Joint City Charter Committee Approves Compromise Pact

A marathon round of negotiations, which one participant compared to “shuttle diplomacy,” produced a major breakthrough Wednesday in the debate over modernizing Los Angeles’ City Charter when the leaders of the dueling reform commissions unanimously approved a compromise package.

When the votes were tallied, members of the panel and the audience burst into applause, and USC law professor Erwin Chemerinsky, chairman of the elected commission, grinned broadly as he announced: “We have a charter.”

Of course, in the world of charter reform, nothing is over until it’s over, and two more votes have to occur to ratify Wednesday’s action. The full elected commission meets Saturday to consider the package, and the City Council is expected to vote next week.

If the deal holds, and most observers now believe it will, it means that Los Angeles residents will have the chance to vote in June on a far-reaching reform package that would, among other things, strengthen the city’s mayor, reorganize key city departments, create an ambitious new system for neighborhood representation, and open the way for a possible expansion of the City Council.

The deal came together when Mayor Richard Riordan agreed to yield on a handful of issues some City Council members view as important, and the council’s representatives stopped insisting that the charter not take effect until after Riordan leaves office in 2001. On one or two other issues, minor tinkering with charter language went far enough to please both sides.

Those compromises were hard won, with the two sides and leaders of the charter commissions hammering away late into the night Tuesday and then again Wednesday morning.

Public Could Vote in June

Los Angeles City Atty. James Hahn also played a key role in the breakthrough by announcing that his office could make an earlier effective date work; as a result, the new charter, if approved by voters, would take effect a year later, giving Riordan a full year to use it.

Representatives of Hahn’s office previously had expressed a preference for the later date, saying they would rather have more time to implement the reforms.

On Wednesday, however, Hahn sent a top deputy to the conference committee to explain that with some additional resources and staff, the earlier date is achievable. Hahn and Riordan, who do not often see eye to eye, nevertheless worked together to produce that agreement.

“I know that the mayor has the best interests of the city at heart, and so do I,” Hahn said in an interview after the vote. “It was a great result that we achieved today.”

While Hahn and Riordan were working through the details of the implementation date issue, two top Riordan aides, Chief of Staff Kelly Martin and Assistant Deputy Mayor Theresa Patzakis, negotiated with leaders of the two commissions and with the city’s chief legislative analyst, Ron Deaton, who carried the concerns of council members.

Those conversations, Chemerinsky said, opened communications and cleared the way for the compromise.

Under the deal, the mayor agreed to give up his efforts to enhance mayoral authority over a few internal operations at City Hall--important there but unknown to the public.

“We want to support a unified charter,” Martin said after the conference committee vote. “We think that it’s easier for voters.”

In another area that became contentious near the end of the long charter debate, both sides agreed to compromise on provisions that govern how much authority the council would have in overseeing and administering city contracts. With minor language changes, the conference committee agreed to leave those provisions essentially as they are now, a solution that neither side enthusiastically supported but both said they could live with.

Riordan said about an hour before the vote that he believed a deal was imminent and added that if it passed as he expected, he would favor it.

Some Opposition Still Lingers

With those parties on board, Wednesday’s meeting of the conference committee that negotiates compromises seemed mostly perfunctory, but participants were conscious of the history-making aspect of their action.

“This is a very important vote,” George Kieffer, chairman of the appointed commission, said just prior to the roll call.

Others nodded, and then every member of the conference committee voted for the proposal. One member, Jackie Dupont-Walker, was in Washington and unable to attend, but her input was considered so important that commission staff members used a speaker phone to allow her to participate and vote.

Some members of each of those groups are gearing up to encourage a breakdown of the compromise. Council members were eyeing substantial amendments to the unified charter, and a few elected commissioners were toying with tossing out some of the concessions they made and rewriting their charter in a way that would strip the council of important powers.

So deep is the distrust between the elected commission and the council that neither wants to be the first to vote on a charter package, because some members of each group are convinced that the other will then amend the proposal. One result is a convoluted procedure for finalizing the votes: Elected commissioners are expected Saturday to consider approving the unified charter and signing a transmission letter to the city clerk. But they also intend to hold on to that letter until after the council votes, delivering it only if the council joins them in supporting the compromise.

And yet, despite the lingering suspicions, most observers now believe that the hard work of charter reform is done and a unified document will be presented to voters in June.

Chemerinsky agreed.

“I’m thrilled,” he said. “And I’m cautiously optimistic.”