A LOOK AHEAD * Two charter reform commissions with diverging methods work toward one goal. Their ideas may be a blueprint for . . .Guiding a Fractured City Into a New Century

One works in threadbare office space lent by the Department of Water and Power; the other has borrowed ragtag furniture from City Hall and set up shop in a downtown high-rise where Wells Fargo offered free space.

One hired a respected academic to coordinate its work; the other turned to a battle-tested campaign junkie with roots in New York politics. One is broken into committees, working groups and task forces that seem to meet almost daily; the other meets as a whole or not at all. One is approaching its work as a methodical exercise in revision; the other is starting from scratch.

Together, two commissions and their staffs are engaged in the business of taking Los Angeles’ charter apart and putting it back together in the hope that their work will guide a fractured city into a new century.

Their missions are identical: to write a new charter. But their approaches are as different as the commissions themselves--one elected by voters from 15 districts, the other appointed by the City Council and other officials largely as a counterweight to the view that Mayor Richard Riordan was trying to bolster mayoral power at the council’s expense.

Because of the way they were selected, the elected commission has greater latitude in that it can put its work directly on the ballot, while the appointed commission exists to recommend a new charter to the City Council, which has the power to decide to place it on the ballot. That, too, has influenced the way the panels have gone about their work, and has created some incentive for them to work together to avoid a blizzard of conflicting charter recommendations that could irritate and confuse voters, and doom the effort.

Both commission chairmen express enormous respect for each other, but they acknowledge that they have come at their tasks in different ways.

“We’ve had vastly different processes for many different reasons,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, chairman of the elected commission. “Each commission thinks its approach is the right approach.”

*

George Kieffer, chairman of the appointed panel, agreed. “It’s my experience that the same proposals are given more thorough, fair consideration in the process that we have. They are not argued for and against. They are analyzed.”

Now, as the two groups move into a new phase of their work, shifting from deliberations and public comment to the drafting of a new charter, the differences between the commissions are playing out in the way they see their task--and may well determine what kind of charter city voters ultimately choose.

What’s more, while both commissions nod toward cooperation, they also view each other with some suspicion. The elected commission and its staff tend to see the appointed group as conservative tinkerers, bent on incremental change and resistant to major reform. The appointed panel and its staff, meanwhile, question the depth of the elected group’s research and the thoughtfulness of some of its proposals.

On the question of dividing power between the mayor and council, for example, elected commission members and staff tend to frame the issue in the federal structure, where the president acts as chief executive and controls the bureaucracy, while Congress keeps its hands off those functions except to hold hearings.

But Raphael Sonenshein, executive director of the appointed commission, points out that the division between executive and legislative functions is never that simple in local government. City councils traditionally have had a role in considering contract awards and other matters that would not fall to Congress in the federal structure.

That subtlety, some appointed commissioners say, seems lost on much of the elected panel.

At the same time, there is little doubt that the appointed commission is more conservative in its approach--if not necessarily in the result--to the task of drafting a new charter.

*

In its quest to be sure that nothing is left out of the new charter, the staff for the appointed commission has been wading through the existing document a line at a time, striking sections that staff and commissioners believe are no longer needed and adding new language where it seems appropriate.

That is in contrast to the elected commission, which has simply tossed out the old charter and is determined to build a new one from the ground up.

“We’re writing a charter,” elected commission Executive Director Geoffrey Garfield said. “They’re editing.”

Sonenshein declines to comment on the elected commission, but disputes the notion that his panel is inclined toward tinkering rather than overhauling. According to Sonenshein, the appointed commission is “neither status quo nor radical, just careful.”

The differences between the commissions are not just matters of academic interest. They have a real effect on debates such as the question of whether the charter should include a statement of rights and of how a charter might address the vexing topic of increasing citizen participation in government.

On the bill of rights issue, for example, the elected commission spent weeks wrestling with whether such a statement would enlarge and strengthen the charter or politically imperil it by offending someone with its protections.

Commissioners were shouted down in the San Fernando Valley when a group of abortion opponents arrived en masse to complain about a proposed protection for “reproductive autonomy.” And when the commission finally brought the matter to a vote last week, Commissioner Paula Boland threatened to oppose the entire charter if it included even a watered-down statement of rights that dropped some of the most controversial ideas.

*

Although that battle ended with the rights statement falling one short vote of the eight needed for approval, it may still be revisited. Meanwhile, the battle illustrates the wholesale approach being contemplated by the elected commission as well as the political naivete that it sometimes displays.

At the appointed commission, meanwhile, no one is talking about anything as sweeping as a bill of rights--in part because the commission entertained and discarded similar ideas months ago and in part because the appointed panel is working from a different mandate.

“Early on, we developed a work plan that emphasized making the charter more flexible and simple, that clarified the charter and that encouraged participation,” said Kieffer. “And we concentrated on hiring and building our staff. . . . We had a few people who wanted to jump in and start discussing issues, but the commission exercised a lot of patience and held off.”

That time invested early on, Kieffer said, gave the appointed commission a solid body of work to weigh. And he argues that it helped teach the panel discipline and narrow its focus.

The result: “Radical ideas aren’t likely to get as far with our commission. They get filtered out earlier with us than with the elected.”

The role of the staff at the two commissions also differs markedly, and it, too, has had a pronounced if largely unnoticed effect on the progress of the two panels.

When the elected commission was formed last summer, it struggled for months to come up with money to operate. As a result, it could not hire staff, and so, in order to get rolling, it started by dividing up work between commissioners.

The commission broke into five committees, each of them charged with examining different aspects of city government. As they plow through the charter, the committees are responsible for briefing the full commission on their respective areas.

That approach has its advantages. It means the emphasis of charter reform rests on those elected to carry it out, and it makes commissioners directly responsible for their work. But the approach has its downside as well. The full commission hears reports from an array of committee leaders, and its receptiveness to an idea can be influenced by the persuasiveness of the speaker.

The appointed panel, in contrast, meets only as a full group and responds to recommendations by its staff. That places a bigger burden on the staff, but Kieffer said it guarantees that commissioners act on a common body of knowledge, and it means that there is a uniformity to the language and style of the recommendations because all of them are members of the same group.

*

Despite their differences and the seeming inevitability of clashes down the road--most notably over the recommendations for what types of neighborhood councils to create--representatives of the two commissions have begun meeting regularly in a conference committee that already has drafted common language on a number of provisions detailing the power of the mayor and City Council.

That process is going more smoothly than either commission had expected, in part, Chemerinsky said, because both panels have reconciled themselves to life with the other.

“Each commission would prefer that the other wasn’t there,” he said. “Having two commissions working at once sometimes takes the difficult and makes it at times seem nearly impossible. But we’ve come to accept that each of us is here to stay.”