Big City Stretches a Small Council

In the official voter’s guide to the Nov. 5 election, advocates of both Hollywood and San Fernando Valley independence cite a key reason they think Los Angeles should be broken into pieces: The City Council’s members, they say, have districts so large that they cannot begin to represent them adequately.

Each of the 15 council members represents nearly 250,000 people, far more than council members in any other American city. A council district can include residents of so many cultures and points of view that it is impossible for one person to be accountable to them all, secessionists say.

New York, with a little more than twice the population of Los Angeles, has more than three times as many council members: 51. Chicago, with nearly 1 million fewer people, has 50. Phoenix, the city that comes closest to Los Angeles’ ratio, still has 81,000 fewer people per council member.

Frustration with the size of council districts is a driving force in the secession movement. Backers of the breakup say council members cannot possibly know their vast districts intimately enough to tackle problems efficiently.

Size, they add, has bred a sense of remoteness, encouraging the council to see itself as something apart from the neighborhoods it represents and encouraging residents of those neighborhoods to disengage from civic life. It’s hard to engage, after all, when just getting to a council meeting can mean an hour’s drive, some residents say.

Under the secession proposals, a new Valley city would have 14 council members, each representing about 95,000 people, and an independent Hollywood of about 183,000 would have five council members elected at large, or one representative per 37,000 people.

The city’s promises of reform do little to soothe. Los Angeles first got 15 council members in 1878, when it was still a farm town of 10,000 people.

The number of council members shrank for a while to nine, but it never grew beyond 15, said James W. Ingram III, a political scientist at San Diego State University.

Today, the population is about 380 times what it was 124 years ago, edging toward 4 million, but the size of the council remains unchanged.

Those who oppose secession argue that size does not dictate quality. They say secessionists’ cozier councils, with part-time members living next to those they represent, could not deliver without ample staff and finances.

But some prominent secession opponents say the criticisms are valid and that the council needs to grow.

Assemblywoman Jackie Goldberg (D-Los Angeles), served two terms as a Los Angeles city councilwoman and opposes secession. But she agrees that districts are too large.

“I think that, at some point, you just get too big to be manageable. I think we long exceeded that here.”

As a councilwoman, Goldberg was known for activism in her district, which included Silver Lake, Echo Park and part of Hollywood.

Three of her staff members spent all their time out in the district, helping community groups to organize meetings and articulate their concerns. To reach the district’s diverse population, she hired aides who spoke Tagalog, Spanish and Armenian. She and her staff drove different routes each day to work, combing the area looking for potholes and dumped couches.

But even so, Goldberg acknowledges, they could not keep a constant eye on the whole territory. And even though her district was one of the smaller ones, so many people competed for her attention that she usually couldn’t visit any one community group more than once.

“We were knocking ourselves out, and we still felt like we scratched the surface,” she said.

Secessionists offer a more intimate version of government, in which council members would hold night meetings that all could attend.

Council members in smaller districts, they say, would run into residents at the diner or the supermarket. They’d learn about problems quickly.

Assemblyman Keith Richman (R-Northridge), who is running for Valley mayor, said there’s a term for what happens when people realize there’s no way for them to play a meaningful role in their government: rational ignorance. People decide it’s rational to be ignorant about their government. Many Angelenos feel that way because they can’t get to council meetings, and their representatives spend more time at City Hall than with them, Richman said.

“What happens is that, after a point in time, they give up and say, ‘You can’t fight City Hall.’ When people feel that way, that’s how you get independence movements.”

“A more local government allows people to become involved. It empowers them to become involved with their governments and to help effect change in their communities.”

Secessionists also say they would have a leaner, more efficient government. Their council members, at least at first, would be paid only $12,000 a year, a far cry from Los Angeles council members’ salaries of $136,000. Unless voters approved more spending for salaries of council members and others, the new councils’ budgets would allow for little staff, let alone big bureaucracy.

Los Angeles council members usually have more than a dozen staff members apiece. Each of the 15 representatives has an annual budget of around $1 million to pay for field offices and staff members who can show up at community meetings and pound away at solving residents’ problems.

The council members’ salaries are the nation’s highest, a fact secessionists decry, but are meant to give the officials freedom to work full time on city problems.

“There’s no doubt it’s a lot of work. It’s a 24-7 job,” said council newcomer Wendy Greuel, who represents a portion of the Valley, adding that she’s talking not just about her own work, but also about that of her staff of 18. Greuel said she spends a lot of time out in the district, recruiting volunteers to help her scout potholes and abandoned cars. She’s also told downtown department heads that she expects them to fix such problems quickly. Government must be much more responsive, she said.

“It’s all about priorities and having the community work with you,” she said, adding that even though she has too many constituents to spend time with them all, “A lot of people don’t care if they meet me at all. Ninety percent of the people in the city just want the job done.”

Other cities have dealt with growth by expanding their city councils. Just a little over a decade ago, New York added 16 council seats.

But James Svara, a North Carolina State University political scientist and an expert on city government, said increasing the size of the council to make smaller districts can be a trade-off. Council members, he said, have two roles: one of governance, helping to determine the direction of the city, and the other of representation, hearing from constituents and channeling those views into policy.

“The larger the council gets, the more they can fulfill the representative role, but the harder it is to function as a group,” he said. “Also, when you have smaller districts, they tend to be more homogeneous. You have to figure out how to aggregate those 30 or 40 or 50 voices being articulated. It can be very hard to pull them together.”

In large councils, strong political factions can end up running the show, often making it harder for specific communities to get heard, he said. Mayors, too, can step between competing factions and forge a more powerful role for themselves.

Still, Goldberg said she believes doubling the council’s size would make sense.

Erwin Chemerinsky, the USC constitutional law professor who led the city’s elected charter commission, is also adamant that some increase is necessary.

“There is no doubt that the Los Angeles City Council desperately needs to be larger. I think many of the complaints of the Valley secessionists could best be answered by having smaller council districts,” he said.

If secession fails Nov. 5, he said, supporters should back the idea of a larger council.

But Chemerinsky knows firsthand the difficulties that such a proposal would confront. For every person angry that government seems remote, there is another who complains that it is too big and expensive. Sometimes, in fact, people hold both views at once.

In 1999, Chemerinsky and others rewriting the city’s charter wanted to expand the council, but couldn’t agree on a size. They also feared that opponents of expanding the government could sink the entire charter reform effort.

Instead, voters were given three proposals: one to enact a new charter, and two to expand the council (to either 21 or 25 members).

The charter passed, but 63% of voters opposed the measure to expand the council to 21 members, and 65% voted against 25 members. The margins against the expansions were high in the Valley, he said.

“I’d like to think it was because of confusion in having two competing measures. But I don’t really believe that,” Chemerinsky said.

“I think the real problem was the unpopularity of adding to the size of government and persuading people to pay more. It’s a hard sell.”