What CA can learn from LA’s botched government reforms

from Robert GreeneCalMatters

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Los Angeles this summer is the epicenter of both a sweeping change in municipal governance and a staggering government shutdown.

The pushback comes from the Los Angeles City Council, which shut down a series of widely popular charter reforms in late June because, members said, the proposals had not been sufficiently vetted — despite nine grueling months of hearings and committee debates and, frankly, years of debating the costliest elements, such as council expansion.

In contrast, the County Board of Supervisors finalized a cleanup measure for the November election after moving too fast and breaking too much with a 2024 charter reform that created new offices and new official duties, but that threatens to smashed the county’s landmark justice reforms due to hasty and careless drafting.

It’s a surprising role reversal, at least in image, with the traditionally labor-intensive, state-sized county government suddenly looking more urgent and creative (but prone to mishaps) than the smaller and relatively unassuming City Hall.

Which of the two governments hit on the right formula? Better to be quick than safe? Should policy or politics set the pace?

These are questions that other municipal governments in California would be wise to consider in the coming months. Voters have been restless and have shown some degree of volatility since 2020, a chaotic year in which the way we manage public resources and distribute public responsibilities and benefits was called into serious question.

Cities and counties across the state have begun dusting off their charters to keep up. San Bernardino and Shasta counties have sent their voters major reforms in the past four years, and San Francisco and San Diego County has charter measures on the ballot in November.

Los Angeles County moved at a speed somewhere between breakneck and reckless. Supervisors Lindsey Horvath and Janice Hahn presented their colleagues with a historic restructuring plan the day before the 2024 Fourth of July holiday and were ready right after the break with some showbiz flashbacks and pre-prepared testimony from academics, community leaders and, in a 1972 video, even Hahn’s late father. Kenneth Hahn, for whom the county administration is named, has served on the Board of Supervisors for 40 years.

“You don’t have to study, study, study,” on Elder Khan said in the recording. “They’ve been studying county government since 1851, and there’s a time for change and change, and the time is now.”

The county’s proposal calls for expanding the board from five members to nine, creating a new elected executive director, creating an independent ethics commission and numerous other procedural and administrative changes. The stated goals were greater responsiveness, accountability and efficiency.

The board had to fill in the details after the fact after hearing recommendations from an appointed task force. Voters passed Measure G reform in November 2024 by little more than a particle.

The task force then began its work and found that the measure inadvertently overturned a previous charter reform that set a spending threshold for alternatives to incarceration. The task force also learned that the independent ethics committee would be impossible with no subsequent vote measure. And members are grappling with various other items that probably should have been included in the restructuring plan but weren’t. For example, the auditor’s role is oversight. Shouldn’t that office be accountable to the board, not the elected executive?

Attempts at amendments include a lawsuit and new ballot language. Any cleanup costs money and makes it more challenging to keep the reformers’ implicit promise to keep implementation cost-neutral. (Measure G actually only guarantees that it will not result in new costs to taxpayers. The wording is open to interpretation.)

Meanwhile, down the street at City Hall, the Los Angeles City Council in June 2024 launched what it called a once-in-a-generation charter reform process to explore how to modernize city government and restore public trust that was lost after a series of scandals and long-simmering dissatisfaction with city service delivery.

The city’s charter reform commission has gotten off to a slow start, in part because Mayor Karen Bass has been slow to appoint members. But since the group began its work last summer, it has received the kind of news coverage and public involvement the county task force could only dream of until now.

Many of the proposals the committee made in March were familiar, debated literally for decades. For example, City Council expansion was rejected by voters in 1999. Granting certain noncitizens the right to vote in city or school elections, lowering the voting age to 16, and implementing ranked-choice voting were before two charter reform commissions in the 1990s, but did not come to a vote.

Nearly 30 years later, the city council has shelved each of those proposals for further study. The council too rejected a plan to give him more direct authority over police department policy and a host of other reforms.

Several proposed changes will move on to the November ballot, including things like contracting rules and meeting schedules. None represent the promised sweeping reform of city government, nor are they likely to cause a stir at the ballot box. Their relative punitiveness may actually fuel anger at City Hall’s perceived resistance to change and play a role in runoff campaigns of Bass and challenger Nithya Raman.

The city council, with its strategy of “look before you leap” – and perhaps never leap – seems unresponsive. The county’s quick-vote, leisure-time repentance attitude seems politically smarter for now, given that county voters (many of whom are also urban) may be only too happy to vote on ethics reforms one more time.

But it is not yet clear which approach makes local government policy the soundest. The county reforms are still in the midst of a multi-year rollout, and we’re a long way from knowing whether they’ll work.

In the meantime, the city has another chance to “study, study, study” its proposals and weave them into a more comprehensive and internally consistent package than the somewhat scattered reforms proposed by the charter reform commission.

The city must continue to take the political temperature of its constituents. This is Los Angeles, the birthplace of suffrage and home to periodic suffrage riots. If the board does not want to change the way it operates, its members may find that the change is imposed without their input.

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