A special Los Angeles City Council committee begins its review of the city’s constitution on Wednesday, three months after the full council all but killed the bulk of proposals offered by a Charter Reform Commission.
The commission conducted nine months of hearings and deliberations and filed its report in April. The council moved only a handful of mostly minor charter amendments to the Nov. 3 ballot.
The Ad Hoc Committee on Charter Review is headed by Councilmember Tim McOsker, an attorney with a long record of municipal legal work. He was briefly a member of one of two L.A. charter reform commissions in the 1990s and was chief of staff to L.A. City Attorney and then Mayor Jim Hahn.
One of McOsker’s first tasks will be to assure activists who backed a host of rejected proposals that he and his committee are serious about hearing their arguments and reconsidering the measures that did not make it to the ballot.
“I do plan to set a whole series of meetings with experts and all the folks that have shown interest in the last couple of years,” McOsker told me. “Everybody. And I would like to go through the entire document, but with particular attention to those areas that folks feel that we had an opportunity to amend or reform, and didn’t.”
Our conversation took place last month in San Pedro.
The committee includes council members Heather Hutt, Eunisses Hernandez, Katy Yaroslavsky and Nithya Raman, as well as McOsker.
Raman is running for mayor against incumbent Karen Bass. Raman has criticized Bass for alleged mismanagement and said Angelenos are demanding “a functional city.”
Bass, for her part, has argued that Los Angeles runs poorly because of structural problems, including the division of resources and responsibilities between the city and the county, rather than mismanagement.
I asked McOsker what problem he believes the charter reform process is meant to solve.
“The problem continues to be distrust in government,” he said. “The belief that we’re not open and public.”
Doesn’t the council’s killing of the commission’s package exacerbate that problem?
“The work that everyone did [in the commission] was disadvantaged by the process,” he said. “I want to go around the city. I want to get input from the folks who are totally and completely pissed off.”
McOsker said he expected 12 months of hearings and deliberations, followed by a package of charter reforms to go to the ballot in 2028.
The Los Angeles City Charter is the city’s constitution and can be amended only by a vote of the people. Voters adopted the current charter in 1999 after a three-year reform process that began when Mayor Richard Riordan drew on a state law permitting the election of an independent city board of freeholders to draft a charter. He funded much of the election out of his own pocket.
The City Council, alarmed at the move, beat Riordan to the punch by appointing a rival charter commission. The two panels held their hearings separately and often eyed each other with suspicion. City officials and reform advocates that testified in front of one commission had to repeat the exercise days or weeks later in front of the other.
It was a stark exhibit of the city’s political dysfunction.
But in the end the leaders of each panel sent a unified proposal to the voters, who adopted it. They rejected two companion reforms to expand the council, one to 21 members, another to 25 members.
The drive for charter reform began anew after the 2022 leak of secret recordings of racist conversations among three City Council members and a labor leader. They were discussing how to redraw district lines to favor their incumbencies and other political interests.
At the core of the conversations was the members’ power to issue marching orders to their appointees in a supposedly independent – but actually very non-independent – redistricting commission. That problem was resolved with a 2024 ballot measure to, at long last, assign redistricting to a truly independent body.
But the drive to partially rewrite the charter remained. The widely stated goal was to restore lost trust and confidence in city government.
The commission meetings began last year and were sometimes raucous affairs, including recriminations among several members over alleged racism and mistreatment of public speakers. But the panel, despite a late start due to late appointments, completed its task.
The most talked-about proposals included an expanded City Council of 25 members over the current 15, an appointed city attorney for civil advice and litigation, and a selection of voting changes: ranked-choice voting, voting rights for certain non-citizens and voting rights for 16- and 17-year-olds. The council ultimately held each of those measures off the ballot in favor of the ad hoc committee reexamination.
“If I have one leave-behind for something that is citywide, I would have picked the charter,” McOsker said. “And I find myself in a situation where, unfortunately, because the thing broke down in the end, I get the charter. I find this to be potentially the most important thing that I can do.”
The meeting is scheduled for Wednesday, Sept. 30 at 8:30 a.m. in the John Ferraro Council Chamber, Room 340, 200 N. Spring Street, Los Angeles. It will be live-streamed on YouTube.
For the record: Katy Yaroslavsky's first name was previously misspelled and has been corrected.