Business Leaders Issue Edict on Charter

A group of big business leaders drew a line in the sand Thursday, saying that if a charter reform commission recommends creation of elected neighborhood councils in Los Angeles, it will finance a campaign to persuade voters to reject the idea.

The group of 26 corporate chief executives, who call themselves the Los Angeles Business Advisors, has in the past implied its willingness to fund such a campaign. On Thursday, for the first time, it made the threat explicit.

The organization “will not support this additional and costly new layer of government,” the group’s president, Sam Bell, said Thursday in a statement delivered to a task force of the elected charter commission. “If required, we will vigorously campaign against elected neighborhood councils if they are included in a new city charter ballot measure.”

The statement increases pressure on the elected charter reform commission, which finds itself in the middle of a pincers movement, with business interests converging on one flank and a coalition of city employee unions, homeowner groups and neighborhood activists converging on the other.

At stake is raw power. Business interests believe they have a better chance of influencing government decisions if they are centrally made. They argue that any public demand for greater access to government can be satisfied with an expansion of the City Council.

City employee unions and neighborhood activists, who would be best positioned to win elections to neighborhood councils, are pushing hard for them.

Like the business group, some homeowner leaders have threatened publicly to wage a campaign against any proposed charter that does not contain neighborhood councils. The difference is that the business group has a demonstrated ability and willingness to raise large sums to finance an effort.

Elected Charter Commission Chairman Erwin Chemerinsky said Thursday that he hoped all sides would turn down the volume in their increasingly pitched argument.

“I would hope that rather than a rhetoric of threats . . . we could have a rhetoric of conciliation and compromise,” he said. “We are trying to find a middle ground. . . . It’s premature for anyone to draw lines in the sand.”

So far, the elected commission has tentatively decided to give elected neighborhood councils decision-making authority only over local service delivery questions such as whether it should devote more money to its local library or its local park.

The commission has deferred a decision on the more controversial issue of whether to recommend that neighborhood councils be empowered to decide local land-use questions.

Even the more modest proposal would place Los Angeles in the vanguard of neighborhood representation, and in its statement, the business group criticized the commission for experimenting with public policy. “We believe that it is inappropriate for our city to become a political science experiment,” Bell’s statement said.

Giving land-use power to local boards represents big business’ biggest nightmare, and Chemerinsky and others have suggested that giving the local boards only advisory authority in that area should mollify business’ fears.

But business groups, fearful that elected neighborhood councils would inevitably seek to expand their own authority have not been persuaded.

Looming over the dispute is the threat of secession by San Fernando Valley activists clamoring for more local control.

In an interview Thursday, Bell said that the group’s six-member charter reform steering committee decided last week to take the new position. The steering committee includes Mark Willes, publisher of the Los Angeles Times and chairman of Times Mirror Co., its corporate parent. Two other members of the Times Mirror board also are members of the Los Angeles Business Advisors.

While restating the group’s opposition “to hard-coding any language into the City Charter that institutionalizes neighborhood councils,” Bell also seemed to suggest that there was still room for compromise.

Asked about the accuracy of recent comments by advisors to the group that it was “heading for compromise,” Bell remarked: “No compromise at this stage of the game.”

A second, appointed charter commission has tentatively decided to recommend creation of a department of neighborhoods to help those neighborhoods that want to establish advisory councils. Under the appointed commission’s approach, the new city department would be directed to create a system of neighborhood councils.

That commission’s recommendations must be approved by the City Council before they can be placed on the ballot. By contrast, the elected commission has the power to put its recommendations directly on the ballot. It hopes to have its recommendations completed in time for either the April or June ballot next year.