Let Los Angeles voters decide whether to expand the City Council

from Jim NewtonCalMatters

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A storied idea is making its way back to the top of Los Angeles’ political court, and voters may — or may not — soon get a chance to decide: Should the city be served by a larger council whose members serve much smaller districts?

It’s a controversial idea, but one that voters at least deserve the right to consider.

Last week, the city’s charter reform commission recommended that voters be allowed to consider expanding the City Council from the current 15 to 25 members. It’s a significant step forward, although the council itself — which has often been a roadblock to the idea — still has to clear the measure for the June ballot.

Council expansion has drawn the attention of reformers for decades. Some argue that the city, long at the pinnacle of American immigration and diversity, has outgrown its current structure.

This structure, with a city-wide mayor and 15 council members, each representing districts, has been in place for just over a century. The city’s charter created it in 1925, when the acquisition of the region’s water supply spurred the development of the San Fernando Valley and ushered in a decade of galloping growth.

Los Angeles then had about 600,000 residents and was overwhelmingly white. The city’s mayor, George Cryer, was a Midwesterner and Republican whose legacy included building City Hall and the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. During his tenure, Los Angeles surpassed 1 million residents, many of them migrants from the South and Midwest.

This meant that in 1925 each member of the Los Angeles City Council represented about 40,000 people. The districts had some diversity—some were more affluent than others—but less than a fifth of Los Angeles’ residents were Hispanic, and its black population, though growing rapidly, still numbered fewer than 25,000.

Today’s Los Angeles is home to about 4 million people. Its largest ethnic group is Hispanic, who make up about half of the city’s residents. Black people make up about 9% and the city is of course home to immigrant communities from all over the world.

Bigger advice for smaller areas

That’s it politics is liberal to very liberaland the current mayoral race is a race between an African-American actress, Karen Bass, and a South Asian woman, Councilwoman Nitya Raman.

In short, Los Angeles has changed a lot since 1925. However, the City Council remains structurally unchanged — 15 members representing 15 districts. While the districts once included 40,000 people, they are now home to about 265,000 people each.

If the council were to expand to 25 members, each would represent 160,000 people.

There are moves to expand the council kicked for decades. In the late 1990s, then-Mayor Richard Riordan began an overhaul of the city charter, and although his goals were more to streamline power and strengthen the mayor’s office, two commissions considering reforms tackled expanding the council as a means of improving representation.

The thinking goes that smaller districts would mean more cohesive. A city’s Korean-American community, for example, may command a district. Or residents of the Philippines or Guatemala, who have significant populations but whose numbers are swamped by other groups in existing areas, may exercise more power in their areas.

Smaller districts would also have other advantages.

Council members are part of the city legislature and vote on city ordinances and priorities, but they also act as administrators for constituents, advocating when residents run into red tape, assisting residents trying to access city services or navigate city rules. Smaller constituencies could mean voters get more individualized attention.

These assumptions keep the idea of ​​expanding the council alive, but there is also considerable opposition, starting with the council itself. Many members see the idea of ​​expansion as diluting their power, reducing them to lesser political figures.

Other critics worry that a larger council would be more expensive for taxpayers and not inherently more responsive to the public.

Still, Los Angeles stands out among big cities. New York, with a larger population than LA, has a council of 51 members each representing about 172,000 inhabitants. Chicago, with a smaller population, has 50 elders, each representing about 50,000 inhabitants.

In California, San Francisco has 11 members representing a city of about 840,000 people, meaning each member represents an area of ​​about 76,000 people — about one-third the size of Los Angeles. San Diego, the state’s second-largest city with a population of 1.4 million, has nine council members, or one for every 155,000 people — again areas smaller than Los Angeles would have even if it approved council expansion.

Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of UC Berkeley’s law school and president of the Los Angeles Charter Reform Commission in the 1990s, has been dealing with this issue for a long time. He is a staunch supporter of council expansion. I contacted him this week to ask if he still supports the idea, and he made it clear that his view remains unchanged.

“Is it desirable to increase the composition of the Municipal Council? Undoubtedly, the answer is yes,” Chemerinsky said. “More municipal districts mean fewer voters per councillor.”

But Chemerinsky has also been around the politics of this issue. In 1999, when his commission and an appointed committee combined their work and drafted a proposed city charter, panel members were worried enough about how voters would react to the council expansion provisions that they split them out as separate ballot measures: one that would have added six members to the existing body, and one that would have added 10.

They were right to be worried. Los Angeles voters accepted the basic charter written by Chemerinsky and his colleagues, but rejected both options to expand the council. As Chemerinsky recalls, focus groups consulted by the charter reform commissions warned at the time that if council expansion “was part of the overall charter proposal, it would defeat it.”

Politics is framing. Part of the opposition may come down to how the issue is presented. The same people who might vote against “enlarging the Borough Council” might vote for “reducing the size of municipal districts”.

First, though, it will be up to the council to decide whether voters will get that chance at all. It would be a shame to deny them this opportunity.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.