These days it seems that most Angelenos don’t like how their city works. You stumble on this perception in the least likely places. When interviewed recently on the future of Los Angeles, for instance, some Chicano-studies academics said they saw the city splitting, others saw it staying together. Some said they saw one Latino politician as becoming our next mayor, some saw another as governor. But they all agreed on just one thing: Right now, the city doesn’t function well.
Now, is this a surprise? When did you last hear someone brag about how fast he got his building permit? Or zoning appeal? Or about how clean her street was? The processes may still work, on the whole, much the same way they did in the years of Sam Yorty. But more people feel they deserve more from the city than they’re receiving. This millennial discontent translates into a consensus that things just ought to be better.
So who, you ask yourself, believes the contrary? Who really loves Things as They Are, here in the City of Angels? Probably, not you. Me neither. But if the champions of the status quo aren’t numerous, they’re vocal. They consist largely of those who share responsibility for the way the city now works. Including some union leaders and . . . guess what? The majority of the Los Angeles City Council.
That’s the ostensible reason why members of this faction now oppose the new city charter, whose creation they were promoting for the past two years. That was then. Now that the bets are all finally down and a new charter is set for the ballot two weeks hence, the All-Star Urban Inside Baseball League is getting icy feet about it.
It’s one thing to promote charter reform — that’s one big PSA, like Easter Seals Week. But it’s another to have to endure real changes in governance. Hey, that switches the way we do things. We’ll have to learn new rules and routines, and can’t get away with a lot of stuff. You’re asking way too much, charter commissioners!
Some of the brighter council opponents of the new charter argue that, left to their own devices, the council would find the time to do it all themselves. Trust them: Given just a few years, of their own free will, the very same people (or their successors) who oppose the charter now would painlessly implement, decade upon decade, ballot initiative by ballot initiative, every worthy reform this charter wants to force, all at a gulp, down their unwilling gullets.
What balderdash! Just look at the 14 years over which the council’s dragged its feet on a simple street-vending ordinance. Or the six years it took the council to reform the city’s wasteful procurement! The list of hung-fire legislation is endless. No, the council does nothing it isn’t forced to do. Hell could freeze over and the Devils could retire the Stanley Cup before our 15 downtown surrogates might pass the 140 pages of measures in the new charter.
Face it. Most of the council members — who originally approved the creation of one of the two charter commissions and the financing of the other — have turned their coats against the process they and the voters supported. These members are now enemies of reform. As are their toady-turncoat union allies — SEIU Local 347 and the Police Protective League — both of whom, not long ago, helped compile the new charter. Now, the County Federation of Labor has joined their ranks. Let no one accuse labor of favoring a progressive agenda! Perhaps you were wondering why union membership has dropped to about 15 percent of the work force over the past decade?
The charter wonks are raging because, during the process, city unions got more input into how the document looks than just about anyone outside City Hall management. Now it looks as if, rather than continue their good-government posturing, the unions’ leadership is willing to sell out two years of hard brainstorming for a chance to ingratiate themselves with the charter’s power-hoarding council critics, and thereby pluck some future contract favors. In other words, they turned their backs on the city’s future for the sake of a batch of termed-out timeservers.
When it comes down to it, what these elements have in common is that they like the way the city runs now because, dammit, it works fine for them. Whether it works for the rest of us is, of course, another thing altogether.
So if you haven’t figured out yet whether to vote for the charter on June 8, you should ask yourself just one thing: Do you really like the way the city runs and think it cannot be improved? If so, vote against the charter. Otherwise, your course is clear.
The Mickey Mouse Man
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Remember this, Ed Roski and Eli Broad: He’s Michael Ovitz and you’re not. Now, you two local real estate tycoons may be able to buy and sell him 30 times over. But Ovitz is the guy who’s slick enough to cut out your heart without unbuttoning your shirt.
