This story was originally published in L.A. Reported
“It’s because L.A. is a weak-mayor city,” I heard someone say.
I was struggling with a dysfunctional parking meter in a city-owned lot, and complaining about it perhaps a little too loudly. I looked up to see a woman at an adjacent meter locked in a similar battle. When she saw that her remark had gotten my attention she continued the lesson.
“No one has any power to fix anything here,” she explained. “Not like in Chicago, where I’m from.”
She was expressing a core tenet of many residents’ shared belief about Los Angeles: We have a weak-mayor form of government.
But is that really true? Or do we just have a penchant for electing weak mayors?
Continue reading in the July 6 edition of L.A. Reported.