Boost for City Attorney’s Office

Compared to the testy dialogue over whether a new city charter should require neighborhood councils, deliberations over the city attorney’s office are decidedly low-key. How well the city attorney’s office functions depends of course on how good a job the boss of the office does. Yet, certain charter changes governing the office’s operation would ripple positively through the whole city bureaucracy.

Los Angeles’ charter provides that voters elect the city attorney and specifies his duties, which include giving legal advice to all city departments and officers, representing the city in all lawsuits and prosecuting misdemeanor criminal cases and ordinance violations.

That’s a tall order, even for an office with 376 attorneys and a $65-million budget. The scope of these duties, combined with the charter-driven confusion and ossification in City Hall, has created problems for the city attorney. The incumbent, James K. Hahn, like his predecessors spends far too much of his time decoding Los Angeles’ byzantine charter at the request of city departments and officers. If the two charter reform commissions now at work did nothing else but draw clearer lines of authority between the mayor, City Council and city departments, the city attorney’s office would realize enormous savings in staff time.

Some, including Mayor Richard Riordan, have argued for splitting Hahn’s job into an elected criminal prosecutor and an appointed lawyer to defend the city in civil suits. That sounds to us--and to the appointed charter reform panel--like a prescription for duplication of cost and effort. It also wouldn’t remedy the more common problem with the current structure: that the city attorney must sometimes represent two separate and conflicting city departments or officials in the same action, or the public interest may conflict with the legal interests of a city official. In those cases, some use of outside counsel seems unavoidable.

However, the city attorney’s office ought to have the authority to settle minor civil suits on its own; currently all settlements require City Council approval. That’s a time-wasting way to work. As long as the city attorney is elected, voters have to be able to assume that he or she can make basic judgments, such as routine settlements, without waiting for council approval.