Voters Approve New City Charter by Wide Margin

The campaign to overhaul Los Angeles’ 74-year-old, phone-book-sized City Charter scored a decisive victory Tuesday, cheering leaders of an effort that was launched by Mayor Richard Riordan, opposed by some City Council members and pursued for more than two years by two citizen commissions.

At 10:35 p.m.--with nearly half the votes counted--George Kieffer, who chaired the appointed charter reform commission, mounted a chair at the Regal Biltmore Hotel and announced: “All the political analysts we’ve consulted on this say it’s time to declare victory. And we do.”

Riordan too welcomed the results. “The voters are saying that they’re sick and tired of the status quo,” he said. “They want accountable government.”

Although not as abysmal as some had predicted, turnout for the election was low, with about one in five registered voters casting ballots either at the polls or through the mail.

Two charter amendments to expand the City Council were losing badly.

The charter’s passage represents a watershed moment in the governance and politics of Los Angeles.

The new document, which will partly take effect immediately but mostly become the city’s governing constitution on July 1, 2000, will bring literally hundreds of changes to Los Angeles government, from the creation of new departments and the reallocation of power at City Hall to relatively minor shifts in duties that will be little felt outside the bureaucracy.

Among the most closely watched portions of the proposed charter were sections strengthening the power of the mayor’s office, instituting a citywide network of neighborhood councils, clarifying the role of the Police Commission’s inspector general and requiring regular audits of city finances.

On a political level, the charter debate marked an important--some believe the final--test of Riordan’s long campaign to remake Los Angeles.

As a private citizen, Riordan championed term limits for city officials. As a powerful fund-raiser with business community backing, he helped reshape the board of the Los Angeles Unified School District. And as mayor, he became the city’s leading advocate of rewriting the Los Angeles charter. Riordan’s first two efforts were successful. With the charter following suit, Riordan will leave a lasting mark on the city’s political landscape, reordering some of its most fundamental institutions.

In the days before the vote, supporters aggressively pressed their campaign on television and radio, in the mail and through telephone banks, while opponents were outspent and outflanked. On election day, Riordan, voted early at a polling place near his Brentwood home, then headed out to walk precincts.

City Council members, a majority of whom opposed the charter overhaul, cast ballots in their own districts before heading downtown for the council’s regularly scheduled session. Their campaign relied largely on four mailers sent to residents’ homes over the past two weeks; in them, the charter opponents cited endorsements by police and fire unions and warned that the new charter would take money away from essential city services.

On Tuesday, the mayor and his allies welcomed the early returns.

When the first returns were announced, cheers went up at the Regal Biltmore, where supporters gathered at a sports bar.

“The charter’s passage is a real triumph for the city of Los Angeles. It’s a triumph of hard work,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, who chaired the city’s elected charter reform commission. “If the charter passes, it’s going to be because of the broad constituency behind it.”

Kieffer agreed: “This is not a victory of the mayor over the council or the council over the mayor, or business over labor, or homeowners against homeowners,” he said. “This is a victory for the people who were truly looking at the overall picture and a charter that would serve everyone.”

At City Hall, charter opponents were more reserved. Councilman Rudy Svorinich, who chaired the effort to defeat the charter, acknowledged that the measure was headed for passage. “We’re disappointed, but not surprised. The other side outspent us 6-1. . . . Now the voters have spoken and it’s up to us to go to work.”

Controversial Provisions

Through an occasionally acrimonious campaign, Riordan and other supporters, most notably Kieffer and Chemerinsky, argued that the changes in the proposal were needed to make Los Angeles government more efficient, accountable and accessible. Opponents responded that the recommended charter tilted City Hall’s balance of power too far in favor of the mayor and did not go far enough in empowering neighborhoods.

Some of its most controversial provisions, at least within City Hall, involved moves to shift authority from the City Council to the mayor’s office. Although none is particularly significant by itself, supporters said that together they would create a more efficient management for the city. Council members and other opponents disagreed and warned that the new system might lead to corruption.

Among the most important changes: The mayor would get a modest increase in the power to fire general managers and city commissioners, and the council would lose its ability to substitute its own decisions for those of city commissions.

While those moves stirred anxiety among council members and some others, residents would be more likely to notice a set of provisions intended to diffuse authority away from the civic center and across Los Angeles. A new Department of Neighborhood Empowerment would be created to oversee development of a citywide network of neighborhood councils, and the city Planning Commission would be broken into at least five local commissions--moves intended to bring government closer to residents.

Other provisions include creation of charter-mandated performance audits, rejiggered power on some city commissions and modest tinkering with the city’s budget process.

Given the document’s range of proposals, even opponents found some things that they liked. A section dealing with the role of the Police Commission’s inspector general was endorsed by opponents as well as supporters of the charter.

In addition to the charter itself, voters were asked to consider amendments to the document--a strange circumstance that was the result of the charter commissions being unable to iron out their differences on those topics. One of those amendments would expand the City Council from 15 to 21 members; another would go further, expanding it to 25 seats.

With so much confusion surrounding those options, most observers predicted defeat. Those predictions were being borne out Tuesday, as both council expansion alternatives were losing handily.

A less far-reaching but still important effect of the charter’s passage would be to affirm Riordan’s continuing influence over the city electorate and City Hall. Although Riordan is a lame-duck mayor with two years left in office, he declared 1999 “the year of reform” and has proceeded to meet each of the major goals he set for himself as part of that effort, though he has had to make some concessions along the way.

Earlier this year, he won a modified version of his first reform plank, a retooling of the city business tax code, which the council watered down and then passed. Then, in what Riordan proclaimed his most important venture, he helped overthrow the Los Angeles Unified School District board, backing three winning candidates in the April election. Challenger Genethia Hayes appeared headed for victory in a runoff Tuesday with incumbent Barbara Boudreaux. Hayes was backed by Riordan.

The Mayor’s Legacy

Charter reform represents the final and, in all likelihood, the most lasting plank of the mayor’s reform trio. Interestingly, it is the one in which Riordan had the least direct control over the outcome.

After first urging charter reform, partly to head off secessionist movements in the San Fernando Valley and elsewhere, Riordan refused to join with council members in appointing a reform commission. Riordan dug in his heels because the council would not pledge to put that commission’s work directly before the voters, reserving for itself the right to amend or reject any suggestions from the panel.

Instead, Riordan relied on an obscure state law that allowed voters to elect a charter reform commission that could bypass the council altogether.

Voters approved that approach but rejected most of Riordan’s slate of candidates to serve on the elected commission. The result was that the mayor, having launched charter reform, quickly lost much direct say over its outcome.

Instead, the chairmanship of that commission fell to a liberal law professor, Chemerinsky, who immediately frightened business interests by suggesting that he was eager to see charter reform spearhead creation of elected neighborhood councils with authority over issues such as development.

Over time, however, Chemerinsky dropped that idea. He and Riordan surprised many observers by reaching common ground on many points, including the charter provisions that bring more authority to the mayor’s office.

Chemerinsky and his commission did not bend on some key points sought by the mayor, however. Most notably, Riordan had sought to abolish the office of the elected city attorney and replace it with an appointed post. The commission rejected that proposal.

Also over Riordan’s objections, Chemerinsky and his panel entered into long negotiations with the appointed panel and its chairman, Kieffer, and eventually drafted a compromise charter proposal that won the endorsement of both commissions. Riordan begrudgingly accepted that package, and the council unanimously voted to place it on the ballot, in part because council members realized that if they balked, the elected commission would go ahead without them.

Once they had approved it for the ballot, however, nine council members peeled off, taking some elements of organized labor with them. Dipping into their officeholder accounts, council members supplied the vast majority of the money to defeat the charter, but they were outspent six to one.

While some of the financial backers of charter reform were controversial--billionaire executives and big companies, including the parent company of The Times--its political base was extraordinarily large. Groups as diverse as the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce and the NAACP, the Los Angeles Urban League and downtown CEOs, as well as all five major newspapers in the area backed the proposed charter--a coalition unrivaled since the police reforms of the early 1990s.

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Times staff writer Nicholas Riccardi contributed to this story.

Get the latest vote totals from the Los Angeles city election on The Times’ Web site:

https://www.latimes.com/laelection