2 Charter Boards Are Seeking Consensus

Seeking to present voters and the City Council with a single charter reform proposal, the two commissions charged with rewriting Los Angeles’ civic constitution are creating a joint panel to develop consensus between them.

The so-called conference committee, whose formation will be announced today, plans to work with the appointed and the elected commissions throughout the process of amending the 73-year-old City Charter.

It is also an indication that the two commissions will work cooperatively despite their antagonistic political origins. The elected commission, the brainchild of Mayor Richard Riordan, will put its reform recommendations directly before voters; the appointed commission, created by City Council ordinance, must send its reforms to the council, which must pass on them before they are presented to voters.

“I think it’s an important message that the two commissions . . . are really dedicated to working together and getting one charter proposal,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, chairman of the elected Charter Reform Commission. “The goal is to have one charter proposal before the voters, and the conference committee is our mechanism to do that.”

City officials and others had been concerned that the two commissions would develop different proposals, confusing voters and complicating the reform process even more.

George Kieffer, chairman of the appointed city of Los Angeles Charter Reform Commission, said the 10-person conference committee, whose members will be appointed by the commission chairmen, could help both panels achieve their goals without giving voters two conflicting sets of reform proposals.

“We cannot unilaterally agree to go directly on the ballot and the elected commission can’t unilaterally agree to change and go through the council,” Kieffer said. “This is a vehicle for resolving differences and approaching issues together but preserving the integrity of each of the commissions and their own specific issues.”

The conference committee will function differently than legislative committees of the same name, which typically reconcile conflicts in bills passed by different chambers at the end of the process. As envisioned by the commission chairmen, this committee will deliberate while the reforms are being formulated.

“We will be coming back and forth and back and forth with issues,” Kieffer said.

The conference committee, likely to be composed of three permanent and two rotating members from each commission, will review materials and forward them to the panels before decisions are made. The committee will also try to reach a consensus between the two groups before proposals are approved or rejected by the commissions.

Any decisions by the conference committee will be reviewed and voted on by each commission, the chairmen said.

The charter reform panels, consisting of 18 people each, are charged with reviewing the hundreds of pages in the existing City Charter, which governs city services and policies. Any revisions must be approved by voters.

The key issues in the charter reform debate have been accountability, efficiency and responsiveness of city government. Both commissions have heard extensive testimony from elected and appointed city officials, and both have worked mostly independently thus far.

The conference committee, which has been endorsed in concept by both commissions, would be a formal way for the appointed and elected commissioners to exchange information. In addition, the committee could make recommendations to the commissions to help keep them on track.

“This is a conference committee with a twist,” Kieffer said. “This is an effort to get the commissions together before views have hardened.”

Both commissions still have a long way to go before their proposals are ready for approval by the council or to be placed before voters.

If the commissions hope to seek voters’ approval on the April 1999 ballot, their work must be completed by next February, officials said.