Panel Asks for Up-or-Down Charter Vote

As its appointed counterpart unveiled its draft charter, the elected Los Angeles charter reform commission moved Monday night to clear a path for its work to be considered by city voters next year.

Members of the elected panel unanimously approved a motion by Commissioner Dennis Zine urging the City Council to refrain from offering any charter amendments next April or June, so that the commission’s rewrite of the city’s constitution can face a clean ballot and an up-or-down vote.

An appointed panel of reformers also is producing its version of a new City Charter, and if the two commissions cannot agree on a single set of reforms, voters face the prospect of being asked to consider two charter proposals, each numbering in the hundreds of pages, on the same ballot.

So daunting is that prospect that city officials have yet to figure out how to print such a ballot--much less how to convince voters to read it.

The challenge would be worse, commissioners said, if other amendments are offered at the same time. Their request that the council keep the ballot free of other amendments is not binding. But commissioners said they hoped the council would agree that the new charter is important enough that voters should be allowed to consider it by itself.

“I think this will help with our efforts and the efforts of the appointed commission,” Zine said, adding that a clean ballot will “not confuse voters any more than they’re already confused.”

Monday’s vote is just one step in a complicated endgame as the two charter commissions begin to wind down their drafting and shift to the task of explaining the relevance of their work to residents.

So far, they have met with mixed results: The elected commission’s meetings often draw a sizable and sometimes impassioned crowd of devotees, while the appointed commission recently sponsored a well-attended series of public meetings. At the same time, the elected commission’s recent “constitutional convention” was sparsely attended.