Boroughs Are as Bad as Secession

Dividing Los Angeles into boroughs, as some now are proposing, is no better than secession for the city. During the most recent charter reform process, a borough system was carefully considered and rejected by both the elected and the appointed charter reform commissions. A borough system would mean a loss of control for city government over key choices for Los Angeles’ future.

We don’t have details yet on the current proposal, but all the borough plans studied during charter reform had three core features: decentralizing decision-making over land use; allowing each borough to keep a portion of its tax revenue; and allocating a portion of the city’s budget for each borough to spend. None of these changes would be desirable.

First, placing land-use choices, such as planning and zoning variances, at the community level inherently would mean each area would block uses that are essential for the city but undesirable in any community. No borough would want the next jail or the next large shopping mall or the next halfway house.

During charter reform, the elected commission initially favored giving neighborhood councils decision-making over land use. Many of the commissioners who supported this, including me, changed their minds because there was no acceptable answer to the reality that each neighborhood would say that it did not want certain uses in its backyard.

The new City Charter balanced the desire for decentralization with the need for some choices to be made for the entire city. For example, it created area planning commissions to replace one citywide planning commission. Members of the area planning commissions must come from that region of the city. This achieves many of the benefits of boroughs but allows decisions by commissions to be overturned where necessary by the City Council. Also, the new charter created a system of neighborhood councils. These new reforms should be given a chance to work before they are replaced by a borough system.

Second, the proposals allowed each borough to keep a portion of the tax revenue generated in its area. This is a core aspect that offers an incentive for boroughs to allow development and, more important, to address concerns that some areas of the city pay more in taxes than they receive in services.

It is a terrible idea, however, to allow areas to keep their tax revenues because it would permit wealthier areas of the city to have more to spend on government services than poorer areas. Historically in Los Angeles, poorer, predominantly minority areas have received less than their fair share of city services. Permitting boroughs to keep a portion of their tax revenues would exacerbate and institutionalize this inequality.

Secession is favored primarily by white residents of the west San Fernando Valley, who say they pay more in taxes than they receive in services. This repeated justification for secession has not been criticized nearly enough as pure selfishness; inevitably, in any decent society, the affluent must help subsidize services for the poor. The selfishness and unstated racism of secessionism--the desire of some in the Valley to live in a majority-white city--should be identified and criticized, not indulged through a borough system.

Third, supporters of a borough system propose allocating a portion of the city’s budget to each area to spend as it deems best. I favored this during charter reform until I realized how little of the city’s budget involves discretionary spending choices. Most city spending is committed to crucial tasks such as the airport, the harbor, the Department of Water and Power, the police and fire departments and basic public works projects. What’s left would be an insignificant amount of money.

Although the motives of advocates of a borough system are noble, the better approach is to defeat secession without adopting an undesirable alternative. City government, of course, can be improved, but neither secession nor a borough system is the way to do this.

*

Erwin Chemerinsky, a professor of law and political science at USC, was chairman of the Elected Los Angeles Charter Reform Commission.