Charter Panel Seeks to Simplify Power in City

In the latest in a series of tentative decisions on a revised government structure for Los Angeles, an elected charter reform panel decided Monday night that some of the citizen commissions that oversee city departments, such as parks and recreation, should be stripped of management authority.

The decision was intended to streamline executive authority. It reinforced earlier decisions by the panel to give the mayor sole power to fire department general managers. Currently, the mayor must get the consent of the City Council.

The charter panel--which plans to submit a revised charter to voters next spring--also voted to eliminate a provision in the city’s constitution giving the City Council the power to override actions of the citizen commissions. The panel sees the City Council as primarily a legislative body, functioning as the city’s chief policymaker but staying out of the way of administration.

The charter provision in question--passed by voters as Proposition 5 in 1991--has allowed the City Council to assert jurisdiction over any commission decision and substitute its own judgment.

Supporters of Proposition 5 argue that it helps balance power between the mayor, who appoints the commission, and the council. But opponents say the measure impedes accountability and the mayor’s effectiveness by blurring the lines over who is in charge administratively.

The elected reform panel was evenly divided on a plan to modify Proposition 5 to allow the council to retain a legislative veto over commissions’ rule-making actions, but not administrative matters involving issues such as personnel or contracts.

A second, appointed charter reform panel has not yet taken a position on Proposition 5. But it has expressed a similar sentiment that the mayorally appointed citizen commissions that oversee city departments should stick to advisory functions, rather than management.

The elected charter panel decided Monday to remove day-to-day management authority from commissions that now head the animal services, fire, library and parks departments, as well as the departments of airports, the harbor and water and power. Those commissions would be left with limited policy-setting roles and oversight function to make certain that department heads are setting rules in accordance with council policy and enforcing them in accordance with the mayor’s executive authority.

The panel voted tentatively to preserve the city’s quasi-judicial citizens commissions, such as planning and civil service; to retain the police commission as a managing body, and to strengthen the independence of the ethics commission by declaring that its decisions on individual cases involving allegations of wrongdoing are not subject to City Council review.

The panel late Monday night had still not decided the two most controversial questions on its agenda.

These were whether to include a far-ranging, legally enforceable “bill of rights” in the Charter, and whether to give neighborhood councils decision-making authority.

One of the panel’s committees, on the quality of life in Los Angeles, has recommended that the Charter contain a bill of rights similar to the U.S. and state constitutions.

But besides standard items, such as freedom of religion and speech, the committee has also proposed a right to “reproductive autonomy.” In case the U.S. Supreme Court reverses itself and says a woman has no right to an abortion, she would retain such a right in Los Angeles.

A separate committee, on More Responsive Government with an Involved Citizenry, has recommended a citywide system of elected neighborhood councils with the ability to decide local land use and planning issues, but only to make recommendations on citywide land use and planning issues.

The distinction is intended to address concerns of business and construction-trade unions that neighborhood councils would be tempted to be parochial and thwart developments of citywide import by taking not-in-my-backyard approaches.

But that distinction has drawn criticism as impractical. “There is simply no principled way within the confines of the English language to separate ‘local’ from ‘citywide’ issues,” declared another committee of the elected panel that examined planning issues.

Decision-making authority for neighborhood councils would be unique in American municipal government. Scores of cities have neighborhood councils, but all are advisory.

The second, appointed charter revision commission, which must win support for its proposals from the City Council before they can be submitted to voters, has already rejected the concept of decision-making neighborhood councils here and embraced the concept of advisory neighborhood councils, vested with “procedural” authority.