Coalition Proposes 15 Area Councils to Boost Local Control

An unusual coalition of liberal activists and conservative homeowner representatives unveiled its version of a new Los Angeles on Tuesday--one in which 135 elected community representatives would steer local projects and manage neighborhood affairs.

The proposal is the latest offering in the increasingly complex and passionate debate over how to rewrite the city’s charter to broaden representative government without thwarting development and job creation.

“We don’t need more government,” San Fernando Valley lawyer David Fleming said. “But we need more decentralized government.”

The proposal unveiled Tuesday would increase city government’s size, but Fleming and the other coalition members emphasized that the fiscal investment would be small. Fleming estimated that the new community council members would be paid $100 to $200 per week. At that rate, he said, the entire undertaking would cost $625,000 to $1.25 million out of a city general fund budget of more than $2.5 billion.

As envisioned by Fleming and other proponents, 15 community councils of nine people each would be elected to two-year terms from neighborhoods throughout the city. They would control local development, oversee delivery of city services and retain tax money generated by growth. That last component is intended to give neighborhoods an incentive to encourage development and counteract the threat of so-called NIMBYism that some fear would accompany powerful local councils.

What most distinguishes the latest offering, however, is not so much the proposal as the interests arrayed around it.

At a news conference Tuesday, Fleming, who backed Mayor Richard Riordan in 1993, was joined by state Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Los Angeles), who ran against Riordan in that campaign. Fleming is a corporate lawyer who works in Studio City; Hayden was a student radical in the 1960s and has spent his adult life in liberal politics.

Also among the proponents were Gordon Murley, the conservative leader of the Hillside Federation, and Julie Butcher, the liberal labor leader who heads the largest city employees union. There was a representative of an Alameda Corridor jobs program, who stood silently as Hayden cited the failure of the corridor to deliver on promised jobs as one of the reasons for creating strong local councils.

And there was the unacknowledged potential for conflict between some members of the group who support local councils as a way of spurring growth and others who are wary of development and developers.

“You’ve got a coalition that hasn’t gotten together on anything in years,” Fleming acknowledged at the outset of the briefing.

Even the name of the group was unclear. A news release by Butcher’s organization called it “The Coalition for Community Empowerment,” but another participant in the news conference spied that release and shook his head. “It’s just ‘The Coalition,’ ” he said. Fleming agreed.

The breadth of the coalition supporting the proposal released Tuesday reflects a point of common interest among the disparate groups behind it. Homeowner advocates are seeking greater control over local development, slow-growth proponents are hoping for a way to rein in the power of developers and builders, city employees envision better community relations and the chance for empire-building, and some idealists see the councils as a vehicle for broadening community participation, particularly in the city’s underrepresented poor neighborhoods.

“It’s an amazing joining of mutual interests,” Butcher said in a statement.

Critics, however, see the councils as the most perilous step in the ultimate Balkanization of the city. And, like supporters of the idea, critics reflect a broad and strange coalition.

Riordan has shied away from elected neighborhood councils with strong powers, and he is joined by City Administrative Officer Keith Comrie, who has fiercely criticized some Riordan proposals, but shares the mayor’s skepticism for powerful local councils. Similarly, the city’s appointed charter commission has recommended against creation of decision-making local councils.

Those people and some groups have cited the potential slowdown of development--and consequent loss of jobs, particularly for the poor--as a major reason for viewing the councils skeptically. Others have warned of bureaucratic gridlock, as hundreds of new elected officials try to put their stamp on city government.

Most controversial has been the input from the city’s business community, particularly the Los Angeles Business Advisors, a group of corporate chief executives and other powerful figures. That group, known as LABA, includes Los Angeles Times Publisher Mark Willes, and it has threatened to campaign against any proposed charter that establishes powerful neighborhood councils.

Partly because of its tactics, the business group has become a lightning rod for criticism of the neighborhood council idea. Tuesday was no exception. Hayden snickered about its membership, which is overwhelmingly white and male, and one speaker accused the group of racism for opposing an innovation that she said will empower poor communities.

The new proposal on neighborhood organization comes as the charter reform debate enters an important phase. Next week, the elected commission is expected to take up the matter of neighborhood councils.