Neighborhood Councils Considered as a Way to Give L.A. Citizens a Say

Los Angeles City Council members took their first look Wednesday at the idea of forming neighborhood councils to give citizens a greater voice in city government, one of the hottest proposals to come out of the effort to reform the city’s 72-year-old charter.

“Fundamentally, people identify with neighborhoods, not with council districts,” said City Councilman Joel Wachs at a meeting of the council’s governmental efficiency committee. “If there is one thing everyone has in common in Los Angeles, it’s a neighborhood.”

The same sentiment was more or less repeated later in the evening in North Hills at a public hearing by an appointed panel charged with charter reform: “Instead of moving to small communities or small towns where government is accessible,” one man told the panel, “let’s make the structure [of city government] like a small town.”

The idea of neighborhood councils is still in the discussion phase, and proposals range from a suggestion by City Councilwoman Laura Chick to form a city “office of neighborhoods” that would essentially formalize community activism, to a recommendation by some Valley business leaders to eliminate the City Council altogether, and replace it with a board whose members would be appointed by local “town councils.”

The proposal for neighborhood councils is just one of the ideas to surface from discussions of how to restructure Los Angeles city government, revamping the city’s 1925 charter. Also at issue are whether the mayor should have more power, whether the city should have a city manager, and whether someone other than elected officials should draw the boundaries of the city’s political districts.

But of all the subjects on the table, the neighborhood council proposal has stirred the most intense and immediate interest.

“People are really into it,” said George Wolfberg, director of research for the Los Angeles Charter Reform Commission, a board appointed by the City Council last year. “Some . . . see it as an opportunity to wrest power from City Hall.”

Over recent years, members of the City Council have been forming neighborhood advisory groups to serve as models for formal neighborhood councils. Some council members have visited other cities with citywide community councils to observe them.

Wednesday’s committee meeting was the first of a series to be held over coming months to help nail down some of the thornier issues neighborhood councils pose, such as how big they should be, whether their members should be elected or appointed, and how much power they should have, whether the city should set aside money for their administrative costs, and the key question of whether they might impinge on the existing City Council’s authority.

Confusing an already complex picture is that there are a number of overlapping efforts to establish councils. Wachs’ committee discussions overlap with efforts by two charter reform commissions, both of which are studying the idea.

Meanwhile, the City Council is developing its own blueprint for neighborhood councils with only advisory powers.

“The only way to give them formal powers is a charter change,” Wachs said. But where neighborhood councils are formed, even when advisory, “they are a voice that cannot be ignored. . . . They become a force to be reckoned with.”