Don’t Let Date Snag Charter

The last details of the proposed new charter for Los Angeles are being ironed out in meetings with the City Council, members of the two charter reform commissions and other groups. This new document, if voters approve it in June, will be a huge improvement over the 74-year-old set of rules that now governs city operations. It would be madness to let the package fall apart over the latest dispute, the date on which the new charter would take effect.

Debate over the date, a seemingly minor issue overlooked during months of testy negotiations on other provisions, has now devolved into a bitter political tug of war. Pulling hard on one end of the rope is Mayor Richard Riordan. For two years, the mayor, a strong supporter of charter change, insisted that any new charter would take effect after he left office. That’s why leaders of the appointed and elected reform panels last month chose July 1, 2001, as the date for the new rules to took hold, the very day that Riordan’s successor takes office.

Although the mayor just weeks ago disparaged the unified charter as offering little improvement over the status quo, he now can barely hide his eagerness to pull the levers of power that the new charter would give mayors. To that end, he now insists that the charter take effect well before he leaves office.

Supporting the mayor are members of the elected reform panel, most of whom follow his bidding. Last week, that group endorsed a plan, which Riordan backs, to put some parts of the new charter into effect six months after ballot approval, by Jan. 1, 2000, and the rest by July 1, 2000. But phased implementation is a prescription for chaos; city departments and officials cannot operate under two charters simultaneously.

On the other end of the rope is the reform panel appointed by the City Council. That group remains convinced that July 1, 2001, two years after voter approval, is the prudent time for turnover, a choice sensibly indicated by the experience of other cities that have adopted new charters and by the city attorney and others who insist that it will take two years to draft all the ordinances and make the myriad other changes necessary for the charter to take effect.

Leaders of the appointed panel also took Riordan at his word--that charter reform was not about him and his powers. Nor was the reform process about rebuking the current City Council. Yet that is exactly how this council must feel as it reviews provisions that somewhat reduce its authority, expand its membership and enhance the powers of a mayor with whom it has had troubled relations. Like Riordan, many council members are in their last term.

Yet if this is the charter for the next century, as so often proclaimed, voters shouldn’t have to wait so many months into the next century, until July 1, 2001, for it to take effect.

A committee drawn from both reform panels meets today and next week to discuss a compromise date. The city attorney’s office, which would shoulder much of the responsibility for implementation, has indicated it could make implementation happen sooner than two years, and it should. Yet Riordan’s bullying and intransigence threaten once again to bring down the whole reform effort by fomenting more dissent within the elected panel and alienating the City Council, which must approve the compromise package for the June ballot by March 5.

Nearly $4 million has been spent by both reform panels over nearly three years. The result is a new charter--not a perfect one but a vastly better one. Los Angeles is so close to achieving this goal that it would be insane to allow the compromise to die over a date.