LA City Council: What’s Up With the Gang that Never Votes No

GELFAND’S WORLD-The Los Angeles City Council has a strange culture in which most items are passed without even one dissenting vote. You can look at multiple meeting records, as I did, and fail to find even one No vote. Yet council members manage to communicate disapproval in their own convoluted way. 

The commonly held belief by politically interested amateurs is that almost all City Council votes are 15-0. It's not true, because a lot of votes are recorded  as 11-0 or 13-0, even though all 15 council members were at City Hall that day. How could this be? 

To get some idea of what is going on, I took a look at the City Clerk's website, which contains what are known as Journals of City Council activities. The journals are simply the recitations of the decisions that the council took on each agenda item. You can think of them as the draft minutes of the meetings. 

I randomly chose 3 separate dates from the past few months, which included 3 regularly scheduled meetings plus 2 special meetings. The meetings in total included slightly more than 100 agenda items, with the special meetings generally accounting for only one or two items apiece. 

Interestingly enough, there weren't a lot of 15-0 votes, but for all 5 meetings combined, I did not find even one negative vote. How could this be? 

It's simple. On a lot of votes, one or more names are listed as absent. Thus you can find a lot of votes that are recorded as passed by 11 votes, followed by the names of 4 absent members. All 15 council members are accounted for, but nobody is actually recorded as voting No. 

There are two more things you need to know about the system at City Hall. The first is a City Council rule that requires at least 8 votes to pass a standard motion (there are a few kinds of motions that require more votes). Technically, the rule is that a majority of the entire council is required to pass a measure. Since the City Council has 15 seats, a majority is 8 votes. Even during periods where there is a vacant seat, the required majority is still 8 votes (do the math). 

This means that a Council member who isn't at the meeting is effectively a No vote. 

This is a different rule than you are probably used to, because most private organizations usually treat a passing vote as a majority of those present and voting. If 10 board members show up to your neighborhood council meeting, enough to be a quorum, then a vote of 3-2 would be a passing vote. It would be a majority of those present and voting. 

Not so with the City Council. Whether you are present or not, the requirement is for 8 votes. 

There's one other peculiarity of the LA City Council rules. If you are a member of the City Council and you are present at a council meeting but don't actually push the button to vote on some item, that doesn't matter. Your failure to vote yes or no is counted as a Yes vote. In other words, there is no such thing as an abstention if you are actually present. 

What a system! 

Not voting counts as a yes vote. 

But there is a way out. Your vote is not counted if you are outside of the council chamber. Therefore, the way to abstain is to run away. If you are away from the council chambers when a vote is called, then you won't be counted as a Yes vote. 

In this way, it is possible for a member of the LA City Council to vote yes on a motion, leave the room so as not to be counted on the next motion, and then return to the room to vote on succeeding motions. Nobody on the City Council ever has to vote No on anything -- just walk out the door and hang out in the break room. 

Only if a council member wants to make a public point, by voting No on a minimum wage bill for example, will we ever see a No vote. 

I asked a former City Hall insider about this current voting culture. The explanation for how it came to be, and how long it's been around is interesting. The advent of term limits both in the state legislature and in the L.A. City Council resulted in an influx of former state legislators into the City Council. As we have discussed previously, the L.A. City Council is a well paying job ($178,000 a year plus benefits) and has attracted a lot of termed-out state legislators. 

As it was explained to me, this transition resulted in a transplanted culture of "go along to get along." Since most items are destined to pass, why take the chance of annoying a measure's proponents by voting No? Instead, vote Yes and reap the rewards when your favorite agenda item comes up. 

This kind of "you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours" has been traditionally called by a lot of terms, for example log rolling or horse trading. But whatever you call it, the idea is familiar to the workings of democracies. What's a little strange about the Los Angeles system is that there is no middle ground, just a lot of unanimous votes. 

At the risk of letting my wonky side come out, I would like to suggest that this peculiar voting culture is not always all that bad. There are two distinct situations, where one is acceptable and the other is less so. 

The more acceptable side of the argument is that a lot of City Council agenda items are really trivial. Looking over those 3 meetings, I found an item in which the City Council had to vote to return a building to its owner after he had successfully made repairs to bring it up to health and safety requirements. The program, known as REAP, actually required a City Council vote to release the property. 

There are scores more such categories that involve City Council action. In a city of 4 million people and only 15 Council members, it seems like a lot of trouble to create a council agenda item to rename an intersection, but think about a situation where the councilman from San Pedro is faced with an agenda item that affects Van Nuys and nowhere else. Why should he do anything but cast a robot-like vote of Yes? 

You will often find a City Council agenda that is jammed full of such trivialities. They have been vetted by a city agency and/or a City Council committee, and there is nothing left to do but to affirm them. It would make sense to relieve the City Council of having to vote on trivial administrative items, but under the current system, that is what they do. 

But then there are the other items before the council, the questions that involve some policy decision or an expenditure that might benefit one area more than another. These are the kinds of items that might get a 3-2 vote in a smaller city's legislative body, or pass by 60-40 at the state level. 

Our City Council has drifted into a system in which items which make it out of committee and get to the City Council floor are routinely passed in the absence of official dissent, where the real measure of such dissent would be a vote of No. Even when there is critical discussion, the social structure of this council results in rather more unanimity, and rather less naysaying. 

You can think of it as game theory in the mathematical sense. As an elected City Council member, the damages you would do to your own career and to the district you represent by that No vote are tangible. The good feeling you would get by voting No wouldn't ordinarily cause the measure to fail. Voting No is a lose-lose situation. Voting Yes has the modest but non-zero benefit of keeping you aligned with the ruling majority. 

The fault lies in the peculiar structure by which we have 15 council members representing approximately equal territories. The most stable system is one in which the council members divvy up the city services more or less equally. If every district gets pretty much the same level of benefits and services, nobody can complain. There are a few exceptions driven by raw necessity. High crime areas get more police, and burnable hillsides get more fire prevention. But things like street repair and pothole filling are going to be divided up more or less equally. The game theory side of this kind of government pushes every council member a little bit further along that "go along to get along" road. 

The negative side of this culture of unanimity becomes more obvious when somebody chooses to obstruct it. I call this the Bernard Parks effect, because when Parks didn't jump on the wagon and support Herb Wesson as City Council President, Parks was punished publicly. He had been the chair of the Budget and Finance Committee, a position of power and prestige. He was stripped of that post and relegated to Education and Neighborhoods, a position that had traditionally been assigned to newcomers to the council. It was the equivalent of losing your corner office and being reassigned to a broom closet. 

The punishment of Parks took things a little farther than just telling new council members that they should "go along to get along." The Parks saga made clear that the culture of unanimity has become pernicious. Council members should have the latitude to vote their consciences on matters of merit without fear of retribution.

 

(Bob Gelfand writes on culture and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected]) 

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CityWatch

Vol 13 Issue 47

Pub: Jun 9, 2015