Turning L.A.’s charter reform into a page-turner

LOS ANGELES owes much to Raphael J. Sonenshein, a pioneering scholar of this city whose serious study has spurred interest in its dense, subtle politics and government. More important, Sonenshein is that rare being -- the civically engaged intellectual. He is honestly dispassionate yet utterly committed.

The Cal State Fullerton professor’s book “The City at Stake: Secession, Reform, and the Battle for Los Angeles,” now reissued in paperback and updated with a new afterword, chronicles with precision the events of the mid- to late-1990s, as Los Angeles debated its future in the context of a complicated overhauling of its city charter. And Sonenshein writes not just as an observer but also as a participant: He served as executive director of one of two charter commissions that led that ambitious and difficult reform effort.

It should be noted at the outset that charter reform as it played out in Los Angeles politics in the 1990s was a long and political process. Progress was often obscure or incremental. The scenes were set in offices and government buildings -- all too often late at night in such glamour spots as the Department of Water and Power conference room. It was important work, which I covered for The Times, but it was hardly white-knuckle entertainment.

Sonenshein has energized that potentially bland narrative with meticulous research and observation, qualities vividly displayed in his landmark 1993 work, “Politics in Black and White.” And he has interwoven three sometimes contradictory animating impulses that gave rise to charter reform and structured its eventual result: the fear of secession by the San Fernando Valley, the desire for a stronger and more efficient mayor and the quest to broaden and deepen citizen participation in government.

Two of those three -- the power of the mayor and the role of citizen participation -- reflected aging artifacts of the city’s Progressive-era charter, written in 1925 at a time when leaders were fearful of consolidating too much power on the one hand and yet nervous about reserving too much for the people. The result was a government run largely by commissions and the City Council. That appealed to the Progressives, who wanted to curb corruption without giving away the store to populists.

To some, those ideas seemed painfully old-fashioned as the end of century approached, but the desire to revisit them came from distinctly different quarters. Mayor Richard J. Riordan wanted stronger institutional authority for the mayor, while liberals and community activists became enchanted with expanding citizen participation and lighted upon neighborhood councils as one vehicle. Both groups, for the most part, also saw charter reform as a useful tool for demonstrating the city’s responsiveness and thus an answer to the long-simmering threat of a San Fernando Valley secession.

Then USC professor Erwin Chemerinsky and Westside lawyer George Kieffer took command of the two commissions -- one created with Riordan’s support, the other a creature of the City Council -- and commenced an elaborate, skillful effort to write a proposed charter and then to bring their commissions’ efforts together in a single ballot measure. Each worked in his own way: Kieffer with deep knowledge of City Hall as well as extraordinary patience and political acumen; Chemerinsky with dazzling intellect and ability -- his “energy and writing speed seemed limitless,” Sonenshein writes.

Those efforts were too complicated and detailed to recount here, but they ended in success, at least on the terms of the charter commissions. In 1999, voters approved the charter despite the opposition of some council members. Three years later, Valley secession barely passed in the Valley itself and was resoundingly defeated by the rest of the city.

I concur with almost all of Sonenshein’s observations about the reform process and its principals, but I do have a slightly different take on its central actor, Riordan. Like many people who brushed up against him during his eight years as Los Angeles’ mayor, Sonenshein seems not quite sure what to make of him. Riordan is alternately described in the book as a conservative stalking for more mayoral power and as the energizing force of charter reform. He was, as Sonenshein observes, a bit of both.

But too much can be made of Riordan’s politics. Riordan, a Republican, came to office in a wave of public revulsion at the city’s political leadership, which was associated with riots and recession -- a political class that was largely Democratic and liberal. Riordan identified with the anti-government sentiments of that period, but he was not fundamentally a philosophical politician. He is best regarded as a non-ideological occupant of a nonpartisan office -- conservative politically, to be sure, but more important, wily and shrewd, a tough negotiator who fought for every comma in the charter talks, not so much out of ideological purpose as to strengthen his office and fulfill his vision of how best Los Angeles might be managed.

“The City at Stake” was released in 2004. In the new edition, Sonenshein takes stock of Los Angeles’ latest political phenom, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, whose rise to power recalls that of Mayor Tom Bradley and whose 21st century political melding of blacks, Latinos and liberal whites, especially Jews, represents yet another wrinkle in the city’s evolving coalition politics. Villaraigosa, Sonenshein observes, has the potential of “bringing groups to the table and of pursuing ethnic recognition without polarization.”

Whether he does is Villaraigosa’s great challenge -- and, with luck, Sonenshein’s next book.

Time has not dimmed Sonenshein’s enthusiasm for the project he influenced and whose history he then wrote. We exchanged messages not long ago as both of us were ruminating on Los Angeles’ charter reform contest. Sonenshein’s remark in that exchange sums him up: “I loved every second of it.” It shows in his book, and we should all be thankful for it.

Jim Newton is The Times’ city-county bureau chief.