Deep Rifts Surface at City Charter Summit

A private summit aimed at building consensus for the charter reform effort among feuding Los Angeles business, labor and homeowner factions got off to a rocky start Wednesday when some participants balked at accepting the premise urged upon them by the person who brought them together, Erwin Chemerinsky, chairman of the Elected Charter Reform Commission.

Before excusing himself from the closed-door meeting at USC’s law school, where he teaches, Chemerinsky urged the 16 invitees to accept that elected neighborhood councils would be a feature of the proposed Charter, which the commission will submit to voters next spring. He urged them to focus their discussions on the role such councils should have in deciding land-use questions.

But after Chemerinsky left the meeting, business representatives declared they were unwilling to accept the premise that there would be elected neighborhood councils, participants said.

“The business community was quite united on the concept that [neighborhood] councils should not be elected and should not have powers on land use,” said George Ross, manager of corporate external affairs at Arco. Ross represented the Los Angeles Business Advisors, a group of 24 chief executive officers, including the publisher of the Los Angeles Times and two other members of the board of Times Mirror Co., which owns The Times.

Participants said the meeting was low-key and that no one’s mind appeared to have been changed. The group agreed to reconvene next Thursday.

Retired U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge William A. Norris, who moderated the meeting at Chemerinsky’s request, declined to make any assessment of the potential for achieving a consensus, saying only: “We talked and we’re still talking. That’s the only news.”

Labor union representatives were split, with a city employees union in favor of elected neighborhood councils and a building trades union adamantly opposed, participants said. The building trades fear such councils would reject proposed developments and cost construction jobs.

Homeowner groups supported elected neighborhood councils with land-use authority. “Our basic position has always been that they have to be elected and that they have authority for planning, land use and zoning,” said attendee Gordon Murley, president of two umbrella homeowner groups, the Federation of Hillside and Canyon Assns. and the San Fernando Valley Federation. “In essence, we see [elected neighborhood councils] as replacing the current Planning Commission.”

Commenting from the sidelines, George David Kieffer suggested that an opportunity for consensus lies in tentative decisions made by the separate, appointed charter reform commission that he chairs, which must win City Council support for its recommendations before they can go to voters.

The appointed commission has voted in favor of a Department of Neighborhoods that would encourage formation of advisory councils in neighborhoods that want them, with a review of the experiment after a fixed period. Kieffer, a partner in the law firm of Manatt, Phelps and Phillips, called “the presumptuousness of thinking you can invent a whole third level of government in a very short time . . . very unwise.”

Chemerinsky’s premise was based on a tentative decision by the elected commission 10 days ago to include elected neighborhood councils in its proposed charter. The elected commission decided that the councils should have control over small portions of the city budget, which they could use to buy additional local services such as extended library hours.

But the elected commission postponed indefinitely consideration of the far more contentious issue of what role neighborhood councils should play in deciding how land is used.

After hearing threats from business to campaign against a charter that included elected, decision-making councils, and threats from homeowners to campaign against a charter that left such councils out, some commissioners suggested the summit.

Consensus-building is considered critical in light of lessons learned in the last failed effort to win passage of a revised charter nearly 30 years ago. A charter commission then said its proposal went down to defeat even though it had only one source of well-financed opposition--threatened Department of Water and Power managers who scared off voters with the campaign theme of “a charter hoax.”