Charter Panelists Can’t Agree on City Council Size

The effort to reach a compromise between two commissions trying to rewrite the Los Angeles City Charter ran aground Thursday on a debate over politics and principle as members of a special committee grasped for a solution to the vexing question of whether to expand the City Council.

In a complicated series of votes, the conference committee rejected two proposals for compromise. Both would have left the City Council at 15 members, but would have given voters the option to approve an expansion as an amendment to the City Charter. One proposal recommended expansion to 25 members, the other to 23.

Opponents of those proposals came at the issue from a variety of perspectives: One said he was adamantly opposed to leaving 15 members in the main charter; two said they opposed 23 because of the district lines it would create; at least one criticized 25 because it did not represent a compromise but merely affirmed the initial decision of the elected commission.

At the end of the day, the committee simply gave up--the second time it has thrown in the towel on the topic of council expansion--and agreed to try one more time next week.

Nevertheless, elected commission Chairman Erwin Chemerinsky said after the meeting that he remained optimistic about the committee reaching a compromise on the issue.

“I believe the conference committee will come to a compromise,” he said. “We’ve come too far to let this become a deal breaker.”

George Kieffer, chairman of the appointed commission, agreed. “I don’t think we will be stymied on this ultimately,” he said. “I see this as something that simply needs to be worked out.”

The council debate was an odd one to force the showdown Thursday because it has not been one of the charter discussion’s more volatile issues, at least in recent weeks. A few members do feel strongly about it, but in general the topic has been overshadowed by disagreements over the creation of neighborhood councils and the amount of power that the city’s mayor should have, particularly when it comes to firing city department heads.

What makes the council debate particularly difficult, however, is the array of options available to the charter commissioners. Proposals ranging from preserving the status quo to more than doubling the council size to 35 have been aired before both commissions, with most members gravitating toward somewhere between 19 and 25.

Proponents of expansion argue that the council districts today are so large--each member represents nearly 250,000 people--that the members cannot effectively provide constituent services. Los Angeles City Council members represent larger districts than any council members in the nation.

Critics of expansion agree that the districts have gotten extremely large but warn of the potential effect that dramatic expansion could have. Some worry about the ramifications for ethnic representation, others about the potential for altering the internal workings of a council long used to operating with 15 members.

The most passionate opposition to expansion has come from Woody Fleming, a member of the elected commission. He has argued that adding council seats will dilute African American representation, an argument not widely shared among demographers and other experts, and has vowed to oppose any proposed charter that enlarges the council.

Thursday, appointed Commissioner Joe Mandel said he had been taken aback by Fleming’s fierce defense of the current council size, and added that he considered Fleming’s reasoning incorrect.

“I strongly feel that we have to have a meaningful expansion of council size,” Mandel, one of the most respected members of either commission, argued. To maintain the status quo, he added, would be a “grotesque mistake on our part.”

Echoing an argument that increasingly reverberates in the debates over a compromise charter between the two commissions, Mandel said he was concerned about making deals that might advance the political prospects of charter reform at the expense of the charter itself. “I do think we have to be careful not to lose moral principle,” Mandel said.

If no deal can be reached by Monday, it could torpedo the effort at compromise, a development that would all but ensure that city voters next year are asked to consider not just one but two separate proposals for overhauling city government. Chemerinsky and Kieffer both believe that the best chances for winning approval of a charter lie in their two commissions agreeing on a single document.

Others, including Mayor Richard Riordan, are convinced that voters will accept competing charter proposals and that a successful campaign can be waged for charter reform with two different charters on the ballot. Riordan has been lobbying commissioners to include language in the charter that would allow future mayors to fire department heads and has been urging the panelists to reject any compromise that does not include that authority.

If the conference committee can agree on compromises over the issues that divide the two panels, the unified charter proposal would be considered by both commissions. Both would need to approve it for a single charter to be submitted to voters next June.

Otherwise, city voters will be able to choose which they prefer.