What California can learn from LA’s hot mess era of governmental reforms

Los Angeles this summer is the epicenter of both sweeping municipal governance overhaul and stultifying governmental stasis. 

The foot-dragging comes from the L.A. City Council, which shut down a series of broadly popular charter reforms in late June because, members said, the proposals hadn’t been sufficiently vetted — despite nine grueling months of commission hearings and debates and, frankly, years of discussion over the biggest-ticket items, like expanding the council.

By contrast, the county Board of Supervisors is finalizing a clean-up measure for the November ballot after having moved too fast and broken too many things with a 2024 charter reform that created new offices and new official duties, but that threatens to wreck the county’s signature justice reforms because of rushed and careless drafting.

It’s a surprising role reversal, at least in image, with the traditionally plodding, state-sized county government looking suddenly more urgent and creative (but accident-prone) than the smaller and comparatively scrappier City Hall.

Which of the two governments landed on the right formula? Is it better to be swift than certain? Should politics or policy set the pace?

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

Cities and counties around the state have begun dusting off their charters to keep up. San Bernardino and Shasta counties sent their voters major reforms over the last four years, and San Francisco and San Diego County have charter measures on this November’s ballot. 

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 a day before the Fourth of July holiday in 2024 and were ready, immediately after the break, with some showbiz flash and pre-arranged testimony by academics, community leaders and, in a 1972 video, even Hahn’s late father. Kenneth Hahn, for whom the county Hall of Administration is named, served on the Board of Supervisors for 40 years.

“You do not need to study, study, study,” the elder Hahn 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 county proposal called for expanding the board from five members to nine, creating a new elected executive, establishing an independent ethics commission, and numerous other changes in procedure and administration. The stated goals were greater responsiveness, accountability and efficiency.

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

Then the task force began its work and discovered that the measure inadvertently overwrote a previous charter reform that set a spending floor for alternatives to incarceration. The task force also learned that the independent ethics commission would be impossible without a follow-up ballot measure. And members are grappling with various other items that probably should have been in the restructuring plan but were not. For example, the auditor’s role is oversight. Shouldn’t that office report to the board rather than to the elected executive?

The attempted fixes include a lawsuit and new ballot language. Each clean-up costs money and makes it more challenging to keep reformers’ implied promise to keep implementation cost-neutral. (Measure G actually guarantees only that it won’t result in new costs to taxpayers. The wording is open to interpretation.)

Meanwhile, down the street at City Hall, the L.A. City Council in June 2024 launched what it called a once-in-a-generation charter reform process to study how to modernize city government and rebuild the public trust that had been lost following a series of scandals and long-simmering dissatisfaction with the delivery of city services.

The city Charter Reform Commission was slow getting off the ground, in part because Mayor Karen Bass was slow in appointing members. But once the panel began its work last summer, it got the kind of news coverage and public participation that the county’s task force can, so far, only dream of.

Many of the proposals the commission delivered in March were familiar, having been discussed for literally decades. For example, expanding the City Council 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 came before two charter reform commissions in the 1990s but did not proceed to the ballot.

Nearly 30 years later, the City Council delayed each of those proposals for further study. The council also rejected a plan to give it more direct authority over Police Department policy, and a host of other reforms.

A smattering of proposed changes will proceed to the November ballot, including things like contracting rules and meeting schedules. None constitute the broad city government reform that was promised, nor are they likely to cause excitement at the ballot box. Their relative puniness may in fact exacerbate anger at City Hall’s perceived resistance to change and play a role in the run-off campaigns of Bass and challenger Nithya Raman.

The City Council, with its look-before-you-leap — and maybe never leap — strategy, comes off as unresponsive. The county’s vote-in-haste, repent-at-leisure attitude appears for the present to be politically smarter, given that county voters (many of whom are also city voters) may be only too happy to vote for ethics reforms one more time.

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

The city, meanwhile, has another chance to “study, study, study” its proposals and meld them into a more comprehensive and internally consistent package than the somewhat scattershot reforms proposed by the charter reform commission.

The city needs to keep taking the political temperature of its constituents. This is Los Angeles, birthplace of the voter initiative and home to periodic voter revolts. If the council doesn’t want to change how it operates, its members may find change imposed without their input.