That’s why we need big Ideas — like reimagining city government
By Mike Feuer, Candidate for Los Angeles Mayor
Governance in Los Angeles isn’t working. Homelessness is pervasive. Residents feel unsafe. Neighborhoods feel neglected. Inequality diminishes all of us. Sure, the pandemic intensified these issues. But it didn’t create them. Given the challenges we face and the lack of effective municipal action to address them, some question whether LA is governable at all.
These problems have festered for many reasons, but one is the structure of city government itself. Too few govern too many, making elected leaders less responsive, less diverse, more insular and less accountable than they should be.
It’s time for the first major structural reform in LA in a generation. It’s time to cut the size of city council districts in half, reduce the length of time members may serve and do so in a cost-neutral way by cutting their $223,829 salaries by fifty percent. Add an independent redistricting commission that isn’t chosen by the elected officials whose political futures they will determine, and we’d make real progress.
Los Angeles’s government was designed nearly a century ago, when our city was 25% of its current size. That Los Angeles was much more compact and homogenous. Council members represented 50,000 residents. Today, each member represents more than 260,000 — more than the entire populations of Buffalo, Boise or Baton Rouge. Times have changed dramatically and so must City Hall.
The benefits of this restructuring will be immediate and sweeping. By cutting council districts in half, council members will be much closer to the communities they serve and know those communities more intimately. Residents will compete less for their elected representative’s time. This proposal will improve the quality of our lives by empowering neighborhoods and giving them council members who respond rapidly to their concerns over everything from homelessness to public safety to traffic gridlock. It would be much harder for members to evade accountability to the residents they serve.
Communities of mutual interest will more likely hold together. No more creating ill-formed districts by jamming together Eagle Rock and downtown’s Historic Core, or Westchester and Pacific Palisades. City leadership will likely become much more diverse, as neighborhoods like Koreatown, which have long sought more direct representation, achieve it.
New York has fifty council members. Ask any New Yorker if they would be willing to share a representative with double the number of constituents, pay them twice what they are currently making, add free cars and give them an extra term for good measure. You probably couldn’t print the response in this newspaper.
As for that extra term council members got a few years ago: My initial reaction to term limits was that they intensify short-term decision making and diminish the deep pool of knowledge too often required to tackle tough municipal problems. And who needs them, I thought, when we have elections?
While I still hold that view when it comes to members of Congress (whose elections are held every two years, allowing for more frequent turnover if the representative fails), when it comes to local elections my thinking can be summarized in one word: urgency. I don’t see nearly enough of it in City Hall, especially when it comes to the issues that count the most. Eight total years — the same two-term limit that applies to citywide elected officials — are quite enough to make one’s mark. We should reverse the gift of any extra term that council members persuaded the electorate to bestow on them.
An independent redistricting commission is an important element. As we’ve seen at the state level where this model is followed, with independence comes less interest in issues that have little to do with what matters to voters, like where the incumbent might live.
Similar proposals to these have failed because politicians and lobbyists fought to protect their power base and led voters to believe that change would increase the cost of city government. That’s why I propose a revenue-neutral approach that cuts the size of an individual council member’s salary, perks, staff, and discretionary budget. Representatives of more intimate districts will focus their resources on giving taxpayers maximum bang for the buck.
The bottom line is this: We need to increase focus, responsiveness, accountability and diversity in city government. Our current structure is holding us back.
Let’s decrease the size of council districts and bring government closer to the people it serves.
Mike Feuer is the Los Angeles City Attorney and a candidate for mayor. To learn more about Mike’s vision for Los Angeles, visit MikeforLA.com.