L.A.’s Apathy Toward New Charter Defies History, Other Cities’ Views

Tuesday’s elections perhaps will attract a record-low number of voters. The fate of the proposed city charter could be decided by no more than 200,000 voters, representing only 10% to 15% of the electorate. This would fall well below the average turnout of 25% for recent municipal elections. Such paltry participation stands in sharp contrast to past charter-reform efforts. In 1924, nearly 60% of the electorate voted to enact the current charter. In 1970 and 1971, when new charters narrowly failed, turnout was three to five times higher than that predicted this time around.

L.A.’s charter apathy would also dramatically contrast with the recent experiences of other cities. In the past few years, 50% of San Francisco and Oakland voters trooped to the polls to ratify their respective new charters. New York City’s 1989 charter revision attracted more than 60% of the electorate. In Detroit, never a paragon of public participation, 40% of voters turned out to ratify a new charter in 1996.

The irony of the expected minuscule turnout in L.A. is that the recently completed charter revision was the most open and democratic in the city’s history. Both the appointed and elected charter commissions held a collective 300 public meetings across the city over two years. Many meetings were videotaped for later airing on TV. Both commissions created Web pages, used focus groups and conducted extensive media and outreach efforts to encourage public participation in drafting a new governance system. Minorities were well represented on both commissions. No other major city considering a new charter can match this record of openness and inclusiveness.

But attendance at the commissions’ meetings averaged only 50 people, most of them representatives of city agencies, lobbying groups or perennial civic gadflies. The Brown Act’s requirement of open public meetings generated what little attendance there was, but the general public was largely absent. In a sense, the light voter turnout expected Tuesday naturally follows from the public’s modest involvement in charter deliberations.

In the 1920s, the public wasn’t really invited to the show. Then, a 15-member elected board met 36 times over a six-month period. All meetings were held downtown, and not a single private citizen spoke before the board. Virtually all input came from academics, civic and business organizations and government officials. Of a populace of 750,000, citizen involvement consisted of a mere 26 letters to the charter framers. All board decisions were made behind closed doors. As undemocratic as this process was by today’s standards, a record number voted in 1924, with nearly 90% of them supporting the current City Charter.

During the 1968-71 reform effort, stakeholders again dominated charter deliberations. An appointed commission held numerous public meetings over a one-year period; all input came from public officials, experts and lobbyists. Later, a City Council charter committee held 27 public meetings over a four-month period. Of the 80 statements submitted to it, only six were from private citizens. Yet, both bodies drafted their proposals in full public view.

The hallmark of the successful 1924 campaign was its sheer length. Then, pro-charter forces mounted an aggressive yearlong drive complete with a speakers’ bureau. The Chamber of Commerce, Municipal League, City Club and other civic organizations assisted mightily in creating consensus that a new charter was needed. This well-orchestrated campaign for voter support commenced even before charter deliberations began.

The current campaign, in contrast, only began in March, when the City Council voted to place the charter on the June ballot. Since then, city officials have hamstrung the effort. The city attorney ruled that, if city funds are involved, charter commissioners must remain neutral in public meetings unless opponents are there to argue the other side. The City Council, most of whose members oppose the new charter, effectively defunded the elected commission’s staff and operations. Mayor Richard Riordan, who supports charter reform, belatedly sponsored a media campaign that started only in the last few weeks. Given such constraints, civic apathy is an understandable response.

Should the charter proposal fail, supporters plan to place some form of it back on the ballot in the near future. If they pursue this option, the problem of voter apathy will resurface. But valuable lessons can be gleaned from L.A.’s past and the experience of other cities to deal with this problem. In L.A.. a long, well-financed and organized campaign ensured charter success in 1924. Elsewhere, the presence of pro-charter mayoral candidates on the same ballot--Willie Brown in San Francisco and Edmund G. “Jerry” Brown Jr. in Oakland--boosted voter turnout and prospects of success. High-turnout elections diminish the power that stakeholders can wield over the outcome.

L.A.’s ambitious democratic experiment in charter reform has revealed major weaknesses in the fabric of its civic life. Reinventing local government was supposed to fix the city’s ills, but has wound up underscoring its very problems: widespread voter apathy and cynicism, weak political leadership, moribund civic institutions, a public life dominated by a few powerful special interests.

Still, charter reform offers the promise of incremental solutions. One proposal not included in the new charter, but worthy of revisiting, is to schedule local elections to coincide with state and federal contests. This would help to increase voter turnout and lessen stakeholder influence. Such was the case in 1924, when the charter appeared on the same ballot as the presidential primary. There is risk that hotly contested state and national elections can overwhelm local races and issues. But some cities, including San Diego, think its a risk worth taking and have consolidated their elections.

The two charter-reform commissions believed that the public’s participation in framing the city’s new constitution was more important than producing a document behind closed doors and marketing it to voters. The reformers’ paradoxical legacy, however, is a vessel designed for democracy but lacking a crew. They created open and citizen-friendly deliberations but couldn’t attract the public to make them work. By which standard--framers’ democratic intent or public’s apathetic response--should the new charter’s legitimacy be judged?*