CHARTER REFORM

It’s easy to see in last Tuesday’s elections a dramatic triumph for Mayor Richard Riordan. In leading the movements to reform both the L.A. school board and the City Charter, he now stands alongside George Alexander and Tom Bradley as one of the three most effective and expressive mayors of Los Angeles in the 20th century. Alexander (1909-1913) ushered Los Angeles into the progressive era and presided over a symphony of public works. Bradley (1973-1993) facilitated the multiculturalism of Los Angeles and presided over the city’s rise to world-city status. Now Riordan has led the effort to launch the City of Angels into the new millennium better equipped, as a matter of charter and attitude, to deal with the possibilities and complexities ahead.

Riordan had plenty of help--the two charter-reform commissions, most notably--in refounding the city, and that is precisely what charter reform has done: refound Los Angeles for the 21st century. This was not the result of drastic innovations but of a series of subtle, nonetheless crucial, adjustments in local governance, such as strengthening the executive authority of the mayor and requiring regular audits of city finances. Most important, the new charter will institute a citywide network of neighborhood councils, which, if properly managed, will do much to alleviate the public’s frustration over the unresponsiveness of L.A.’s mega-government.

The City Council lost as dramatically and vividly as Riordan won. None of the arguments it advanced against charter reform carried the day. As Councilman Joel Wachs, a supporter of the new charter, said, it boggled the mind that the council was actually arguing that by making the mayor a teensy-weensy bit more powerful, hoses might be plucked from the hands of our firemen.

Still, how else does one expect the boyars on the City Council to act? They have been locked, mano a mano, in a death dance of plots and counterplots with the mayor for the better part of six years, and the voters probably like it that way. Their struggle represents, after all, a balance of power between reform that can become Savonarola-like, which is to say, self-righteous and dictatorial, and the earthy, flesh-and-blood ambitions of politicians that can become Nero-like, which is to say, catastrophically self-regarding.

The council, in short, lost, but it won by losing. Individually and collectively, it remains a forum in which our frankest appetites and darkest desires and most delightful revelations of psyche can surface alongside our struggle to create the city on a hill and be our best possible selves. Hooray for each impulse, the one correcting and anchoring the other. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza need each other.

But the overarching question remains: Have the forces of secessionism, which inspired and impelled the drive to overhaul the city’s charter in the first place, been routed? Does charter reform’s overwhelming victory citywide--and especially in a Valley district, the 7th--represent the beginning of the end for secessionism, or only the end of its beginning?

Valley VOTE (Voters Organized Toward Empowerment), for one thing, has secured sufficient signatures to have the issue of secession studied by the Local Agency Formation Commission. The state of California, despite some opposition in the state Senate, will likely pick up most of the tab for the study. True, Riordan is demanding that he and his staff review the study’s findings before they go to the commission, while Valley VOTE is demanding that it be able to meet with the panel for off-the-record sessions. Neither of these demands will survive intact, though the mayor’s has the best chance; nor is state financial support for the study a slam dunk. Yet, despite these obstacles, the secession movement is moving toward its next plateau.

Will the new charter’s authorization of neighborhood councils slow its momentum? Yes, among everyday voters, but not for the Valley VOTE elite. Theirs, after all, is an abstract obsession, Robespierre-like in intensity, which is to say, ruthless: the dismantlement of the second-largest city in the United States, even after that city has reformed its charter to make municipal government more responsive and bring it closer to the neighborhoods through decentralizing planning. The Valley VOTE leadership consists, in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s phrase, of men with knives in their brains: willing to dismiss the 219-year existence of Los Angeles, its heritage and moral significance, as so much romantic poppycock.

The passion for deconstruction that Valley VOTE is unleashing, moreover, has had a domino effect. No fewer than 17,000 signatures have been gathered in San Pedro and Wilmington to promote a similar secession study; and we are asked to contemplate the prospect of a city of 140,000 having substantial control over one half--the Los Angeles half--of the largest deep-water port in the nation, a port built over time by the very city that harbor-area secessionists wish to disestablish.

Will neighborhood councils head off such madness by satisfying the need for local autonomy? Will the presence of a stronger mayor blunt secession by enabling the executive to manage neighborhood needs swiftly and directly and acting on his or her own authority? Or will the opposite be true? Will neighborhood councils, like kerosene thrown on flames, further fan the desire to localize?

As of now, the tea leaves suggest, however obscurely, that neighborhood councils, especially in conjunction with the decentralization of the planning department, will frustrate the secession movement by enhancing localism.

A single force, the Latino vote, together with the increasing availability of first-rate Latino political candidates, offers further hope that the City of Angels will prevail undeconstructed into the millennium. Take Alex Padilla, the 7th District’s new councilman. He holds an engineering degree from MIT. He is 26 years old and still lives with his parents in Pacoima. Despite his youth (or was it because of his youth?), Padilla lined up such heavyweight support as Riordan, Rep. Howard Berman (D-Mission Hills), Assemblyman Tony Cardenas (D-Sylmar) and Councilmen Richard Alatorre and Joel Wachs. He also enjoyed solid union support. Most important, he enjoyed the support of young and voting Latinos.

Valley VOTE so often seems to be made up of a bunch of angry white guys: middle-aged white guys, to be exact, baffled in their ambitions, looking for a jump start into the political career that has so long evaded them, looking for political spoils amid the ruins of L.A. The first thing he would do when elected, Padilla told a reporter, would be to fix a traffic light near the elementary school he attended as a child. What more could we ask as we study, as we now must, the proposed deconstruction of Los Angeles? Like Padilla, we can keep an open mind on the question while getting down to the business of fixing traffic lights.

Has Valley VOTE ever fixed a traffic light? I wonder. Los Angeles, meaning the entire city, can thank its lucky stars that a new generation of Latino elected officials is entering center stage. One suspects that it is not the leading item on their agenda to deconstruct the city. Why should they assent to the breakup of Los Angeles just as they are coming into political possession of a city that has, for more than 150 years, spoken English with a Spanish accent?