Mayor Won’t Be Master of Charter Panel

In electing a commission Tuesday to rewrite the city of Los Angeles’ 72-year-old charter, voters put their hands into a grab bag.

And no one knows what they’re going to pull out two years from now, when the commission is scheduled to report back with a plan to redistribute power in city government.

In the words of a senior aide to Mayor Richard Riordan: “The genie is out of the bottle. No one controls the genie.”

It is certainly clear that voters gave Riordan, the driving force behind charter reform, little control over the outcome of the commission’s work. Only three candidates backed exclusively by the mayor, who would like to leave the city with a legacy of streamlined government, were assured election to the 15-member panel late Tuesday night. Another appeared likely to win. In contrast, eight of the commissioners were selected from a slate backed exclusively by labor unions, which frequently are among the mayor’s best-organized opponents. Two winners shared backing from Riordan and labor and one won without backing from either camp.

How influential the unions will be is far from clear. Beyond a few key issues--chiefly preservation of the Civil Service system for city workers and a ban on privatizing city services--labor has no consistent agenda and, more important, no means of exercising control over many of those it endorsed.

Interviews with commission members suggest that they may be an independent-minded group who, as some said, will “put everything on the table,” ranging from the relative dimensions of mayoral and council power to whether legal immigrants should be allowed to vote in city elections.

But before they get on with their principal business, they and city leaders will have to resolve two important preliminary questions:

* Who will pay for the elected commission’s work?

* More vexing, given that there is already a charter reform commission whose members were appointed by the City Council, to what extent are two commissions better than one?

Riordan, who raised $1.9 million privately to finance the initiative that created an elected commission and to back his own slate of commissioners, has said he will make good on his promise to raise another $300,000 in start-up funds to finance its work. The council has already funded the 21-member appointed panel to the tune of more than $1 million for its first year.

Beyond Riordan’s seed money, elected commission members have talked vaguely about getting help from foundations, or even from the City Council, for their effort.

But whether the council will fund an elected commission is anyone’s guess.

The existence of the two panels grew out of a dispute between the mayor and the council. The dispute had, at its heart, the council’s fear of losing control and finding itself the object of a mayoral move to rein in its extensive administrative powers.

The mayor, who has made no secret of his desire to do just that, initially agreed to have only one commission, appointed by city leaders. But Riordan demanded that the council not alter the panel’s recommendations and send them directly to voters.

The council would not agree. So Riordan arranged financing for his own initiative to authorize an elected commission whose work product would bypass the lawmakers.

Members of both commissions have expressed hope that they will be able to work closely together, but it is uncertain whether the panels could legally merge or come up with a single reform blueprint.

“I hope that we can and will work together,” said George Kiefer, the lawyer and Democratic activist who chairs the appointed panel. “There’s a common goal and there’s too much at stake.”

Elected commissioner Erwin Chemerinsky, a USC law professor who helped draft a constitution for Belarus--the former Soviet Republic of Byelorussia--said competing proposals will be “a recipe for both to be defeated” when they are submitted to the electorate, as they must be by law.

The fear is that a public confronted with leaders pulling for change in different directions will simply reject change. That is what happened to the last serious effort at charter reform in 1971 and that is what some members of the council are banking on this time to give them leverage in promoting a compromise with the mayor’s forces.

In short, they believe that the mayor will not be able to get voter approval for any reforms if the council publicly urges voters to reject them. The mayor’s camp, however, is increasingly confident that the council is so unpopular as an institution and so inept at fund-raising that it can be safely ignored.

“My guess is that the two panels will reach an agreement on 95% of the changes but it will be the other 5% that kills it,” said UCLA political scientist Xandra Kayden, herself a former member of the appointed panel. “I’d say the odds are less than 50-50 that we will get charter reform in the end.”

Charter reform is an esoteric subject that--given Tuesday’s 12% voter turnout--has certainly not captured the public imagination. But aficionados, such as USC political scientist Eric Schockman, talk about it with relish as the stuff of high drama.

Schockman sees it as an opportunity to turn away from another time--the 1920s--when Los Angeles was a very different place, dominated by white, largely Protestant Progressives whose political goal was in part to prevent the rise of other ethnic groups.

By abandoning political parties in favor nonpartisan elections, they hoped to avoid the rise of ethnic political machines that dominated Eastern cities, Schockman said.

Interested in “good government,” they created a complex weak mayor/strong council system that also featured citizen commissioners--who would in practice be like them: middle-class volunteers, appointed by the mayor and confirmed by the council to oversee each city department. In the business-friendly 1920s, it was called “managerial government.”

In rewriting the charter, both commissions will probably consider whether there is still a need for these department commissioners, or whether it would be better to have department heads report directly to the mayor.

They will also be likely to consider whether the council should continue to function as a group of 15 “mini-mayors” with effective authority to kill projects in their own districts, or whether the council should be restricted to a legislative role.

They will also consider whether the council should be enlarged and, judging by their comments so far, they will almost certainly recommend some sort of new civic institution.

The words “neighborhood councils,” aimed at bringing disaffected residents in closer touch with their government, are on almost everyone’s lips, although there does not appear to be any firm consensus--or even firm idea--as to what they are.

No one has been more important in the fight to shape the new charter than Riordan, whose themes have been that government needs to be more accountable to citizens and that the path to accountability lies in enhancing the authority of the chief executive.

While he coasted to victory in the April mayoral primary, his coattails did not extend to the candidates he backed for the commission. Riordan forces outspent labor more than 2 to 1, but only three Riordan-backed candidates for charter commissioner won outright, compared to seven labor-backed candidates.

Riordan minimized the impact of the loss in a recent interview, saying he and labor had the same primary goals: streamlining the city “so that we aren’t as dysfunctional as we are,” and creating more jobs. Riordan said he supports continuance of Civil Service, but believes labor will back his effort to “have 5 or 10 exempt positions in each department” so executives can be brought under firmer mayoral control.