Charter Poll Finds Support for Larger Council

According to a new poll commissioned by some of Los Angeles’ leading business institutions, the views of the city’s likely voters contradict two key assumptions now guiding efforts to rewrite the city’s charter: the notions that people overwhelmingly support powerful new neighborhood councils and that they oppose proposals to expand the City Council.

In fact, the new poll concluded that 53.5% of likely city voters would support expanding the council from 15 to 35 members, if they were assured that the larger council would not cost more. In addition, the poll found that, while respondents initially favored the creation of neighborhood councils, 44.9% said they would oppose those councils if they would cost extra money to operate.

Conducted by pollster and political consultant Arnold Steinberg, the results are based on telephone interviews with 1,000 city residents who have voted in recent elections.

The pollster did not provide a margin of sampling error. Because of that, polling experts said, it is difficult to know how much confidence to place in the poll’s findings.

The numbers are a mixed bag for the business groups that commissioned the survey. Even after being told that neighborhood councils might limit job growth, add to the city bureaucracy and cost more tax money, 43.4% of the respondents said they still liked the idea.

Still, leaders of the city’s Chamber of Commerce, the Central City Assn. and the Los Angeles Business Advisors emphasized in unveiling the new results that significant numbers of likely voters dropped their support for neighborhood councils and instead backed a larger City Council as the best way to improve representation in Los Angeles. Leaders of two of those groups--the chamber and the business advisors--pledged to raise money and support any proposed charter that did not include elected neighborhood councils but did include an expanded City Council.

“We think it’s doable, we think it’s salable,” said Sam Bell, president of Los Angeles Business Advisors. “Is it going to cost money? Yes.”

Ezunial Burts, head of the Chamber of Commerce, echoed Bell’s endorsement and said his organization would join in fighting for a new charter with those provisions. “We would throw our full support behind that,” he said.

Carol Schatz, of the Central City Assn., declined to say what role her group might play, saying that she was reluctant to discuss campaign strategy in advance.

The business community’s role in charter reform is complicated and charged with political possibility.

On one hand, a united front against a proposed charter by the city’s leading business interests could almost certainly kill the idea, since business could raise substantial money to fund a campaign. On the other hand, the city’s corporate elite--much of it white, male and moneyed--offers a tempting target for anyone eager to wage a populist campaign against the notion.

Already, a precursor of that possible future has surfaced in a related issue, the question of the San Fernando Valley’s quest to secede--or at least to study that idea in detail. Supporters of the secession study include the Valley-based Daily News, which has been criticized for donating much of the money to a petition-gathering effort while also supporting it on its editorial pages.

Reacting to that criticism, leaders of the petition campaign have criticized Times Publisher Mark Willes for serving as a dues-paying member of Los Angeles Business Advisors while simultaneously overseeing the city’s largest newspaper.

The business groups unveiled their findings Monday at a meeting with Times reporters and editors. Willes attended the meeting at The Times but did not participate in the discussion. The same group also presented its findings to the Daily News.

Even with some questions about its methodology, the poll to some degree it counters the conventional wisdom on the issues of expanding the council and forming government-supported neighborhood representative groups. Many advocates of charter reform have speculated that the public would hesitate to support a significant expansion of the council because of its cost and that, conversely, the public would enthusiastically welcome creation of neighborhood councils, which theoretically would bring government closer to the people.

The poll at least suggests that the public is not nearly so set in those opinions, and that an aggressive campaign might persuade voters to consider the alternatives.

In addition to releasing their poll numbers, the business representatives formally unveiled maps of the way Los Angeles might be divided if voters approved expansion of the City Council from 15 to 35 members. Under the business groups’ configuration, which has changed slightly in recent days, as many as 12 council districts would be wholly or partly in the San Fernando Valley.

Seven to nine districts would be majority or near-majority Latino, six would be majority African American, and the balance would be majority white. No district would have a majority Asian voting population. However, two--one around Chinatown and the other in the Koreatown area--would have large Asian voting blocs.

Burts championed the larger council’s potential ability to improve representation and increase ethnic diversity on the city’s main governing body. He also argued that such a council might help defuse brewing racial tensions that he and others fear could ignite over redistricting council seats after the next census.

“As this city grows in its diversity, we are going to be sitting on a powder keg,” he said. “We pit minorities against minorities.”

Smaller districts and more council members would help ease that problem, Burts said, by giving more candidates the chance to hold office and by allowing smaller neighborhoods to elect their own representatives.

Critics of the council expansion worry that it would create an unmanageable body and exacerbate some of the group’s existing problems. Other skeptics wonder whether local voters would accept a significant expansion of the elected body.

County voters have previously rejected attempts to expand the Board of Supervisors, and critics of council expansion cite that history as evidence that any such ballot measure is doomed.

There are differences in the current debate, however. This time, any proposed expansion would be packaged with a larger group of reforms, which might buffer the expansion issue. And those supervisorial tests were launched without any significant political support while the current charter reform effort, though controversial, has a number of high-profile backers, including labor, the business community and Mayor Richard Riordan.