Charter Reform Exhibit A

Keith Comrie, Los Angeles’ head administrative officer since 1979, is a respected senior member of the city government. But Comrie’s no-holds-barred attack last week on charter reform--along with the “attaboys” he’s since gotten from his buddies in City Hall--are pointed illustrations, if more are needed, of why this city so badly needs to restructure itself.

Comrie blasted reform proposals to give the mayor more power and to create elected neighborhood councils. He fingered Mayor Richard Riordan as inept and ominously warned that some of the draft reform proposals would produce in Los Angeles a New York-style government that lists toward corruption and mismanagement.

In the nearly two years since the start of efforts to streamline the city’s 700-page clunker of a charter, Comrie has often been helpful and supportive to both the commission appointed by the City Council and the panel that voters elected last year. We agree with him that some reform proposals such as elected neighborhood councils would be an invitation to gridlock. But his comments in a Times interview last week are wrong in many respects, at times nasty--especially toward the elected charter reform commission, which has proposed eliminating his office. He is also premature in that neither panel is close to making final recommendations.

More troubling, the remarks show once again that the real power in L.A. rests not with the people or elected leaders but with a small cadre of appointed bureaucrats like Comrie. City government should be transparent and easy to understand; it shouldn’t have a bureaucracy so convoluted that it takes five phone calls and herculean efforts to get a pothole filled or a crack house boarded up.

Decades of piecemeal amendments to the 1925 city charter have so muddied the lines of authority that no one is really accountable for a job not done. Ordinary residents can’t figure out whom to call, or whom to blame.

Guys like Comrie and those now slapping him on the back--none of them elected--too often hold the keys to getting things done in Los Angeles. Not surprisingly, they’d like to keep it that way.

To Comrie, charter reform “is a threat to honest and good government” so grave that he plans to delay his retirement to oppose the reform package. The fact that Comrie--or any one of a number of groups with narrow, self-serving agendas--wants so much to undo the hard work of both panels is only further evidence of the urgent need for a more functional and accountable city government.