Los Angeles is offering a real-time civics lesson this summer, and the moral of the story depends on which building you’re standing in.
At Los Angeles City Hall, the City Council spent nine months studying a package of sweeping charter reforms, only to shelve most of them in late June, arguing the proposals needed more vetting. That decision came despite years of prior debate on the biggest items, including the long-discussed idea of expanding the council’s size.
A few miles away, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors is now scrambling to clean up its own 2024 charter overhaul, which created new elected positions and administrative duties but was drafted so hastily that it inadvertently undermined the county’s signature criminal justice reforms. Supervisors are now asking voters to approve fixes this November.
It’s an unusual reversal of reputations. The county, typically seen as slow-moving and bureaucratic given its size and scope, suddenly looks bold and innovative, if a bit clumsy. The city, often viewed as nimble and responsive, now looks cautious to the point of paralysis.
So which approach is the smarter one? Is it better to move fast and fix mistakes later, or take the time to get it right, even if that means disappointing voters who want action now?
These are questions other California cities and counties should be asking themselves as well. Voter patience has worn thin since 2020, a year that forced a broader reckoning over how local governments allocate resources and responsibilities. San Bernardino and Shasta counties have already sent major charter reforms to their voters in recent years, and this November, both San Francisco and San Diego County will ask residents to weigh in on their own governance overhauls.
Los Angeles County’s process moved at a pace somewhere between urgent and impulsive. Supervisors Lindsey Horvath and Janice Hahn unveiled their restructuring plan just before the July Fourth holiday in 2024, then returned from the break with a full campaign already in motion — testimony from scholars and community leaders, and even a 1972 video clip of Hahn’s late father, longtime Supervisor Kenneth Hahn, urging swift action. “You do not need to study, study, study,” he said in the recording. “They’ve been studying county government since 1851, and there’s time for change and the change and the time is now.”
The measure, known as Measure G, proposed expanding the Board of Supervisors from five members to nine, creating a new elected county executive position, and establishing an independent ethics commission, among other changes. The specifics were left to be worked out later by an appointed task force. Voters narrowly approved it in November 2024.
Once that task force got to work, problems surfaced quickly. The measure had unintentionally erased a previous charter provision guaranteeing funding for alternatives to incarceration. It also became clear that the promised independent ethics commission can’t actually be created without another ballot measure. Other loose ends remain, including questions about whether the county auditor — whose job is oversight — should report to the board rather than to the new elected executive.
Fixing these problems now requires a lawsuit and additional ballot language, all of which costs money and complicates the promise that the restructuring wouldn’t burden taxpayers with new expenses. (In fairness, Measure G’s actual language only guarantees no new implementation costs — a claim that leaves plenty of room for interpretation.)
Meanwhile, at City Hall, the council in June 2024 launched its own ambitious charter review, billed as a once-in-a-generation opportunity to modernize city government and restore public trust eroded by scandal and long-standing frustration with city services.
The city’s Charter Reform Commission got off to a slow start, partly because Mayor Karen Bass took her time appointing members. But once the commission began meeting last summer, it drew far more public engagement and media attention than the county’s task force has managed to attract.
Many of the ideas the commission floated in March weren’t new — some had been debated for decades. Expanding the City Council, for instance, was rejected by voters back in 1999. Giving noncitizens voting rights in city and school elections, lowering the voting age to 16, and adopting ranked-choice voting all surfaced in charter discussions during the 1990s but never made it to the ballot.
Nearly three decades later, the council once again punted on all of these ideas, sending them back for further study. Council members also rejected giving themselves more direct oversight of Los Angeles Police Department policy, along with several other proposed reforms.
A handful of narrower measures — covering things like contracting procedures and meeting schedules — will make it to the November ballot. But none of them amount to the sweeping transformation city leaders originally promised, and none are likely to generate much voter enthusiasm. If anything, their modest scope may deepen public frustration with City Hall’s apparent resistance to change, a dynamic likely to surface in the mayoral runoff between Bass and challenger Nithya Raman.
The council’s cautious, wait-and-see approach risks making the city look out of touch with voters demanding action. The county’s move-fast-and-fix-it-later strategy, by contrast, looks more politically savvy for now, especially since many county voters — who are often city voters too — may well be willing to approve another round of ethics and governance fixes.
Still, it’s too early to say which strategy actually produces better government. The county’s reforms are years away from being fully implemented, and it remains uncertain whether they’ll function as intended.
The city, meanwhile, still has time to take its own advice and truly study its options, crafting a more coherent and unified reform package than the somewhat piecemeal proposals that emerged from its charter commission.
City leaders would do well to keep listening to their constituents. This is Los Angeles, after all — the birthplace of the modern voter initiative and a city with a long history of political uprisings. If the council isn’t willing to reform itself, voters may eventually decide to do it for them.
Original source: CalMatters
