpler charter.

In fact, even as it released its draft recommendations, the appointed commission was busy tackling a dense area of the current charter, its provisions for managing city pensions. Those provisions make up roughly a third of the current, voluminous charter, and the commission has voted to pull them out of the main document and create a separate volume that would include pension rules.

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So far, its most controversial suggestions have been the proposal to consolidate more authority in the mayor and to create some form of neighborhood councils, community groups that would act as boards to represent their areas.

The mayoral proposals in particular have lately drawn a bead from organized labor, particularly those branches that represent city workers.

Julie Butcher, general manager of the local Service Employees International Union, is a regular fixture at charter commission meetings, and on Wednesday she expressed dismay at their work so far. The appointed commission’s completed package of recommendations, she said, fell far short of what she had hoped for.

“Frighteningly, in a very polite, quiet . . . kind of way, it looks like these two commissions are headed in the same direction,” she said. “They are moving toward an alarming consolidation of power in the mayor’s office.”

The power to fire department heads without City Council approval, Butcher said, will result in weak, politically driven general managers. She views that as bad for city workers and residents, and as a rollback of the city’s progressive reforms at the turn of the century.

Others, however, see that recommendation as part of a larger package intended to balance interests and create a smoother, more efficient government.

“I would hope that people will look at these recommendations as a whole,” Kieffer said. “I’m comfortable with the tentative recommendations that we’ve made, but I want to remain open.”