A Vision of the Future L.A.

The Los Angeles City Council is parochial and dim, its members occasionally thoughtful but more often preoccupied with personal political advantage. The mayor is smart and well-intentioned, but he misses opportunities to lead. Civic services are reliably available, but undermined by inefficiency and waste. Residents are poorly represented and disconnected from one another. And the city’s government, though filled with smart, caring people, often projects cynicism to a populace badly in need of compassion and leadership.

Those are a few of the views of some of the most experienced, civic-minded and thoughtful people on the subject of Los Angeles. As two citizen commissions--one elected, the other appointed by the council--wrestle with the question of how to overhaul the antiquated City Charter, two dozen of these men and women agreed to share their visions of Los Angeles with The Times.

They are an eclectic group--from 28-year-old labor leader John A. Perez to 72-year-old former Secretary of State and police reform champion Warren M. Christopher, from Connie Rice, chief of the city’s respected NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, to her former professor James Q. Wilson, one of America’s foremost political intellectuals.

These 24 men and women were chosen for their wisdom and their diverse perspectives, not their titles. Only one holds elected office and only one other is directly connected to charter reform, sitting as a member of one of the two commissions charged with rewriting the city constitution and submitting the rules to Los Angeles.

And yet despite their divergent politics and points of view, the leaders interviewed by The Times share a common sense of dismay at the city’s current civic life and a strong belief that the time has come to reform Los Angeles’ politics and government. Without it, they say, the city may squander a historic opportunity to capture its place at the head of the 21st century.

“The fact that the city has not fallen apart with all its ethnic diversity and the rivalries that are created by that is remarkable,” Christopher said. “I just think it could be a lot better. It needs to be a lot better. Able, consistent leadership is going to be essential for the future. That’s what gives me concern. . . . We’ve gotten through, but we’ve survived on the basis of our own vitality.”

In rough terms, these leaders divide into three groups: those who want to make government more efficient, those who want to make it more representative, and those who want to make it more inspiring and responsive to human concerns.

Their suggestions are far-ranging and potentially could help guide the commissions charting a new course for the city. Key to that mission is striking the right balance between those who argue for more streamlined management and those who want decentralized representation. It is a delicate and difficult problem, one on which honest people can disagree.

And beyond that challenge is another: Regardless of what many people feel about governmental structure, there is an unfulfilled yearning for decency. Many worry that government has lost a part of its soul, that it has disengaged itself from real human problems just when it is most needed.

“We don’t have much stomach for the complexity of tragedy,” said Father Greg Boyle. “If government’s heart could be broken by the things that break the heart of God, then government would be better.”

The Case for a Strong Mayor

Underlying much of the drive to reform Los Angeles’ charter is Mayor Richard Riordan’s conviction that to be effective, the mayor of Los Angeles needs more power. Specifically, Riordan has sought more authority to hire and fire department heads. Others also have suggested that he needs more authority to direct city departments in their day-to-day operations and more direct oversight over city contracts.

In short, many argue that the mayor should have the power of a chief executive officer charged with managing the city more like a business.

“If you want to be effective and efficient, I feel the corporate model is the best model,” said Dominic Ng, president and chief executive officer of East West Bank. “It is very clear in Los Angeles that our mayor doesn’t have very much power at all. What is frightening is that 15 council members represent individual districts. What is best for the entire city may not be the best for each district.”

Ng’s alternative, to have residents elect a board of directors and have that board pick the mayor, is more radical than most. But many close observers of the government echo his frustration at inefficiency and waste in a bureaucracy that sometimes seems to move at cross-purposes. Duplication is a common and annoying fact of municipal government life. On housing issues, Community Build President Brenda Shockley noted that the city’s Redevelopment Agency, Community Development Department, mayor’s office and nonprofit agencies all make contributions, sometimes conflicting ones.

“It’s duplication,” she said, “and it’s really difficult to know where you get access.”

It is also a system that tolerates, even encourages, evasion. Heads of city departments have learned that they can circumvent the mayor’s office by courting favor with City Council members--a practice that prevents the city from moving ahead under unified leadership.

Last year’s showdown over Police Chief Willie L. Williams made it clear that despite Riordan’s unhappiness with the work of his most important department head--and even though Williams’ term was ending--the chief could hold out for a substantial cash settlement.

Richard “Skip” Byrne, retired presiding judge of the Superior Court, negotiated that settlement through a maze of conflicting interests. Some council members opposed Williams but were afraid to say so; others were publicly angry at the Police Commission but privately agreed with its determination to dump the police chief. Many agreed with Riordan’s effort to buy out the chief, but disliked the idea of backing a mayor they habitually oppose.

Navigating that minefield helped convince Byrne the city needs a stronger mayor.

“It seems to me that we do need a mayor who has authority to act,” he said. “The council has too much authority. You get a lot of grandstanding and I think posturing, which does not do anything to move an issue forward. It becomes divisive and results in paralysis.”

Indeed, much of the impetus for empowering the city’s most visible official grows out of frustration with its legislative body. Few of the two dozen leaders interviewed for this story had much regard for the council. Although individual members--notably council President John Ferraro, Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas, Councilman Mike Feuer and Councilwoman Ruth Galanter--received high marks, the body as a whole was held in remarkably low esteem.

“Their whole reason for being is to keep power,” said Alice Callaghan, an Episcopal priest who runs a community center on skid row. “Frankly, the quality of the people who get on the council is not high, with some notable exceptions. . . . They’re not people I would go to for help.”

Antonia Hernandez, president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, knows council members in a far different context. She has sparred with them over issues ranging from redistricting to LAPD hiring and promotions. Where Callaghan’s frustrations have to do with a legislative body that cannot seem to deliver toilets for homeless people on skid row, Hernandez’s have to do with budging a group whose focus seems too immediate, too narrow.

“In the minute, everyday management of the city, the City Council does a good job,” Hernandez said. “But if you deal with the larger questions that face the city, they are a failure. It is so parochial, so short term. It’s so much political posturing.”

Disillusion with the council fuels some of the desire to centralize city government, but not all of it. Rather, it is largely driven by the sense that Los Angeles’ government is as diffuse and inchoate as the city itself, that many masters have complicated the task of delivering services to residents and that the lack of a central figure running the government makes it hard for residents to know who’s in charge of success or failure.

That is Riordan’s message. It is echoed even by some who have fought with him on other issues.

“No one is ever held accountable,” Callaghan said. “The mayor has no power. That’s the whole problem. . . . You have to have somebody in the city who can make things happen and who can be held responsible. We need someone to blame.”

The Case for Decentralizing

Strengthening the mayor’s office is a popular notion, but not a universal one. Among those who disagree, some argue that too much power revives the specter of corruption that once haunted City Hall, while others maintain that the problem of mayoral power may be personal, not structural.

Some of those who see Riordan’s problems as his own rather than attributes of the office he occupies cite Mayor Tom Bradley and note that, at the height of his 20-year administration, no one complained that he lacked power.

John Perez, executive director of the United Food and Commercial Workers’ States’ Council, argues along with others that Riordan suffers from the way he came to power. Whereas Bradley served for years as a City Council member before running for mayor, Riordan captured the top job in his first run for elected office--after a campaign financed largely out of his personal fortune. Bradley ascended with a long list of political allies. Riordan arrived as an outsider.

“There’s a difference between a political coalition and a governing coalition,” Perez said. “Bradley had a strong governing coalition. Riordan has a strong political coalition, but not a governing coalition.”

Given Riordan’s unusual political credentials, Perez and several others said they wonder whether the mayor effectively uses the power he has. Even the diplomatic Christopher, who supports the mayor, noted that Riordan’s business background was strong but “whether his experience of history allows him to maximize political authority is another question.”

In fact, even some of Riordan’s strongest supporters have qualms about strengthening the mayor’s office too much.

Take retired Police Chief Ed Davis. Before moving to the California Senate, Davis rocketed through the ranks of the LAPD, finishing his career there with an eight-year stint as chief. So powerful was Chief Davis that when the idea of running for mayor was floated by him, he declined, saying that he had no interest in giving up power.

Today, Davis is an unabashed Riordan admirer. He calls the mayor an “all-star” and “the kind of guy who can do anything.”

But Davis remembers the days when Mayor Frank Shaw ran a thoroughly corrupt administration, so riddled with vice that police skimmed money off brothels to help pay for the mayor’s campaign. The lesson, according to Davis: It makes sense to give the mayor more power--but not too much.

Richard Fajardo, a voting rights lawyer who works out of a snug office in East Los Angeles, sees the issue far more starkly: “I don’t know Mayor Riordan well enough to know whether he’s using power effectively . . . but my alarm bells go up when somebody tells me they need more power. One possibility is that they haven’t done the hard-work sweet-talking to get what they want. The second is that they want a club to bang me over the head. That makes me nervous.”

Still another concern with broadening the authority of the mayor is the resulting shift it could have on race relations in the city. Los Angeles, it is often said, is the odd place where one city elects a mayor to govern another--where predominantly white voters choose a mayor to govern predominantly nonwhite residents.

“The problem with the model of a very, very strong mayor is that if you go to such a system, you’re weakening the branch of the government which represents the disadvantaged, the poor and the colored, and you’re strengthening the branch of the government that is elected by whites,” said Bruce Cain, a UC Berkeley political science professor with long experience in Los Angeles politics. “My own inclination would be to be very, very wary of a system that weakens the council.”

Among those suspicious of concentrating too much authority in one office, many contend that the problems afflicting Los Angeles are not so much of efficiency as they are of voice. Too many people feel too removed from the government that serves them. As they turn their backs, they deprive the government of their perspectives, leaving it to operate in the dark and unsurprisingly causing them to be disappointed by the result.

“It has to be a government of the people, by the people and for the people,” said the Rev. William S. Epps, pastor at the Second Baptist Church in South Los Angeles. “People don’t believe it is any of those things.”

How to turn that around is an abiding problem, not unique to Los Angeles but particularly acute in a city that cherishes privacy more than public discourse.

To many, that challenge is one best addressed not by consolidating government power but by spreading it out, creating a web of neighborhood councils, or by significantly increasing the number of City Council districts.

More districts, the argument goes, would reduce the number of people each council member represents, perhaps allowing the elected officials to concentrate their efforts on smaller communities and give them better service. Ironically, a larger council also might have the effect of strengthening the mayor’s hand, if only because it would reduce the influence of any single council member.

Neighborhood councils represent still another approach to energizing communities around political issues.

The case for them: Local councils could bring residents together, offer them a forum to hash out neighborhood issues, and give the city government a valuable device for hearing the talk of residents far removed from City Hall.

The case against them: Giving local panels any real power could further Balkanize a city already notable for its lack of a coherent center.

“Our problem is that we want two things,” said Douglas Ring, a lobbyist and lawyer who is the husband of City Councilwoman Cindy Miscikowski and has spent decades appearing before government agencies throughout Southern California. “We want government to be an efficient, well-run, tightly knit operation. And we also want total participation in every aspect of decision-making. Those two goals are mutually exclusive.”

Toward a Solution

Into that breach come an unlikely duo, two observers with long histories in the city’s civic affairs and yet who arrive from starkly different places. One is professor Wilson, a formidable political intellectual most often pegged as a conservative but in fact an iconoclast. The other is Harold Meyerson, executive editor of the L.A. Weekly, raised on the left and respected by it and yet just as unbound by its intellectual constraints as Wilson is by the right’s.

It is probably safe to say that Meyerson and Wilson disagree on more issues than they agree on; Meyerson is highly critical of the mayor, while Wilson is Riordan’s good friend and supporter. Where they meet is over two ideas: that Los Angeles suffers from inefficiency, as well as inadequate representation, and that both can be improved.

“You can change the structure of city government to make it more responsive, effective and democratic,” Meyerson said. “You can create a considerably larger City Council with members drawn in two ways [districts and at-large seats]. . . . You can create neighborhood councils that have some relation to services and zoning. You have some staff assigned to them, and you limit their powers.”

And while decentralizing representative bodies, the government also can strengthen its center, Meyerson said, distancing himself from some liberals who worry about that concentration of power.

“I think my buddies on the left are wrong on the question of centralization of power,” he said. “Dammit, the New Deal was right. Some things are best handled by a centralized authority.”

Wilson arrives at a similar view via a different path.

“It seems to me that there are two models of government with which Los Angeles has to come to grips, the corporate model and the political representation model,” the professor said. “The parliamentary regimes . . . approach the corporate model. We have used the representation model at the national level. Los Angeles does not represent an alternative model. It represents a muddle.”

Instead, Wilson argued that the city needs to do two things at once: empower the center and spread the representation. A stronger mayor is a prerequisite, Wilson said, as is some clipping of the City Council’s wings. The council should not be allowed to block the removal of a police chief or other department head, said Wilson, a view advanced by Christopher as well.

But having empowered the mayor, the city should then spread a different kind of authority through a different kind of neighborhood council. In Wilson’s vision, neighborhood councils would be aligned with City Council districts, whose borders would also track those of police areas and other service delivery functions such as parks, schools, street maintenance and the like. Each area would be overseen by a neighborhood board or council, whose members would help distribute services in the area but would not have the power to control zoning or development, functions best left with a citywide authority so that neighborhoods cannot skew important citywide goals.

As with Meyerson’s approach, the result is a mix: a strong central manager combined with strong local representatives.

Yearning for Humane Leadership

Most believe in a strong mayor; some are wary of one. Some see neighborhood councils as a threat to growth; others see them as a way to unite. Some propose new council districts as a chance to amplify the voices of Latinos and Asian Americans; a few fear they will muzzle African Americans.

And yet, to a person, each of these two dozen men and women laments Los Angeles’ lack of leadership. The critique of leadership is curiously impersonal. Supporters as well as critics of the mayor feel the void; there is no noticeable difference between the impressions of liberals and conservatives.

There are, to be sure, differences in how these observers describe that dearth. Father Greg Boyle, a Jesuit priest working in an Eastside parish, sees it in religious terms--as a sad drift from God. Connie Rice discusses it in the vocabulary of social organization--as a breakdown in regional government.

But the common thirst for leadership captivates rabbis and pastors, activists and academics, lawyers, executives, politicians and a journalist.

“You feel once in a while a little yearning for largeness,” said Rabbi Harold Schulweis, who has spent 27 years at Valley Beth Shalom, a Conservative congregation. “There is a need for leadership, a desperate need for leadership, to bring people to something larger.”

Angela Oh, a lawyer and advisor to President Clinton’s National Dialogue on Race, frames the issue differently but sounds a similar theme: “There needs to be a return of dignity to public office. We need leadership, and it’s often not there.”

For many, the absence of strong, enlightened leadership shows up in the distance that so many people feel from government. It is a problem felt directly by community activists such as Anthony Thigpenn, chairman of the board of a community group known as AGENDA, who complains that a few dozen activists dominate public discussion in each council district. And it is felt less directly but still powerfully by state Democratic Sen. Richard Polanco, who bemoans the alienation that many residents seem to feel.

Vivian Rothstein, a longtime community activist in Los Angeles and Santa Monica, is among those who hesitate at centralizing government structures. But she, too, warns of a government so fragmented that it lacks focus and values.

“No one is even making the quality decisions anymore,” she said. “No one wants to be the moral standard or the quality standard.”

Are there ways to satisfy the hunger for leadership? Fernando J. Guerra, director of the Center for the Study of Los Angeles, suggests that one step in restoring a sense of leadership would be to broaden the pool of people who select leaders. The U.S. Constitution does not preclude voting by noncitizens in local elections, and Guerra argues that Los Angeles would be the place to try it. Linda Griego, who ran for mayor in 1993, agrees that broadening involvement to noncitizens would send a dramatic signal of the city’s willingness to reach out for new leaders.

Many object to those ideas, which cut sharply against the grain of recent California politics. And some contend that deeper change lies in a willingness to reconsider the temper and tone of political discourse--a determination to refrain from the personal vindictiveness that keeps some potential candidates away from public life.

Whatever the course, all these observers agree that only leadership will allow Los Angeles to emerge healthy and vibrant in the next century. A new City Charter could help that process, they said, but there’s more to it then that. As John Perez said: “The real question isn’t what the document says. . . . The real question is how it changes the way we’re governed, and what mission people see for themselves.”

From his perch in one of the skyscrapers that he built and that define the look of Los Angeles, developer Robert Maguire agreed.

“It is a difficult, exciting, very diverse, experimental city,” he said. “You have a real shot in this city if there’s a way to make it a civil, humane place to live. . . . You get in the middle of a process here, though, and you wonder what the hell you’re doing here.”

The real challenge, Maguire said: “How do you get a sense of participation and civility? How do you get a place that is really a civil place to live?”

Tomorrow: The political establishment reacts.

* CHARTER REFORM MATTERS: An editorial, M4

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For a stong mayor

Antonia Hernandez

President of the Mexican American Legsl Defense and Education Fund

“In the minute, every day management of teh city, the City Council does a good job. But if you deal with the larger questions that face the city, they are a failure.”

*

For decentralizing

Douglas Ring

A lobbyist and lawyer

“We want government to be an efficient, well-run, tightly knit operation. And we also want total participation in every aspect of decision-making. Those two goals are mutually exclusive.”

*

For humane leadership

Vivian Rothstein

A longtime community activist in Los Angeles and Santa Monica

“No one is even making the quality decisions anymore. no one wants to be the moral standard or the quality standard.”