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GELFAND’S WORLD - I drove up to City Hall on Wednesday to attend a session of the newly created Charter Reform commission. It is the creation of the L.A. City Council and is supposed to deliver recommendations as to updating the city's defining document. You might expect that for a subject this important, lots of people would have poured into the Council chambers. What met my eyes was a sparsely attended audience and some 10 members of a commission that is supposed to include 13 voting members.
For those who are interested, you can find the commission's website here. The site summarizes a process developed by the City Council. In essence, it creates a commission that is top-heavy with political appointees: The mayor got 4, the president of the City Council got 2, and the president pro tem of the City Council got 2. That means that fully 8 of the 13 commission members represent the interests of those who represent the status quo. Presumably the commission will look at issues that have been most irritating to the elected leadership, but there is no guarantee that the commission will look seriously at the things that bother the rest of us.
What about the other 5 commissioners? They were appointed through an application process -- the winners were chosen by the 8 who were appointed by the mayor and City Council officers.
So there has been no process to put people who really represent the public on this commission. There may be a few who snuck in through the application process. We'll have to wait and see.
A modest bit of disclosure here: The neighborhood council congress will happen in September, and I have been named to chair a session which is tentatively titled "Charter Reform: Threat or Opportunity?" I would be the first to agree that some Charter reform may be indicated. Why do I say that? I joined a group that was organizing a neighborhood council back in 2000 - 2001. We had to read and consider Section 9 of the Charter, the section that created the neighborhood council system. We struggled and puzzled and negotiated amongst ourselves because that section is alternately ambiguous, just plain weird, and often enough self-contradictory.
So there were reasons that I was attending Wednesday's event.
What's motivating this latest effort to change the Charter? Some pundits claim that it was the infamous telephone call that brought down City Council members Nury Martinez and Kevin DeLeon. Others like to point out that the city is chronically broke and that we need a better system of budgeting. There are at least a few City Council representatives who would like to see the City Council enlarged -- various numbers have been floated, but one suggestion is to raise the number of members on the Council from 15 to 29.
If enlarging the City Council were the only proposed change in the Charter, it might be a lot easier just for the City Council to put the amendment on the ballot (they have that power) and see if they can sell it to the voters. Instead, we've got this appointed group of newly minted commissioners and a budget of nearly a million dollars to play with.
Let me offer you my take on what I observed on this one day.
The commission commenced by inviting public comment. Now get this: We were allowed as much as one minute per item, not to exceed a total of 3 minutes apiece. Most speakers chose to speak on 2 items and were allowed 2 minutes apiece. You might summarize it like this: For each 40 minutes of driving time, I got 40 seconds of speaking time. No wonder the few audience members who took the opportunity to attend tried to squeeze as many words into their 2 minutes as they could.
And what did they speak about? Several spoke about changing the electoral system to something referred to as Ranked Choice Voting. Maybe we will want to talk about what this is at some point, but I seriously doubt that the L.A. City Council would accept such a recommendation and put it on the ballot. After all, it would change the system under which they got elected, and elected officials rarely change the rules that allowed them to win in the first place.
But dreamers can dream.
Just in case anyone cares, here is the gist of my remarks: Everyone is invited to the Neighborhood Council Congress session on Charter Reform (September 27). However, my default position -- and I expect the default position for voters in general -- is to oppose anything this group comes up with, unless and until they present a convincing case. For neighborhood council participants and board members, this skepticism holds doubly.
Why would I say something like that? We in the neighborhood council system are much more likely to be harmed than helped by anything they do, because the people who appointed them would not want them to do anything to give us more influence or lessen their choke-hold over us.
Let's talk about some of the nuts and bolts of this commission, and then think just a little about what could have been done better.
First of all, the City Council action that created this commission did not give them very much time. The idea is that a ballot measure must come from this group, be approved by the City Council, and appear on the November 2026 ballot. This means that this small group of largely unknown folks is supposed to figure out how to redesign city government in less than a year.
Think about what this means. They need to (a) define their issues (b) discuss things, (c) design specific changes including exact wording and (d) vote to agree to the proposed Charter amendments to be presented to the voters. The Charter has those 9 sections which deal with everything from the power the mayor has to appoint and fire, the makeup of the City Council, the times and methods by which elections are held, the way that a proposed ordinance gets enacted as law, and so forth . . . basically everything that is involved in creating a government and running a big city.
And this commission is supposed to do those things between now and next summer. Not to put too fine a point on it, but what if they disagree on some point?
At least they realized their time problem and have added on extra meetings. At some points, they may be meeting several times a week.
So how did Wednesday's session appear to this naive spectator? Well, for one thing, the commissioners didn't seem to know how to speak briefly or to get things done. Wednesday was supposed to be the session where they elected their chair. Apparently their rules require 7 votes in order to elect somebody -- this is a bare majority of the total number of commission members. There were two nominees and only 10 voting members present, and the vote was tied at 5-5. They gave up on the election for Wednesday and put it off until the next meeting. This raised questions about what to do in terms of electing vice chairs, and that was also put off.
One issue which remained unvoiced, but was hanging over the proceedings: One of the candidates for commission chair is a longtime union representative, while the other has been basically an insider, the friend and choice of previous mayors going back to Dick Riordan. Since there is a need for this city to figure out how to negotiate salaries without giving away the store, there is a real possibility that the commission will start life in a condition where it is all but unable to carry out its most critical function -- making the City of Los Angeles financially responsible.
OK. No elected chair today. Someone gave a brief presentation on hiring a company which does outreach to the community. Somebody must have assumed that this would sail through, but there were several objections along these lines: We don't know who this company is, who runs it, how much money we are intending to pay and for what, and so on. Once again, not an impressive showing by the organizers.
The next section of my remarks must be prefaced by the fact that this was obviously an organizational meeting with hardly anything on the agenda about the ultimate purpose of the commission or how and when they intended to get there.
That having been said, I was musing about visits to The Old North Church, Faneuil Hall, and Independence Hall. I thought of speeches made by Daniel Webster and Patrick Henry and the example of integrity set by George Washington. Maybe that's too high a bar (although nobody in Wednesday's event, to my knowledge, owned slaves) but there was something missing.
Vision.
OK, that's asking a lot, but it is also the minimum we should expect from this group.
It was actually worse than that. There was no content whatsoever that I could abstract out of what was said. Maybe I missed it during one of my side chats out in the hallway. But I waited to hear any member of the commission name even one city problem that would be repaired by a timely stitch in the fabric of the Charter.
Curiously, one of the candidates for chair hit on the problem during his campaign speech. As he explained, the Charter is long and has all those different sections. Therefore, he argued, commissioners should each name up to 8 items for subcommittee work and take charge of a subcommittee. This struck me as possibly the worst way to make such decisions, since important decisions (which might end up being accepted by default) could be decided by two people in a committee of 3 people. The candidate did allow that some topics would be determined to be so important as to require being taken up by the commission as a whole.
It became obvious over the course of the meeting that the commission has no particular vision to sell. Perhaps there are individuals on the commission put there by some elected official who will reveal some such desire, but we haven't heard anything so far.
Let me offer an alternative approach that might have the virtue of being acceptable to the voters. There should be a process that is not so constrained in time. A process that takes 2 or 3 years would not be unreasonable. And it ought to include people who are not hand picked by the electeds. For example, why isn't Rick Caruso on this commission? How about Jack Humphreville?
And importantly, how about we allow people to speak at length instead of limiting them to one minute per agenda item. Can anybody imagine Benjamin Franklin or John Adams agreeing to such time limits?
As I said above, the default for us voters ought to be to say No on whatever comes out of this commission, unless or until they prove to us that their proposals will solve real problems and will not do us any harm. We the voters can say No, and the city can then try to get it right at some later time.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
