Let the Voters Decide

Today the Los Angeles City Council will again take up the proposed unified city charter. Early this week, its prospects in the council looked bleak. But this is a new day--and the last, best chance for true reform of the city’s outdated, byzantine operations.

What remains now is for the council, over the coming week, to put aside its hesitations about this document and its simmering resentment of the mayor and give Los Angeles voters the opportunity to decide in June what sort of city government they want.

Agreement Wednesday by a joint committee of the two charter commissions on a final round of charter changes opened the way for today’s council meeting. Since first getting the unified charter, council members have complained that delegates from the two reform commissions have submitted continual changes. The document that council members got Thursday afternoon is, everyone agrees, the final version, incorporating wise, key concessions by Mayor Richard Riordan and changes to satisfy council concerns. This consensus document, the product of years of exhaustive study and debate by the two charter reform commissions, has the support of an unprecedented coalition of business, labor and civic groups.

The new document grants the mayor more authority, and it allows voters to expand the size of the council. But the new charter would also create an ambitious system for neighborhood representation without mandating elected neighborhood councils, streamline key city departments and build in accountability now woefully absent at City Hall. To voters, those issues are far more important than any worries council members may have about the size of their fiefdoms. Current council members should remember that most of them will be term-limited out of office anyway before long.

The proposed charter is a huge improvement over the 74-year-old charter, amended so often that it has swollen to more than 700 pages of rules and regulations that collectively stifle initiative and public involvement. That is why the council should embrace this document; the standard should not be whether individual members like or dislike certain parts of the new scheme.

Is this a perfect charter? Of course not. Despite review by dozens inside and outside City Hall, unexpected problems may arise later. Charter amendments can resolve these problems as they come up. Even the U.S. Constitution needed amendment, with the Bill of Rights, soon after it was adopted.

If the council deliberately stalls past the March 5 deadline or makes major changes in this consensus document, the elected commission, which meets Saturday, could still decide to submit its own charter directly to the voters in June. Two competing charters on the ballot could mean the death of any real reform. The City Council can avoid that unhappy outcome by letting voters make a clean choice between the current, aged charter and one that moves Los Angeles city government into the 21st century.