City’s New Charter Heralds No Instant Revolution

As I came back into town on the Fourth of July, I scanned the skyline fearfully.

Had revolution begun? Was City Hall still standing? Had the new City Charter swept in on July 1 and shaken the city to its bolted foundations, as the Declaration of Independence had arrived on a July 4 and shaken an empire?

Naaaah.

It’s Week One of life under Los Angeles’ new charter--or hadn’t you noticed? Traffic lights still operate, trash is still collected, water still flows from the taps. No fisticuffs have broken out in the council chambers, no one has been defenestrated from City Hall windows, and the San Fernando Valley is still glumly sistered to the rest of L.A.

On the city’s Web site, the document that is the most dramatic reordering of the city in eight decades must be ferreted out through the City Council link, then a left turn to “vital city documents,” and there, next to last, you’ll find the new charter. Anyone expecting it to arrive with bands and bunting, or something like the “under new management” sign posted outside City Hall after corrupt Mayor Frank Shaw was recalled in 1938, will have to settle for the effect, not the cause.

The charter proposes nothing so radical as a borough system, like New York’s, or so bold as doubling or trebling the size of the City Council. Instead, the charter deals its new game from the same deck of power; some players will profit, some will bluff, and some would like to pretend it isn’t happening. In general, the mayor will have a stronger hand, the City Council a poorer one, and the neighborhood councils--there is the wild card.

There may lie the most profound change, and the most uncertain one--how the 15 neighborhood councils, under a new department of neighborhood empowerment, will be chosen, how they will operate, how much power they can exercise and how they will wield it.

What began so quietly on July 1 will take months and years to be felt throughout the city--by its failure or its success. Maybe a stealth charter is better; a big buildup would have created big expectations, and the problems the charter aspires to address were much longer in the making than the new charter’s four-year gestation process: Valley secession, a creaking bureaucracy and an antique infrastructure, a City Council that often worked like a football team with 15 quarterbacks, and, to the LAPD and the people it serves/protects, cracks in confidence and morale as wide as those in the stairwells at Parker Center.

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Push had already come to shove over the charter even before July 1. The mayor reportedly told the city CEO not to share data with the council before his office approved it. The City Council’s staff wanted to require the mayor to get the council president’s OK before speaking to state and federal governments on the city’s behalf. Neither is charter-friendly, but each shows that we should expect the legislative and the executive to nudge and muscle against each other like tectonic plates, testing the limits of the charter and each other.

The City Council could unite on laudable matters like deploring Third World child labor, but seemed unable to work in sync to do much about parks for children in Los Angeles. The mayor, frustrated by the city’s checks and balances, instead spent money and energy changing the schools.

And department heads played them off like a 5-year-old plays off mom and dad; if they didn’t like the answer they got from the mayor, they could go to the council, singly or plurally, to get a different one, and the other way around.

The charter, compromise that it is, could be the making or breaking of the city’s confidence in itself. Michael Dear, who directs the Southern California Studies Center at USC, says the charter’s success, and perhaps even the city’s, depends on how people perceive L.A.--as a real city, or as a hunk of cheese to be lopped off in pieces, Valley, Harbor, Westside--and, critically, on how power is shared. “There’s a strong desire for more local control, more local democracy. That’ll be the principal struggle in the next five or 10 years, the emerging urban democracy we’re trying to shape.”

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There are cities where civic politics is a spectator sport, but this is not one of them. Angelenos are not amused. Excuses don’t fill potholes, backbiting doesn’t hire more 911 operators. Civil servants seem insulated behind form letters and voice mail.

We just had a national holiday celebrating the power of a piece of paper to alter civic fortunes. Maybe Los Angeles’ new charter can prove itself to be another powerful piece of paper, and not just more excuses on city letterhead.

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Patt Morrison’s column appears Fridays. Her e-mail address is [email protected]