The Great Charter Awakening Sneaks Up on City Hall

The July 4 holiday being what it is, Los Angeles won’t get to use its new City Charter, which kicks in Saturday, until July 5. But for all the preparations for this event, City Hall denizens only now are awakening to the sheer bulk of the imminent change, even though much of it will probably go unenforced or unnoticed for months.

L.A.’s political roadside is littered with the bones of previous attempts to change the city’s progressive-era government. These failures proved that the accumulating unwieldiness of city government favored agencies more interested in battening their power than serving the public. Accordingly, it was no real surprise that the last disco-era charter revamp died at the hands of the Department of Water and Power.

But things have changed since then. The insider-dominated city that had long worked well for a majority-white population didn’t really serve the new, white-minority community. Then the city dragged its economic keel in the early ‘90s; after the defense-industry shrinkdown and before the new-media boom, unemployment and homelessness rose, property values and urban satisfaction sank.

Then the old power structures eroded. The mighty DWP had to shed nearly half its employees. The Los Angeles Police Department was humiliated by the 1991 cop beating of Rodney G. King and riots the following year, which also discredited Mayor Tom Bradley’s multicultural ideal. Richard Riordan’s autocratic, top-down administration won victories over the city’s establishments but seemed to many Angelenos even more remote than its predecessor. Services declined, the San Fernando Valley secession movement, perhaps the key element in the return of charter reform, revived, and Riordan waited months before even voicing his opposition to it.

With the city’s existence at stake, and with traditional charter-change opponents in disarray or in ruin, the moment for change was at hand.

It was a moment lasting four years. It would be romantic--and dishonest--to say that citizen groups sprung up across the city and marched through the streets, demanding reform. The cause really arose among the city’s vocational keeners: the chamber of commerce, the homeowner associations and the urban-policy wonks. These factions, who so often disagree about everything, finally managed, on two separate, long-running commissions, to agree about the charter. So did the voters.

Now the long, slow process of its introduction begins. A few key effects will be immediate.

The City Council, for example, will no longer have the authority to ask the Police Commission to do anything (such as to restore the key community-policing position of senior lead officer, rescinded by Chief Bernard C. Parks), something about which the commission has been dragging its feet lately, with an eye on the calendar. The mayor will have greater authority over his general managers: this, perhaps, the single, largest, close-at-hand change. “There’s an unsubtle shift to mayoral authority,” says George D. Kieffer, former chairman of the appointed charter commission. “Over time, we’ll see a more responsive government,” says his opposite number, Erwin Chemerinsky, who was chairman of the elected charter commission.

One top city official calls this “a new dialogue of authority,” because the 16 department heads who manage city services will no longer be able to play the mayor’s power off against the council’s. The old power game had the result of allowing some truly bad managers to flourish by currying favor with council members instead of tending to departmental business. Optimists say the charter change will create a newly competitive context for managers, with all of them trying to boost their departments’ service performance as they vie for higher wages and bonuses.

Council members, on the other hand, wonder how they’ll be able to help constituents get stoplights and sidewalks fixed when they can no longer influence department heads, except at budget time, when the council can propose cuts in the spending allowance of city managers. Kieffer disputes this: “The new system simply makes the mayor accountable.” In other words, everyone in the city knows exactly who to blame if the trash trucks ignore a neighborhood or sewers overflow the streets.

Raphael J. Sonenshein, the Cal State Fullerton professor who was executive director of the appointed commission, says the most important changes that the new charter manifests are well outside City Hall. Yet, these far-reaching efforts to create an entire new level of government remain a work in progress: the 15 neighborhood councils, for instance, a formula for whose installation is now being compiled by the city’s Department of Neighborhood Empowerment. And there are the five regional planning commissions, a response to the widespread sentiment for more neighborhood input into area planning and zoning. Both these projected entities fall well short of the original popular demands for directly elected local bodies with full legislative powers. Critics call them placebo government. To others, it’s a revolution.

No one can really say how long bringing on the local-government revolution will take. So will most other charter changes, because far more than it transposes the rules, the new document changes the city culture. The mayor is more powerful, and the council now makes legislation instead of giving orders. This turnabout will probably cause, over the next few months, endless skirmishes between the lame-duck City Council, whose members complain that the new charter makes them as ineffective as the Roman Senate under Theodoric the Goth, and the lame-duck mayor. The strife may hamper the immediate introduction of two other major charter innovations: city administrative and financial departments.

“But with seven new council members and a new mayor coming in next year, you’ll see the charter really start to happen,” one city manager says. “The new people won’t remember how it was and will learn to work under the new rules. They’ll have no vested interest and no sense of power loss.”

Maybe. But what else will they be like? Because in the end, for the new charter to succeed, we’ll need new leaders who can fashion a better city government around it. As with so many things, the charter’s success depends on the people who use it. *