They don't know at city hall
A few days ago, I offered a lament for the state of governance in Los Angeles.I said, reflecting on the 11 years since the adoption of a reform city charter, that the creation of area planning commissions and neighborhood councils and the charter's redistribution of power among the mayor, the once independent department heads, and council members should have driven the transformation of civic life in Los Angeles. That hasn't happened.
And I'm not alone in thinking that Los Angeles is fatally stalled in a half-finished revolution. Ron Kaye (at ronkayela.com) has made the formation of a more democratic civic culture one theme of his detailed criticism of day-to-day Los Angeles politics. And Ken Draper at CityWatchLA (at citywatchla.com) also has reflected on the state of governance in Los Angeles.
A blogger who writes as PlebisPower commented with his own assessment:
Charter reform showed that among voters in the City of Los Angeles, there was decisive support for a new way of governing. The Charter gave the Mayor authority to appoint general managers, and accordingly located accountability for services in the executive. New area planning commissions located some land use decision-making closer to the neighborhoods that would be affected, and created a system of neighborhood councils to advise decision- and policy-makers at all levels according to local needs and preferences. The Charter offered a blueprint for a new mode of governance and even a structure for grassroots influence. But it has not worked out that way. Many volunteer stakeholders are hard at work in evening and Saturday meetings trying to realize the promise of Charter reform. (T)he promise breaks down in City Hall. In our USC research into the attitudes of local neighborhood leaders and the responsiveness of city officials to them, we found that elected board members in our survey (in 2006) largely gave the Mayor a pass; they were not very trusting of City Council and other officials to allow the grassroots a voice in municipal governance. Their skepticism was warranted: department management was not at all likely to look to neighborhood advisory councils for guidance - though that was their very function under the new Charter. Ten years after charter reform, and more than a generation after neighborhood-level governance captured the imagination of stakeholders nationally, the picture of neighborhood governance in Los Angeles is decidedly mixed. The recent personnel shuffle in LA City Hall does not signal renewed confidence either. We have a relatively weak mayoral system by design. But that does not mean that the Mayor cannot lead. As Waldie says, it is up to the Mayor to create a renewed civic partnership in governance. "Partnership" was the term employed by the Plan for Neighborhood Councils, but consistently we have seen under this Mayor that the conditions for such a partnership have been undermined in the political jockeying in City Hall.
I agree.
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