Council Can’t Decide How to Fight Measure

Los Angeles City Council members, many embarrassed over their decision two months ago to place a now-controversial measure on the ballot, found themselves hopelessly divided Friday on a proposal urging voters to oppose the charter amendment.

Split 7-7 on whether there were even the legal findings necessary to hear the motion opposing Charter Amendment HH, council members nonetheless heatedly debated the proposal that has generated wide criticism in recent days.

“There’s nothing wrong with admitting you made a mistake,” said Councilman Joel Wachs, who brought the issue to his colleagues Friday. “Far worse is putting your head in the sand . . . because you don’t want to admit you made a mistake.”

But council President John Ferraro, who attempted several times to close debate and even refused to allow Councilman Mike Feuer to speak, told his colleagues that they had had plenty of time to deal with the proposed charter change. He said he agreed with a deputy city attorney that the council had “no immediate need” to act on it.

Under the ballot proposal, the City Council and the mayor would have broad authority over such quasi-independent agencies as the airports, harbor, and water and power departments. Those so-called proprietary departments now operate their own budgets, outside the council-controlled general fund.

But some lawmakers said they had been unaware of the measure’s broad potential and would not have voted to place it on the ballot had they known.

Although Wachs said he believed that council members had inadvertently approved the measure, he voiced concern that it could have slipped through the council by design.

Ferraro, however, lashed out at his colleague, saying that Wachs “should have known better than anyone” because he is an attorney.

Last-minute criticism of the measure is bringing together an unlikely coalition of elected officials, union and department heads and charter reformists. As Julie Butcher, general manager of Service Employees International Union Local 347, put it: “These are people who never agree on anything.”

The idea for the charter amendment arose after the Los Angeles Police Department ran into difficulties when it absorbed the policing duties of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Ferraro authored a motion asking city officials to examine changes in the charter.

A small working group, led by city Chief Legislative Analyst Ron Deaton, wrote HH. Critics say it became much broader, potentially granting lawmakers much wider latitude over the DWP, harbor and airports agencies and the two pension departments.

Even Ferraro, who backed HH, said in an interview earlier this week that those departments need to be “protected” from political whim. But he said that officials have discussed transfers such as moving the city’s waste water program to the DWP and that the city “needed a vehicle to do that.”

The measure’s opponents say it is exactly that kind of transfer, which would remove public input into those decisions, that makes them skeptical.

Mayor Richard Riordan also opposes the measure, agreeing with many critics who believe that the issue should have had a full hearing before the two charter reform commissions.