The saga of Los Angeles Charter reform began a new chapter on Sept. 30, with the first meeting of the City Council’s Ad Hoc Committee on Charter Review, after the vast majority of previously proposed reforms were scuttled earlier this year. Councilmember Tim McCosker, who chairs the committee, set an ambitious goal: final reports “no later than summer recess, so we can spend August through October, cleaning up and finalizing recommendations.” And he proposed a tight four-part thematic schedule to get there: governance (institutional structure) from September through November, service delivery in December and January, workforce issues from February through April, and representation (democratic reforms) May through July.
But the public comments that began the meeting were a stark reminder of how badly the process he inherited has failed. “In keeping with my other fellow prisoners, I’m celebrating my 128th hour of charter meetings in attendance,” said James Moore.
“We heard a ton of public comment about police accountability,” said Jason Enright, with LA Forward. “We heard a ton of public comment about council expansion. And it seems like for political reasons, this committee was created as an effort to kill those reforms. So, we’re really looking at all of you, to prove that public perception wrong.”
While some expressed bitterness and/or exasperation over popular proposals that were dropped, others expressed renewed determination to see them adopted. Top concerns cited were democracy reforms, police accountability reforms, and defense of immigrants.
On democracy reform, two speakers recalled how much work has already been done.
Former Santa Monica Mayor Mike Feinstein promised to reintroduce mapping work for council expansion ranging from 21 to 45 seats “for both single seat and multi-seat districts” that accommodates all major demographic groups, and to put the committee in touch with the experts responsible for the work, as well as with experts and educators involved in introducing ranked-choice voting in New York City.
Hunter Futo, with Public Democracy LA, spoke in support of incorporating jury-like deliberative processes into the city’s decision-making process, as was done with the charter reform process itself.
“They bring together randomly selected groups of residents who reflect the city, give them balanced information from all sides of an issue and ask them to generate recommendations the city can act on,” Futo explained. “Culver City and the State of California both launched similar programs this year.”
Similar civic assemblies have grown popular in Europe after a landmark Irish assembly played a watershed role in liberalizing the country’s abortion law, finding a broad consensus that had eluded elected politicians for generations.
In addition to McOsker, councilwomen Eunice Hernandez and Katy Yaroslovsky weighed in with complimentary remarks about removing some things from the charter.
“During my first term, I lost count about how many walls I ran into because of the city constitution, because of the charter, the limits that were placed on our ability to govern … just to get a contract out, just to get services done,” Hernandez said.
“We need to remove barriers that make it hard to govern,” Yaroslovsky echoed.
The meeting’s main feature was a stage-setting historical presentation about the charter by Raphe Sonenshein, executive director of the 1990s appointed Charter Reform Commission.
“When it comes to the City of Los Angeles, reform is in our blood, it’s in our history,” Sonenshein said. “The reform movement in this country started on the East Coast, with a very kind of elite view that was fighting against political machines in New York and Chicago, but it took off when it moved west,” he said. “California really fell in love with reform,” citing the election of reform governor Hiram Johnson and the direct democracy reforms he championed — the initiative, referendum and recall.
Even before that, Sonenshein cited the development of charter rule. “Most states did not allow local charters until late in the 19th centuries,” with California and Missouri leading the way. “California in 1879 created one of the first home rule constitutions,” and by 1888 LA had adopted its first charter.
Civil service (rather than patronage), non-partisan elections and the recall (even before it went statewide) were three progressive features of LA’s earliest charters, culminating in the 1924 charter, which was subsequently modified, but endured without fundamental change until 1999.
Sonenshein’s history left out some important details, however. Voting alone wasn’t enough to cement the 1924 changes. It took a lawsuit against the city to expand the city council from 9 to 15, and to switch from at-large to district elections. The suit went all the way to the state Supreme Court, where the reformers prevailed unanimously. The city government’s resistance to change then has a familiar ring today.
Fast forwarding to the 1999 charter reform, Sonenshein left no doubt that the threat of secession was a crucial driver of the reforms. “The community itself was at-risk,” he said. “We believed every day that we went to work, that if the city broke apart, it would be the worst possible thing that could happen to the city.”
For all the system’s failures driving charter reform this time, there is no similar existential threat to the city government, and that’s arguably why change has been so difficult to come by.
But there is a much broader threat to democracy worldwide, and city governments have an important — even vital — role to play in combating that threat by showing what democracy can deliver at the most immediate level. Zohran Mamdani’s leadership in New York City — made possible in part by ranked-choice voting — is a stellar example of that.
Charter reform is a more complex, long-term process than electing a mayor, but for laying the foundations for a resilient democracy, it’s ultimately even more important.
The committee’s next meeting is scheduled for Oct. 21. At that time, “We’ll look at the principles and framework that should guide our work, including what properly belongs in the Charter and how we evaluate proposals as they come before the committee,” McOsker said in his Oct. 3 newsletter.