The Brief

Large-scale changes are rare for L.A.’s local government. But now there’s more momentum than there has been in decades for three major reforms to how L.A. is governed.

The proposals are the result of calls for reform after a secret recording was released last year that captured three city councilmembers and a labor official using racist, homophobic and other derogatory language while discussing ways to amass power in the city’s redistricting process.

The proposed reforms would all require a revision to the City Charter, which means voters ultimately have to approve them. But before then, the details and exact proposed language for changes to the Charter have to go through the city council.

First, the council’s Ad Hoc Committee on Governance Reform has to approve a set of recommended changes to the language of the City Charter. Those recommendations are scheduled to be released on Monday, Sept. 18.

Here’s what to know about what’s on the table, what councilmembers have said so far, and what else needs to happen before any of these appear on voters’ ballots.

Creating independent redistricting commissions

This is the map of Los Angeles city council districts that the last redistricting effort started with. It was set in 2011.

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Screenshot Los Angeles City Council Redistricting Commission

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And this was the draft plan advanced for public feedback by the most recent Los Angeles City Council Redistricting Commission.

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Screenshot Los Angeles City Council Redistricting Commission draft map

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This proposal would create two commissions — one for the city of L.A. and one for the L.A. Unified School District — that would be completely in charge of the redistricting process, without the need for city council approval over their decisions.

The backstory: : Every 10 years, after the U.S. Census counts up all the people who live in your community, the process of redistricting begins. That’s when officials get together and redraw maps that make up our districts at the city, county, state and federal levels. This is often a politically thorny process, since the demographics and assets of any given district — whether it’s made up of renters or homeowners, or it has an airport or a major stadium — determine how much power that district and its representative have relative to others, and how voting power is distributed across different groups.

In L.A., the city council has ultimate authority to approve the final redistricting maps for both the city council and the L.A. Unified School District. A redistricting commission advises them during the process, collecting input from community members and proposing draft maps, but the city council has to vote on the final decision.

An independent redistricting commission would change this dynamic. It would have sole authority to redraw and approve the maps, so that councilmembers can’t exert the kind of influence they currently have over the process.

Independent redistricting commissions are already in place at the state level, for redrawing Congressional and state legislature districts, and in L.A. County for supervisorial districts. Cities like Long Beach also use independent redistricting commissions. Other places like Orange County and San Bernardino County require the board of supervisors to approve county redistricting maps.

Why we’re discussing this: The leaked City Hall tapes revealed that three councilmembers and the former president of the L.A. Labor Federation were discussing ways to arrange the redistricting maps to benefit their districts at the expense of others — namely, districts with predominantly Black residents, as well as renters. Outrage over the leaked comments damaged trust in the redistricting process and strengthened the push for independent redistricting.

What details need to be worked out: Major questions on the table include how redistricting commissioners would be chosen (currently, they’re appointed by councilmembers, the mayor, city attorney and city controller), and what the qualification requirements would be.

There are also questions about how the commission should be allowed to communicate with the public during the redistricting process. Should councilmembers get extra speaking time during public comment at redistricting meetings? Should commissioners be allowed to receive public input on redistricting via social media, or should that be restricted to public meetings only?

A state legislator has also introduced a bill that would require all California cities with a population of over 2.5 million (that includes L.A.) to have an independent redistricting commission. If the L.A. City Council or voters don’t wind up passing an independent redistricting measure, and if the state bill ends up getting approved, L.A. could still get an independent redistricting commission — but under whatever the state law requires.

What councilmembers have said about this so far: In a November 2022 L.A. Times survey, all the current councilmembers (some of whom were candidates when they answered the survey) supported creating independent redistricting commissions.

Expanding the City Council

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Albert Lao / Courtesy City of LA

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L.A.’s extremely powerful legislature has 15 members, each representing a city district. Expanding the council would mean redrawing our district maps to create even more districts, and then adding councilmembers to represent them.

Los Angeles has long been an outlier in the size of its city council, with 15 councilmembers representing nearly 4 million residents. Each L.A. city councilmember represents about 260,000 people on average — more than any other city lawmaker in the country.

By comparison, New York City has 51 councilmembers for 8 million residents, or about 140,000 per councilmember, and Chicago has 50 alderpersons for 2 million residents — roughly one lawmaker for every 40,000 residents. The size of L.A.’s City Council has remained the same for the past 100 years, even as its population has grown sevenfold.

Having few representatives and many residents means more power for each council member. It only takes a handful of members to band together to pass or block legislation that affects millions of people, whereas a larger council would need more coalition-building and consensus. Angelenos are also much more underrepresented in L.A. than other cities — the average resident generally has to work harder to get their councilmember’s attention on a particular issue.

There have been several ballot measures to expand the size of the City Council — in 1970, 1985 and 1999 — but voters rejected them each time. A common argument was that expanding the council would mean more city officials to pay and a less efficient government. Others said expansion could potentially dilute Black and Latino representation on the Council.

However, a poll released in August by research firm FM3 found that a majority of Angelenos support expanding the council, with 62% of respondents supporting expansion to 23 members and 55% supporting expansion to 29 members.

Why we’re discussing this: Council expansion has come up repeatedly in reform discussions over the past few decades, but this latest push comes on the heels of a slate of corruption scandals involving L.A. City Councilmembers in the past few years. They involved pay-to-play schemes, bribery and conspiracy, obstruction of FBI investigations and more — and that’s on top of the City Hall leaked tapes.

Many people have argued that the concentration of power in the city council contributes to this kind of corruption — more power means more incentives for business interests or developers to court council members with cash or favors in exchange for something that benefits them. Larger districts also mean that people running for a council seat have to spend more money to campaign, which can incentivize corruption, too.

What details need to be worked out: How many members should an expanded city council have? And should all members be in charge of their own districts, or should some of them be “at-large” seats, meaning they represent the city as a whole? Every new seat that gets added to the city council will also need to have additional staffing and support — where would that money come from?

If L.A. expands its number of districts, it’ll also need to figure out how to hold elections for those new council members. Common Cause, one of the organizations advising the Ad Hoc Committee on Governance Reform, suggested shifting council elections so that all seats would be up for election at the same time (instead of staggered every two years) beginning in 2032.

What councilmembers have said about this so far: Opinions within the city council are much more divided on expansion than for independent redistricting. In the L.A. Times’ November 2022 survey, 10 current councilmembers (some of whom were candidates when responding to the survey) expressed support for expansion, although one, Hugo Soto-Martinez (District 13), has expressed concerns.

At a meeting of the Central Hollywood Neighborhood Council in August 2023, Soto-Martinez said expansion would slow council business, increase dysfunction, and weaken councilmembers’ influence with city departments. He said adding more councilmembers would make them more accountable to their constituents, but that would be diluted, he said, by the fact that “most people don’t vote.” Expansion would lead to “more accountability, maybe more democracy,” he said, “but it will come at the expense of a much slower city and a more dysfunctional city council.” However, Soto-Martinez’s office clarified to LAist that he still supports expansion.

Councilmember Traci Park (District 11) also opposed expansion in the survey, saying it would “cost more and create more bureaucracy and gridlock.”

Reforms for the Ethics Commission

Flag fly above an entrance to L.A.'s City Hall

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Konoplytska/Getty Images

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iStock Editorial

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These are reforms designed to make the five-member Ethics Commission more independent of the city council and to prevent corruption at City Hall. Advocates of these reforms say they are equally if not more important than creating an independent redistricting commission and expanding the council.

Voters created the Ethics Commission with the passage of Proposition H in 1990. The landmark measure gave the panel the authority to enforce city and state laws related to campaign financing, contracts, developers, governmental ethics and lobbying.

Unlike other city commissions, whose members are appointed by the mayor alone, the Ethics Commission is selected by the mayor, city attorney, city controller, city council president and council president pro tempore (one each).

The commission is proposing a series of changes to the City Charter that would require a citywide vote. Here are the main three:

• One would allow the commission to place on the ballot its own proposed changes — without going through the city council. Reform advocates say the council in the past has blocked serious ethics reforms and this would address that problem.
• Another would establish a budget for the commission that would not require council approval. There have been accusations in the past that councilmembers have threatened to cut the department’s budget if it didn’t relax rules on gifts to elected leaders. 
• A third would create an independent attorney for the commission instead of one provided by the city attorney’s office. Critics of the current system say it makes no sense for the commission to be receiving legal advice from an office overseen by the commission. 

In addition, the commission in 2022 issued a 66-page report recommending dozens of changes to the Municipal Lobbying Ordinance (MLO) that could be achieved by simple majority votes by the city council. Many are clarifications designed to close loopholes. One would require lobbyists to identify themselves and their clients when communicating in any way to neighborhood councils.

One of the most controversial is to change how lobbyists are defined. Currently, anybody who gets paid to spend 30 or more hours a quarter lobbying the city council, city commissions and city staff qualifies as a lobbyist. The proposed change would define a lobbyist as anyone who is paid $5,000 or more annually.

“The current time-based definition of ‘lobbyist’ poses a compliance and enforcement challenge, because tracking hours can be difficult and imprecise,” the commission stated in its report. “It can also be a challenge because a lobbyist can be paid a large sum of money to spend far less than 30 hours lobbying for a client.”

“In contrast to hours, dollars are an objective and verifiable measure of lobbying activity,” the report added.

Of the 10 largest cities in the U.S., L.A. is the only one that does not currently have a compensation-based registration threshold for lobbyists. New York’s is $5,000 a year. Six of the top 10 cities have $800 a year thresholds including Chicago, Phoenix and San Diego.

How lobbyists are defined is important because they are restricted from engaging in certain activities, including serving on city commissions, giving gifts to elected officials, and making political donations to elected officials and candidates.

Last year, developers and other people with interests at City Hall paid more than 600 lobbyists $73 million to engage in lobbying activities, according to the Ethics Commission.

Two other efforts to amend and update the lobbying ordinance, in 2008 and 2016, went nowhere. “There were no hearings, no votes, no reason given,” said Jeffrey Daar, the Ethics Commission president. “We’re now hopefully having it happen.”

Why we’re discussing this: The new push for ethics reform follows the release of the secretly recorded City Hall tapes. It also comes amid a series of criminal prosecutions of officials — including four members of the city council. They involved pay-to-play schemes, bribery and conspiracy, and obstruction of FBI investigations. The California Clean Money Campaign, California Common Cause, and the League of Women Voters of Greater Los Angeles are among the groups that support the reforms.

What details need to be worked out: The proposed charter changes would need to be approved by the council’s Ad Hoc Committee on City Governance Reform before heading to the full city council and then to voters. The committee has yet to hold hearings on the charter changes.

The committee also has yet to approve the Municipal Lobbying Ordinance changes. Council President Paul Krekorian has proposed an amendment that could weaken it. Krekorian proposed creating a special “nonprofit filer” exempting nonprofit 501(c)(3) like universities and charitable organizations from the restrictions. This would include not just small groups, but also powerful organizations like USC, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and AIDS Healthcare Foundation.

Perhaps more significantly, labor unions would also be exempt. Labor unions, developers, and business groups like the chamber of commerce are among the most powerful interests at City Hall.

Various neighborhood councils have weighed in against the exemption.

“It is colluding with these special interests that has brought unparalleled shame and corruption to the halls of City Government in Los Angeles and made us an international punchline to jokes about political corruption,” the Studio City Neighborhood Council wrote in its community impact statement. “It confounds us that the L.A. County Federation of Labor, literally caught on tape as a bad actor, would have the audacity to push for exemptions and that Councilmembers purporting to fight for transparency and the public good would entertain their requests.”

The city council recently rejected a nominee to the Ethics Commission, with at least one member citing her opposition to the labor exemption.

What councilmembers have said so far: City councilmembers have generally said they support ethics reforms, but have offered little about the proposed charter changes. Councilmember Nithya Raman, vice chair of the reform committee, has expressed support for the changes to the lobbying ordinance. “We’re giving the public more of a window into what happens at City Hall, about how decisions are made, about who is influencing those decisions,” Raman said. “They have a right to know. I feel like there is no clearer moment, no more urgent moment for us to take action than now.”

What happens next?

The Council’s Ad Hoc Committee on Governance Reform has to approve a set of recommended changes to the language of the City Charter. Those recommendations are scheduled to be released Sept. 18.

The committee will then pass it on to the full council, which will likely take it through a series of discussions and adjustments. Then they’ll vote to send those proposed changes to the ballot in the next election.

According to the Chief Legislative Analyst’s Office, the council must pass any Charter language changes by November 2023 in order for it to qualify for the March 2024 ballot.

Otherwise, they’ll have to pass it by June 2024 to qualify for the November 2024 ballot.

Voters will then make the final decision on whether to approve the changes to the charter.