Chemerinsky, a high-profile law professor at the University of Southern California, was heading a city charter-reform commission elected by voters at the urging of Mayor Richard Riordan. But the City Council, which didn't get along well with Riordan, wouldn't accept the mayor's arrangement. The council came up with its own rival commission, and picked Kieffer, an experienced negotiator in local politics, to chair it.
It seemed like a recipe for failure, and for more than a year, it had failed. Each commission had met separately, seeking to overhaul the city's creaky and complicated 73-year-old charter but finding little common ground. A conference committee had been created, with five members from each panel, but it was getting nowhere. As the two commissions fiddled, activists from L.A.'s San Fernando Valley--an area with some 1.5 million people--gained momentum in their effort to pull off the most spectacular municipal secession in American history. Chemerinsky and Kieffer could see that the opportunity for change was slipping away.
"It's now or never," Chemerinsky said. "It's us or no one." Kieffer nodded agreement, and soon the two men began meeting regularly--one- on-one, without staff members--to work out the troublesome details separating the two groups.
The result was astonishing. A "unified charter"was drawn up over the fall and winter, and in June 1999, 60 percent of Los Angeles' voters approved it, placing the nation's most unwieldy city government on an apparent road to rational performance. Next month, L.A. will begin operating under the new charter.
The document does many things, but the most important are these: It gives new executive power to the historically weak mayor's office, and it makes neighborhood groups serious players on a crucial spectrum of issues. The City Council remains intact, but the power it will wield in the new system is very much open to question. Most of the 15 council members campaigned unsuccessfully against the charter last year.
The charter has one big thing going for it: Almost nobody is pleased with the way L.A. functions now. Neighborhood activists feel alienated from local decision making; many want their communities to secede from the city altogether. Business leaders complain that City Hall bureaucracy and politics are thwarting economic growth. The gigantic Los Angeles Unified School District (which is separate from city government) continues to anger nearly every constituency.
Is the new charter bold enough to deal with these long-standing frustrations? No one is sure. "It's going to be a painful, awkward transition that is going to take five years or more," says Xandra Kayden, a senior fellow at the UCLA School of Public Policy and Social Research. "The worst-case scenario is that the city falls apart because of secession."
It is a dangerous time; it also is a time of enormous opportunity. The period ahead will reveal not only whether Los Angeles can be managed better but also whether it is simply too large, at a population of nearly 4 million, to be a viable governmental unit in the 21st century. If the new charter fails, and L.A. splits into a half-dozen pieces, critics throughout the nation will begin questioning whether any city this size is just a big dinosaur headed for extinction.
In many ways, Los Angeles is both the least political and least typical large city in America. Although it sprawls over nearly 500 square miles, its map looks like an octopus, reaching tentacles outward among suburbs all across the metropolitan area. Unlike Chicago or Boston or New York, Los Angeles does not have a tradition of vibrant election debate or party organization as its lifeblood. There have been no ward leaders, no patronage and no political machines in the traditional sense. One of the reasons the freeway car chase has become a staple of local television news is that political news doesn't draw an audience.
In this city, ordinary folks have left governance to the growth elites--developers, bankers and newspaper publishers. "Although its growth required the intensive and highly effective use of power," urban historian Robert Fishman once wrote, "the metropolis that emerged was strangely bereft of any unifying civic life." For most of this century, many residents of L.A. have preferred not to think of it as a city at all, at least not in an eastern sense. To them, Los Angeles was "the national suburb," a haven for white Protestants from other parts of the nation seeking refuge from immigrants and their political machines.
The 1925 charter was heavily influenced by the ideas of the Progressives, reformers who had dominated much of state and local politics in California in the previous two decades. The Progressives wanted to eliminate the mayor's position altogether, and govern the city through what amounted to, in essence, a board of citizen directors. But the leaders of the pro-growth coalition were unwilling to go this far.
So there was a compromise: retain a weak mayor, create a City Council of 15 members elected by district, and hand off operational control of city departments to citizen "boards of commissioners" and professional "general managers." Under the 1925 charter, commissioners have been appointed by the mayor, but most budget and policy decisions have been made by the council. The general managers--that is, the city department heads--have had civil-service status. Under Progressive-era state law, all local elected offices were nonpartisan.
This diffuse and complicated political structure has always left much of the city wondering exactly where political power lay. The truth was that it lay everywhere--and nowhere. With no fear of getting fired by politicians, the department heads quietly ruled via bureaucratic control. With no strong executive to answer to--and representing districts of about 200,000 people each--members of the City Council gradually emerged as little mayors, exerting control over even the smallest managerial details if they chose. Because there was no clear division between the executive and legislative branches, department heads reported to both the mayor and the council--meaning council members issued orders on administrative matters, especially in their districts.
It was, says Xandra Kayden, "designed to promote growth and limit dissent and promote homogenous decision making." But just as often, it was a blueprint for stalemate: "Almost anybody could say no," Kayden says, "but nobody could say yes."
The mayors themselves had little power except the power of persuasion. Almost all of them railed against their weak position-- most famously the loquacious Sam Yorty, who complained about the charter's intricacy and detail and led two failed attempts to change it in the early 1970s. The mayor who used the office most effectively was the low-key Tom Bradley, whose tenure from 1973 to 1993 was characterized by quiet persuasion, a respect for the council's power and a shrewd understanding of when to pick his battles.
The 1925 charter was designed to take the politics out of municipal government. It didn't really do that. What it did do was to make government appear remote and unresponsive--an especially dangerous combination, given the complexities of the Los Angeles-area governmental map.
Twenty-one cities share a border with Los Angeles; a few are entirely surrounded by it. Some of them have a long-held reputation for conducting business efficiently, cheaply and responsively. And that has had an important impact on the way residents of L.A. view their own city. "If you live in L.A.," says Raphael Sonenshein, who was staff director to one of the charter commissions, "you're always next door to some small city that seems to be well run."
Beginning in the 1970s, one particular part of the city began to get especially restless. This was the San Fernando Valley, epitomized in popular culture at the time as the prototypical example of white- middle-class suburbia. Especially after the Unified School District began forced busing to achieve integration in 1978, Valley activists began agitating for secession--not just from the school district but from the city as well.
With many of their neighborhoods located 40 miles from City Hall, the Valley activists said they simply could not expect responsive government from Los Angeles. Their opponents replied by accusing them of racism. But there was a considerable amount of truth to the claim of unresponsiveness. In a sprawling city with gigantic council districts, weak parties and no history of accessible ward leaders or precinct captains, political power lay mostly with downtown insiders-- often developers who bankrolled elections.
The City Council has spent most of the past two decades trying to mollify the Valley secessionists just enough to keep secession from coming to a vote. In the late 1980s, for example, homeowner associations built up considerable support for elected neighborhood planning commissions with real power over land use decisions. The council refused to go that far, but it approved a watered-down alternative of citizen advisory committees, with the membership appointed by the council members themselves. This last move, of course, gave the council members more power, not less.
In the past four years, however, secessionist agitation has reached fever pitch; after a major battle in the state legislature, the rules on secession were changed and a vote on San Fernando Valley secession is expected in 2002.
The current reform effort was clearly an attempt to head off secession, but there were plenty of other reasons to do something about the 75-year-old charter. The city's professional staff had long wanted to clean up the bulky and complex document because it was too difficult to understand. Amended 400 times, it had become, in Kieffer's words, a little like the Torah. Lawyers in the city attorney's office acted like rabbis, providing interpretation for the masses. When Mayor Riordan--a venture capitalist who thought the boss should have the ability to run the company--made charter reform a priority of his second term in 1997, the opportunity for change had arrived.
But, in some ways, the opportunity could not have arrived at a worse time. Riordan's relationship with the City Council had grown progressively worse since his first election in 1993. "Riordan came in thinking he was the CEO," says Steven Erie, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, who is writing a history of the city government. Figuring he would never get his desired reforms past the council, Riordan used his authority to place on the ballot the creation of an elected charter commission. In 1997, voters said yes and elected a 15-member panel with one representative from each City Council district.
Meanwhile, however, the Council was creating its own charter commission, with an appointed membership. In an attempt to get the mayor to play ball, the council chose members without particularly strong council ties, and even allowed Riordan to select a number of commissioners. But Riordan rebuffed the council and refused to name anyone.
The two panels went on their merry ways for more than a year. The council's commission moved methodically, using the existing charter as a basis and allowing staff members to prepare reform language. The Riordan-backed group started with a blank slate. But the parallel tracks were really a collision course. "It was my view," says Kieffer, "that unless the two commissions came together, nothing would happen."
Kieffer and Chemerinsky believed it was up to them to make it work. The panels were separated by many issues, such as whether the proposed neighborhood councils should be elected or appointed, whether the mayor should have sole discretion to hire and fire department heads, and whether to have the council or an independent panel draw district boundaries. The commission staffs outlined about 50 of these major policy differences, Kieffer and Chemerinsky negotiated, and the duo emerged with small packages for the conference committee to chew on. By early 1999, they had crafted what they called the "unified charter."
There were new hurdles. Riordan at first refused to accept any combined charter and insisted that two separate documents go forward. Then the mayor's commission, feeling like too much had been negotiated away, refused to approve the compromise placed before them.
But it took only two days for momentum to shift in the other direction. The council-appointed commission voted unanimously to endorse the unified charter that Kieffer and Chemerinsky had drafted. Various public interest groups--ranging from the Chamber of Commerce to the Urban League and the League of Women Voters--seized on this endorsement. Newspaper editorials appeared in the charter's favor. Lobbying behind the scenes was intense. The other commission reconsidered and, with the insertion of a few minor conditions, endorsed the unified charter.
As political momentum continued to build, especially in the business community, Riordan slowly came around. By the time Kieffer and Chemerinsky took the unified charter to the City Council, neither the council nor the mayor had sufficient support to tinker with the document. In March 1999, the council voted 14-0 to put the charter on the ballot three months later.
But even as the council members cast that vote in favor of a referendum, many of them made it clear how they wanted the referendum to come out. "This deserves to go down the tubes. It will go down the tubes," said Councilman Nate Holden. But it not only didn't fail, it passed easily. The only consolation to Holden and his colleagues was that voters chose not to dilute council power even further, rejecting two companion measures to increase the council size to either 21 or 25 members.
The combined charter that takes effect next month seeks a subtle balance between centralizing power in the mayor's office and devolving it to the neighborhoods. Few questioned that a stronger mayor was clearly needed, but L.A.'s traditional aversion to machine politics suggested that the charter would be doomed if it made the mayor's office too strong. On the other hand, wholesale decentralization might please neighborhood activists, but power could become so diffuse that it would be impossible to get anything done. "The idea," says Sonenshein, "was to increase public input and still have a government."
So the charter takes influence away from the council and drives it both upward and downward at the same time. In both cases the council is the likely loser. Instead of reporting to both mayor and council, department heads will now report to the mayor only. Combined with the move several years ago to strip department heads of civil-service protection, this change gives mayors true authority over executive branch departments for the first time. "It's like most other big-city systems," says Theresa Patzakis, Riordan's counsel.
At the same time, garden-variety land use decisions--traditionally the province of the city planning commission, with an easy appeal to the City Council--will be transferred to seven newly formed "area" planning commissions representing different parts of the city. Members of these commissions will be appointed by the mayor, although with council confirmation.
The Area Planning Commission boundaries are not identical with council district boundaries. In most cases, they'll cut across council districts and include portions of several. That alone will dilute the power of council members to dictate land use decisions. Beyond that, however, most of the decisions will not be appealable to the City Council except under extraordinary circumstances. The only appeal will be to the city planning commission. The goal is to de-politicize routine decisions, which in the past have gotten caught up in the parochial politics of City Council offices.
The Area Planning Commissions represent an attempt to downshift some actual power to a lower level--but the areas are still quite large, encompassing many square miles each. So the charter also seeks to empower neighborhood residents by creating a separate set of entities called "Neighborhood Councils."
The neighborhood councils will not be decision-making bodies. Rather, they will serve--as they do in New York City--as advisory bodies and lobbying groups on behalf of individual neighborhoods. Just exactly how many of these councils will exist, and what their role will be, is still up in the air. Those decisions will be made by the Board of Neighborhood Commissioners, created by the new charter and appointed-- according to that charter--by the mayor. "This whole concept kind of flips government on its head," says Lee Alpert, a longtime San Fernando Valley activist and now chairman of the Neighborhood Commissioners. "It starts with the people and things trickle up."
For the past year, as the date for implementation of the new charter has grown closer, the city's vested political interests have been busy protecting their turf. Riordan--who insisted on making the document effective this year, rather than in 2001, as most reformers wanted-- has been seeking to maximize his power in the last year of his final term. He has challenged council members over future control of the city's chief administrative officer, who has traditionally reported to both mayor and council. "You can take a new governing document and turn it to retain the status quo, or you can take a new governing document and change how the city functions," says Patzakis, the mayor's adviser. "We want to ensure that the latter happens."
Some of these battles have appeared unseemly, and the mayor has suffered considerable criticism for them. "The way it's being interpreted by the mayor is destructive," says Dan Garcia, a former president of the city planning commission. "All city officials have to report to the mayor first? That's ridiculous." Quite apart from the mayor's own problems, the recent scandal in the Los Angeles Police Department--in which officers in the Rampart division have been accused of bribery and dozens of convictions have been overturned--has focused attention on whether city commissions such as the Police Commission are truly powerful enough to deal with big-city problems.
At the other end of the spectrum, the new charter doesn't seem to decentralize power enough to make the homeowner associations and San Fernando Valley activists happy. "It's incrementally better," says Richard Katz, a onetime mayoral candidate and formerly a powerful member of the state assembly from the Valley. "But people were looking for a transfer of power from the downtown establishment to the neighborhoods. It reorganized power between the mayor and the council, but it doesn't push power outward to the neighborhoods."
As July 1 approaches, the Board of Neighborhood Commissioners has been conducting a series of workshops around the city on how to set up the Neighborhood Councils. The commissioners and their staff insist that "there is no plan." But because the charter directs the commission to designate Neighborhood Councils only if evidence of broad stakeholder involvement is present, some homeowner associations are fearful that they will lose power, not gain it.
Even with all the squabbling, however, it appears that Los Angeles will get through the transition phase without a fatal collision. Chemerinsky and Kieffer team up on a regular basis--on TV and in the opinion pages--to defend the charter and counsel caution and patience. Valley Councilwoman Laura Chick, who chairs the City Council's implementation committee, is optimistic that the charter will mend the rift between downtown and the Valley. "If we can fix what's broken," she says, "if we can keep asking and answering the question of how can we do it better, then people will not be so focused on secession."
The big question remains how well the city will take advantage of its remarkable opportunity. The combination of term limits and charter reform means that, by 2003, there will be a wholesale turnover in the entire political landscape. Virtually all local elected officials will be new, and they will bring with them a very different set of expectations about how things work. There's a crowded field for next year's mayoral election, including Antonio Villaraigosa, who until recently was speaker of the state assembly; businessman Steve Soboroff, a confidant of Riordan's; James Hahn, scion of a family political dynasty and currently the city attorney; and Joel Wachs, who's termed out after almost 30 years on the City Council. And many political insiders are betting that other termed-out state legislators will angle for the council spots.
Indeed, one of the biggest changes may simply be a shift in thinking on the part of both the mayor and the council. Political scientist Steven Erie says the successful mayor will be one who does not think of himself as "the boss," as Riordan has tried to, but understands the still-important limitations of the office. At the same time, legislators-turned-council members may be far more effective than old City Hall hands simply because they understand what a legislative branch is supposed to do.
"I have no illusions that this is the last word on charter reform in this city," says Chemerinsky. Along with many others around town, he avoids any sort of dramatic plea that the new charter is L.A.'s "last, best hope." Indeed, he acknowledges, municipal reform in Los Angeles-- as elsewhere--is an incremental process. Still, the charter is a rare opportunity to show that Los Angeles is at least somewhat governable-- and, in the process, reaffirm the idea that big-city government can work in America in the 21st century.
