Democracy, accountability and modernization proposals mostly neglected, but long-term planning improvements survive
For the first time since 1999, Los Angeles is in the process of reforming its charter, but many of the biggest reforms people have been calling for won’t appear on the ballot for voters to decide on this November. What’s more, there’s a distressing pattern to what’s moving forward and what’s not.
The Charter Reform Commission organized its proposals into four main themes, each with six or seven highlighted proposals. But only one theme’s most significant proposals survived the city council vote on June 17: the one titled “Improve Long-Term Planning and Service Delivery,” which saw five of six proposals survive, four of them closely inter-related.
In contrast, none of the commission proposals to “Strengthen Democratic Voice and Representation” were approved, including the proposal to expand the size of city council, arguably the most significant proposal that helped drive the creation of the Charter Reform Commission in the first place. Only one proposal to “Modernize Government Structure for a City of 4 Million” survived: requiring charter reform every ten years, which is already required by the city ordinance that created the current charter reform process. And although three proposals to “Rebuild Trust Through Accountability” survived, two were relatively narrow, while the entire process significantly eroded trust by virtue of how so many reforms were neglected.
“Unfortunately, nearly four years after we started this process some of the biggest and most heavily anticipated changes are now going to be punted to another committee,” City councilwoman and mayoral candidate Nithya Raman said in a social media video.
Ranked choice voting and council expansion were both deferred, saying ‘further study required,’ “But there was time to study it,” Raman noted. “A full commission was created two years ago to do exactly that. But Mayor Bass sat on her appointments for nearly a year [11 months]. One publication [Politico] called her ‘the most conspicuous logjam in the whole process.’ The commission lost almost a year of work, raced to finish, and now the council says the work feels rushed. Of course it was. That was by design. This is how the status quo protects itself. You don’t have to vote against reform. You just slow it down until the clock runs out.”
Council Expansion Put Off
Such criticism from a candidate challenging an incumbent mayor might be expected, but Raman was simply echoing the sentiments of countless individual Angelenos and organizations involved in the process, which saw a wide variety of democracy-enhancing ideas put forward beyond those recommended to the council. LA Forward is one such organization, part of the broader Fair Rep LA coalition, and their deputy director Godfrey Plata largely echoed Raman’s assessments, while also highlighting key proposals that survived.
“I wonder how the commissioners feel about all the time they spent wading through reforms, only a few of which are making it to ballot,” Plata told Random Lengths News.
“City council expansion is the thing that is most frustrating to folks,” he noted. “I have heard conversations exploring like, ‘Is it time to go the petition route for a ballot initiative here?’ Certainly that would be very costly, but it is something that means that much to people, in terms of being able to feel represented,” he said. “People are thinking that seriously about spending their time collecting hundreds of thousands of signatures to do it.”
The rejected proposal would only have expanded the city council from 15 to 25 seats, still half the size of the city councils of New York and Chicago — a reflection of how relatively modest the reforms actually are.
In addition, Plata noted, “Ranked choice voting was in the same conversation, although perhaps a newer idea than city council expansion and there are very organized advocates around that.” While it may be a newer idea here, ranked choice voting was first implemented in San Francisco a generation ago, in 2004, and was recently adopted by Redondo Beach in 2024.
There was one objection to expanding the council, raised by city council president Marqueece Harris-Dawson, that seems worth considering — that a larger city council would result in a more powerful mayor. Plata offered two responses. First, he said, “I wonder what the public cares about that,” as opposed to council members. And as for them, his second point was, “Part of our argument for trying to get expansion on the ballot immediately this November was to build a longer runway to figure out all the implications. And the power dynamic implication is one where checks and balances can be built and implemented.”
Non-Citizen Voting
There was one proposal to strengthen democracy that did pass — to empower the city to allow non-citizen residents to vote in city and school board elections. But that proposal came from councilman Hugo Soto-Martinez, rather than the Charter Commission, though Plata noted that it had been discussed before, so, “It didn’t come completely out of nowhere.”
The charter measure wouldn’t automatically allow non-citizens to vote, it would simply enable the city council to pass an ordinance to do so. The details could be worked out over time.
“Residential voting has been passed in other jurisdictions, like I believe San Francisco Unified School District passed it a couple of years ago,” Plata noted. In fact, 19 local jurisdictions allow it, according to the Vermont League of Women Voters. And that’s nothing compared to our past history. As noted in the book, Democracy For All: Restoring Immigrant Voting Rights in the United States:
“[A]liens” voted in local, state, and even national elections in as many as forty states and federal territories from the founding of the United States until 1926, and noncitizen immigrants held public office such as alderman and coroner.
Other democracy-strengthening proposals that were dropped included:
- Lower voting age to 16 for city and Los Angeles Unified School District elections;
- Reduce ballot access barriers so more candidates can run;
- Strengthen neighborhood council advisory powers.
Rebuilding Trust Through Accountability
Accountability reforms that were put off included giving the Ethics Commission independent legal counsel and a protected budget, clarifying suspension process and compensation rules for council members, and requiring special elections when vacancies leave more than one year remaining, while the proposal to establish an Inspector General to investigate corruption was set aside completely.
The one major accountability reform that passed was to give the city council the power to set Los Angeles Police Department policy — even as three other LAPD reforms were put off, including one allowing the police chief to fire officers for harmful misconduct.
“Council member [Euniss] Hernandez mentioned in some of her remarks on Wednesday that last year in the face of the ICE raids building up, the council passed 22 motions, 22! in an attempt to keep the public safe. And zero of them actually made it through the Board of of Police Commissioners, which is currently the unelected body tasked with legislating LAPD policy,” Plata explained. “That’s a problem when the folks that we’ve elected, advocating to and were accountable to us literally do not have the power to do the thing that we need. And the folks who do have the power are unelected.”
Council President Harris-Dawson and Councilman John Lee vocally opposed this. Both expressed fears of returning to the 1990s, when Harris-Dawson noted that how police treated residents changed dramatically, depending on which council district you were in. In the rules committee, Lee even went so far as to claim, “It’s a much better department. It’s a department that is extremely progressive,” a claim that hardly squares with its behavior during ICE’s occupation last year.
Plata pushed back in several ways. First of all, it’s not a reversion to how things were in the 1990s. “It doesn’t take away any of the powers of the Board of Police Commissioners, they still exist as an appointed body” that’s primarily responsible for LAPD policy. While it does give the city council the power to set LAPD policy as well, “It doesn’t create any sort of incentive to do so,” he said. “It’s a high bar, you still have to get eight of the 15 votes, currently, you have the committee structure to refer things to, things get stuck all the time to sit there for years.”
What’s more, Plata noted, “How we think about policing is different now than it was in the ’90s. We have all evolved. … I think it’s good to revisit something that perhaps didn’t work in the past, so long as we also continue to use it responsibly.”
Finally, he noted that the question was raised, “Does this make the LAPPL [police union] more likely to weigh in on city council races,” if council members had power over LAPD policy? “But we also know that the LAPPL plays [a role in elections] now, even without that power,” he pointed out.
As if to underscore Plata’s last point, the LAPPL sent a letter to the city council on June 17, criticizing it for failing to “meet and confer” with them, as required under their labor contract. But not only were they notified of charter proposals multiple times, without responding, the proposal that was passed doesn’t impact labor negotiations. In fact, it specifically prohibits the city council from micromanaging.
Modernization Delayed?
Only one of seven proposals to “Modernize Government Structure for a City of 4 Million” survived: requiring charter reform every 10 years, which is already required by the same city ordinance that created this charter reform process. The rest were either delayed or sidelined.
For LA Forward, the most striking failure had to do with restructuring the city attorney’s office, “Currently our city attorney’s office is tasked with a lot more than peer cities task their city attorney with, and it is an elected position as well,” Plata said. The attorney prosecutes misdemeanors, represents the city in litigation, and provides counsel to the city council, as well as departments. The latter is particularly concerning, Plata noted “There are bound to be potential political differences between whoever the city attorney is and the body that legislates.” The attorney is risk averse, concerned with limiting the city’s liability, and thus likely to advise against bold policy changes, while the city council is elected precisely to make such changes when conditions warrant it, and the people who elect them demand it.
The Charter Commission proposed bifurcating the office, with an elected prosecutor and an appointed city attorney, but for the reasons just stated, LA Forward argued for trifucating the office, creating a separate body to advise city council, as other peer cities do, as well as the state legislature. But the chief legislative analyst said it required “further study,” and no action was taken, though there’s still a chance that such a body could be created via a city ordinance.
The fact that decennial charter reform will be voted on — even though it’s already a city ordinance — is perhaps not as positive as might first appear, given how flawed the process has turned out to be in practice. So much was left undone, 10 years seems far too long to wait, and both the mayor and the council served to block the majority of proposals. “The commission was advisory and we are disappointed that with the things that were all passed, only a few of them are making it to ballot,” Plata said, while other things not part of the process will be on the ballot. So, even more than how often, “what will the rules be … feels like the even more important question.”
Where Reforms Advanced
The council approved adopting a five-year capital improvement program, without which, “LA responds to crises rather than preventing them,” as the commission explained in its final report. It also approved a director of public qorks with authority to coordinate infrastructure delivery across departments, and a two-year budget cycle to allow for less rushed, more thoughtful budgeting. This trio of reforms would work together to significantly improve the city’s infrastructure spending, an example of how multiple well-conceived reforms can work together synergistically to significantly improve how the city works, even though not all the reforms in this theme were adopted. In contrast, while some proposals from other themes were also adopted, no such synergies were created.
“We’re really excited about the CIP,” as well as the two other reforms, Plata said. “This is a very technical set of reforms that will pay off for the people,” he said, though “it’s hard for that to be really visible to the voters sometimes.”
That’s not the case for another proposal — to double minimum park funding — that vividly illustrated the disconnect between LA residents and city hall. It was easily the most broadly supported reform proposal, especially during hearings before the rules committee and then the full council.
And it’s not just a matter of public sentiment: In the wake of the Great Recession, LA’s investment in its parks has suffered so much that it has declined from #34 on the Trust for Public Land’s national “ParkScore” rankings in 2013 to 49th place in 2020, 88th place in 2024, and 93rd place today.
But council members’ concern about the lack of a dedicated funding source produced strong resistance, and Budget Committee Chair Kay Yaroslavsky advanced a substitute proposal to increase funding half as much, with a four-year phase-in in the rules committee the week before the city council vote, which most park advocates denounced as inadequate. Councilmember Monica Rodriguez refused to give up, and managed to garner majority support for doubling park funding with a more gradual 10-year phase-in.
The concern with lack of dedicated funding for parks stood in stark contrast to the council’s historical willingness to spend lavishly on police, including overtime and lawsuits, which totaled $436 million since 2020. A reform proposal to shift some of that cost to individual officers via an insurance system was derailed by the chief legislative analyst.
The Big Picture
“Folks have been watching this reform process have noticed that the council has passed the ballot reforms that have given them more power, or clarified some of their power, but not a lot of things that check the power,” Plata said, summing up. “There were a series of possible reforms around what to do in cases of misconduct, for example, and those have been tabled. Even the idea of council expansion … like what happens if we expand this, it changes our power … things that changed their power were not things that they passed forward.”
In the Charter Commission’s final report, it said, “Los Angeles did not arrive at Charter reform because of one bad headline or one bad politician. It got here because many Angelenos came to believe that City Hall had become too hard to trust, too hard to follow, and too easy for insiders to work.”
Unfortunately, the city council’s rejection of most of the proposed reforms has only reinforced that belief. The question now is how people respond — and initial signs, such as public comments at the June 17 meeting, point to an even deeper determination to produce significant change.