Suggestions Guide, Warn L.A.'s Leaders

By JIM NEWTON

Feb. 23, 1998 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

To the men and women engaged in governing Los Angeles, it has become painfully clear that this is a civic season of both promise and discontent.

As the occupants of elected and appointed offices ponder the reflections on city government offered by a group of their most experienced and thoughtful constituents in Sunday’s Times, there is little disagreement with the group’s broad consensus: The city’s legislative affairs are a murky, parochial muddle; inefficiency and waste impede access to civic services; problems of every sort at all levels are compounded by the absence of popular engagement and individual leadership.

Not all of the observers interviewed by The Times--a group of 24 leading Los Angeles thinkers drawn from labor, the clergy, academia, politics, community organizations and journalism--agree on the solutions. In fact, their main points of agreement are on the need for change, not necessarily its direction.

To the leaders of Los Angeles’ dueling charter reform commissions, the thoughts of these two dozen leading citizens on the state of the city are both instructive and challenging: They present an array of tempting options, yet warn of the price of failure.

“So much of what we’ve been trying to do is learn what the problems of the city are as people see them,” said USC law professor Erwin Chemerinsky, who chairs the elected charter commission. “Everything that deals with city government is in some sense related to the charter.”

Among other things, those observers suggested creating neighborhood councils, expanding the City Council, establishing at-large seats for the council, strengthening the office of the mayor, moving election dates to coincide with state and national campaigns, revamping a cumbersome process for reviewing proposed developments and allowing noncitizens to vote in local elections.

On a simpler level, suggestions included lengthening the office hours of city departments, expanding translation services and consolidating government field offices with those of council members--all efforts to stimulate popular participation by making government more accessible.

And on a less utilitarian level, many of those interviewed lamented the decline of political civility and wished for an atmosphere in which, as Connie Rice of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund put it, “the quality of the thinking and the leadership” replaces the “pit bull, junkyard dog mentality” that dominates city politics today.

The urge for reform finds its most obvious home in reform of the city’s charter. Two commissions--one appointed by the council, the other elected--already are at work on that task, and leaders of the groups welcomed the insights of leading city observers, as they try to rechart the city’s course.

Chemerinsky and others close to the reform process said they are particularly struck by the challenge of balancing two opposing notions that surfaced in the interviews with The Times: the desire by some people to centralize government so that it is more efficient against the desire by others to decentralize it to make it more inclusive.

“Those are big issues,” Chemerinsky said, “but I wouldn’t assume that they are so incompatible. There may very well be a need to centralize some things and decentralize others.”

George Kieffer, chairman of the appointed commission, said his panel already is struggling with the questions of where to centralize power and where to distribute it. Like the panel of observers, the commission is torn between those competing notions and the political implications of each.

“The thoughts of this group mirror some of what we’ve heard in public hearings and from invited speakers,” Kieffer said. “They run the gamut. The difficulty is getting these ideas into something that’s workable.”

As it sifts through the city’s mammoth charter, the appointed commission has focused on three main areas: simplifying the city constitution, clarifying the roles of key city officials including the council and mayor, and improving ways for residents to participate in local government.

Simplifying the charter is the least politically daunting of those tasks, but is more difficult than it seems at first. Voluminous sections of the document are devoted to areas such as employee protections and pensions. Moving those out of the charter would leave a cleaner document, but also might erode the strength of those safeguards.

Clarifying the roles of the council, mayor and others, meanwhile, has the opposite problem. That job is far less complex, but also much more politically charged. Mayor Richard Riordan has urged that the council be limited to legislative functions, stripping it of day-to-day management authority and leaving the mayor with stronger control over the bureaucracy.

The working papers of the commission appointed by the council, however, suggest that the group’s staff is leaning against such a sharp division.

“While the council may do too much, and in too detailed a manner, restricting the council solely to a ‘legislative’ role is unrealistic,” the reform commission briefing book states. “Rather than simply assuming the mayor should handle administration and the council legislation, the charter should be revised to assign powers appropriate to the roles the mayor and council can best perform.”

The commission’s third mission, improving public participation in government and politics, combines the problems that afflict both of the others. It is as complicated as trying to address the pension system, and as controversial as trying to balance powers between top officials. And it is confronted with a great uncertainty: Can the government stimulate public participation, or will the reforms under consideration render that participation artificial, short-term and ultimately meaningless?

Former U.S. Secretary of State Warren M. Christopher was among those interviewed who sees hope in creating new neighborhood organizations.

“My instinctive feeling is that we need to come up with more ways for people to come together and discuss issues,” he said. But like many of these leaders, he worried that powerful community groups could tug away from the center, further balkanizing the city rather than drawing it together.

“The question really is: Can you have a neighborhood council that’s powerless?” Christopher asked. “Would anyone turn out for such a thing?”

Kieffer, an admirer of Christopher, agreed. As he asked: “What if we throw a party and nobody comes?”

As Kieffer and Chemerinsky pondered the recommendations of two dozen thoughtful observers, some of the city’s leading politicians reacted with a mixture of gratitude and defensiveness.

Riordan, for instance, defended his style of leadership against the accusation that he has failed to use the power of his office to maximum effect.

“We’ve worked incredibly well when you consider all we’ve done,” Riordan said, citing the city’s continuing economic recovery, as well as his belief that neighborhoods are coming together and that city departments are functioning better under leaders he has appointed. But Riordan added that he is limited in his authority to make big changes, and argued that true reform of Los Angeles government requires consolidating power in the chief executive so that person can delegate authority to communities.

In that, Riordan argues a point similar to that advanced by his friend and supporter, political intellectual James Q. Wilson, one of those interviewed by The Times. Wilson suggests that one route through the city’s current dilemma--the tension between those who want to centralize power and those who want to decentralize it--is to consolidate management authority in the mayor’s office and spread representative power to neighborhood councils or boards that would help distribute city services, but lack the power to block development.

Riordan endorsed the quest for such a balance, and charter commissioners said that, at least as a theoretical matter, it made sense to them too.

Successful charter reform remains an idea beset with obstacles, however. And one of them is the problem that every member of the group interviewed by The Times identified in one way or another: a lack of strong city leadership. The nature of the city’s current politics--personal, divided and characterized by the absence of any unifying coalitions--is a source of unease among most of the leaders, and it has defined the city’s approach to overhauling its charter.

So disjointed are local politics that it takes two commissions to review the charter, one appointed by the council, the other elected after Riordan successfully pushed it past the council’s objections.

The elected commission can draft a charter and put it directly to the voters; the appointed commission must submit its work to the City Council, which would have the option of deciding whether to forward the document to the electorate.

Though the commissions so far are working in tandem, the dueling-commission approach raises at least the possibility that voters could be confronted with two long, complicated and in some respects conflicting city charters. That, most observers agree, could sink both.

“Two commissions producing conflicting recommendations would certainly be unfortunate,” said Christopher, who faced a similar dilemma in 1991 when his police reform commission initially had to grapple with a rival commission.

In that case, Christopher’s group won out, leaving voters with a single set of police reform measures to consider. That package, which established a term limit for the police chief and strengthened civilian control over the LAPD, passed overwhelmingly.

The police reforms of 1992 were among the most significant restructurings of city government in recent times. They profoundly reallocated power between the police chief and his civilian bosses, and despite endless tugging between the LAPD and City Hall, they have become the new way of life for city government.

This time, the stakes are even higher because the potential effect runs far beyond the Police Department. According to its proponents, a new charter could, if politics allow it to, alter fundamental relationships in government and might even persuade residents that government is worth caring about.

In the end, say charter commissioners, elected officials and informed observers, this may be the city’s defining moment, when Los Angeles either takes a step forward or falls back on the status quo.

“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,” said John Perez, executive director of the United Food and Commercial Workers States’ Council. “In part, that’s the difference between having elected officials who are administrators and officials who see themselves as leaders.”

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The 24

Over the past two months, The Times solicited the views of two dozen thoughtful Los Angeles observers from a variety of political and professional perspectives. Each was asked what works well in the city and what does not. And each offered suggestions for reform. Here are the 24:

* Father Greg Boyle, Catholic priest, director of Jobs for a Future

* Richard “Skip” Byrne, former presiding judge of the Superior Court

* Bruce Cain, UC Berkeley political science professor

* Alice Callaghan, Episcopal priest, skid row activist

* Warren M. Christopher, lawyer, former U.S. secretary of state; chairman, Independent Commission on the Los Angeles Police Department

* Ed Davis, retired chief of police, former state senator

* Williams S. Epps, senior pastor at 2nd Baptist Church

* Richard Fajardo, lawyer

* Linda Griego, restaurateur, former deputy mayor to Tom Bradley

* Fernando J. Guerra, director of the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University

* Antonia Hernandez, president and general counsel of MALDEF

* Robert Maguire, managing partner, MaguirePartners