Charter Reform Is L.A.’s Shot at the Big Time

It is one of the great mysteries of suburban Southern California that the city of Los Angeles doesn’t exert more of an emotional pull. Big as it is, people tend to utterly forget it the moment they pass from its boundaries. You hit your offramp and the hub of the metropolis morphs into a backdrop, just another patch of mini-malls and bougainvillea out past your 7-Eleven somewhere.

We don’t stew about it like company town suburbanites around Washington. We don’t rail at its pecking order, New York-style. No, Greater L.A.--Torrance to Whittier to Long Beach to Pomona--cares about its namesake about as much as you care in rush hour about the big rig in the next lane. We brag about how long we’ve gone without visiting downtown.

This quirk goes a long way toward explaining the attitude here in the outer reaches toward L.A.’s current big issue: charter reform. It is said that scores, nay hundreds of Angelenos are debating raucously over what appears to be some big social studies class project involving the reinvention of their City Charter. If so, more power to ‘em. Out here, the topic is synonymous with the phrase, “You are getting sleeeeepy . . . sleeeeepier. . . . “

This is too bad. Not because anyone but a nut enjoys social studies projects, but because the L.A. suburbs are tuning out on what could be the first change in generations in the way L.A. carries itself. There’s a chance--slim, but nonetheless real--that when the charter issue goes on the L.A. ballot this summer, our mother of all suburbs might finally morph into a presence that we can’t ignore.

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This matter of presence is a bigger issue for Los Angeles and its environs than people imagine at first glance. You look at the numbers--9 million-plus people in L.A. County, 3 million of them in the city--and it’s hard to feature L.A. as a victim of reticence.

But it is. L.A. pathologically undercuts its own power, which, after all, is what makes a great city great. This is a city that would go to epic lengths to build the San Fernando Valley, only to let its emotional distance fester to the point of near-secession; that would whine for commerce, only to torture its businesses with red tape.

The same cross-purposes show up in broader contexts: A state-of-the-art subway so undermined with ineptitude and graft that the whole project finally just grinds to a halt. The new Getty Center, so classy and stunning--and so high on such an inaccessible hill that the thing might as well belong to the City of God.

Even L.A.’s mayor, Richard Riordan, reflects the city’s up-and-down level of confidence. A shy millionaire who has just about everything going for him except a commanding, charismatic presence, Riordan has spent the better part of his second term insisting that that doggone charter is the only reason he can’t get the city to do what he wants.

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Well, L.A.’s charter is a holy mess, but that’s not the only reason no one’s running the place. A structure only reflects the people behind it, and a kind of ambivalence toward power has shown up in just about every player and aspect of this charter debate.

There’s the notion that a mayor can’t be more powerful than the political scaffolding around him. There’s the notion that a city like L.A. couldn’t handle real power, because it’s just too fragmented and diverse. There’s the reluctance to bring political parties into local governance as a channel for L.A.’s raging multitude of competing interests, because, when it comes to partisan muscle, L.A. has a tradition of squeamishness.

This isn’t to say there aren’t also practical problems. Los Angeles probably leads the developed world in the need to find some way to manage pluralistic cacophony. But imagine how much more creatively the city might address its issues if it didn’t feel the need to subvert every urge to be bold, to think big.

Instead, the charter reform debaters say they want better representation and a stronger mayor, and then meet every step forward with some equal and opposite way for it to be undercut. They argue about the firing of bad bureaucrats and the empowerment of neighborhood councils, but the bedrock question never changes: Is L.A. ready to wield, to handle real power? Does it possess that kind of confidence?

It has been this lack of confidence, this ambivalence about power, that has really inhibited the influence of L.A. It is said that, here in the suburbs, we like having no “there” there, but, in our hearts, we’d welcome a center of gravity.

It is a measure of L.A.’s growth that people there have finally begun to feel big enough to talk about power at all. It would be thrilling if that growth were to show up on the ballot. We’ll be waiting to feel the pull.

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Shawn Hubler’s column runs Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.