LA’s Council Voted No on Oversight, Yes on a Lighter Schedule

The Charter Reform Commission, a citizen body appointed to study how city government should change, spent a year on the question. It held dozens of meetings and handed the Los Angeles City Council a stack of proposals meant to make city government more accountable to the four million people it governs. Because the commission’s recommendations are advisory, the council still had to vote each one onto the ballot. On the final day to qualify anything for the November 3 election, the council finished sorting that stack into two piles: the reforms that would have loosened its own grip, and the reforms that would not.

So what survived the cut?

Not the police oversight measure. The council voted 8-6 to send it back to committee, officially “for further study,” after the Los Angeles Police Protective League, the union representing rank-and-file officers, threatened to sue over meet-and-confer. Two weeks earlier, the same council had voted to send the measure toward the ballot. Faced with a union lawyer’s letter, it reversed course rather than let voters decide whether elected officials should have more say over LAPD policy.

The stated goal is to bring the measure back in 2028 — a fine distinction from “dead,” except that 2028 is also conveniently two election cycles away. The body that spends the most political energy invoking police accountability could not withstand a threat from the police union long enough to put the question to the public even once.

Not the expansion from 15 seats to 25. The council has been frozen at 15 members since 1925, when the city held fewer than 600,000 people. Today each member answers to roughly 260,000 residents, and the commission had recommended the expansion on a 9-2 vote, arguing smaller districts would give Black, Asian American, and other communities a real shot at representation. The council’s answer: needs more study.

Not ranked choice voting, a system that would force incumbents to compete for second and third preferences instead of coasting. Recommended by the commission. Shelved.

Not noncitizen voting, which the council sent back to committee on a unanimous vote after championing it 10-5 just two weeks before. The measure would have opened city and school board elections to as many as 1.3 million noncitizen residents.

“It’s almost laughable,” said Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martínez, who had been the chief proponent of the noncitizen measure. “We have nothing to show for it. A yearslong process, and engaging the entire city, and we have nothing significant to show for it.”

But the council did not walk away empty-handed. It advanced a batch of measures to the November ballot: a two-year budget cycle, a new Public Works director, a parks funding increase, higher penalties for ethics violations.

None of these items shrinks a district, adds a competitor, hands a voter new power, or puts a check on the council itself. The reforms that would have redistributed power were shelved.

Yet there is the one change to the council’s own operating rules that sailed through. The council advanced a charter amendment rewriting Charter Section 242 so members can “establish its meeting frequency” themselves. The amendment deletes the rule requiring the full council to meet at least three days a week. The floor could drop to a single meeting. The base salary stays at $244,727.

A coalition of good-government groups saw it immediately. The California Clean Money Campaign, Common Cause, Fair Rep LA, the League of Women Voters, and Unrig LA sent City Hall a letter calling the deletion of Section 242(a) a “poison pill” that strips away one of the only hard guarantees of regular public meetings, and asked the council to strengthen public access, not loosen it. The council moved the amendment toward the November ballot anyway, on a 12-0 vote.

When the menu included reforms that would have diluted incumbent power, more seats, an oversight check, a voting system that makes members earn their keep, a bigger electorate, the answer was always the same: needs more study, sometime in 2028, maybe. When the item on the table reduced the council’s own workload while protecting its own pay, it needed no further study at all. It was ready for the printer. An institution reveals its priorities not in what it says during a yearlong “listening” process but in which single proposal it is willing to move on deadline day.

Public comment is not a courtesy. In a city of four million governed by fifteen people, showing up to a public meeting is one of the few moments a resident gets to put a face and a grievance in front of the people making the decisions. Fewer required meeting days means fewer of those moments. The people who lose that access are not the lobbyists with a standing calendar invite or the union counsel who can get a measure yanked with a letter. They are the residents who take a morning off work to be heard once, and now may find the doors open less often.

There is also a trap in how this reaches the ballot. The city attorney is bundling the charter changes into grouped measures, and a meeting-frequency rollback tucked inside a larger “modernization” package is easy to approve without noticing. Read the grouping before you fill in a bubble. Modernization that happens to make elected officials less available to the public is not modernization. It is distance, dressed up as efficiency.

The council already told Los Angeles what it values. Handed a year of work and a mandate to make itself more accountable, it shelved every reform that would have done so and kept the one that makes its own job easier.