Academic Group Recommends Expanding Los Angeles City Council to 25 Members

New Los Angeles City Council President Paul Krekorian (2nd L) presides as the council holds its first in-person meeting since he became president in the wake of a leaked audio recording in Los Angeles on Oct. 25, 2022. (Mario Tama/Getty Images)

The controversy over leaked tapes and racially disparaging remarks from city councilors that fueled outrage in Los Angeles last year has spurred a group of the city’s top academic scholars and researchers to reimagine their local government.

Eight months later, the Los Angeles Governance Reform Project, a group of university scholars, researchers, and leaders, is asking residents to consider three recommendations on how to reform the city’s governing structure.

In the group’s draft report published June 15, they make recommendations to expand the Los Angeles City Council to 25 members, and create an independent redistricting commission.

They hope to eventually let voters decide whether to adopt their vision on Election Day in November 2024.

“The moment is now for change,” said Ange-Marie Hancock, co-chair of the project and professor of gender studies and political science at the University of Southern California, during an online presentation Thursday. “The moment is now to really think about, how do we make the change that we need to make to the infrastructure of our government?”

City Hall in Los Angeles, Calif., on Jan 27, 2023. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)

Redistricting council representative seats is a hot-button issue for the city of nearly 4 million, but recently took on new urgency.

A political firestorm over the issue grew in October after the Los Angeles Times published a leaked audio that included City Council President Nury Martinez and councilmen Gil Cedillo and Kevin de León, along with Los Angeles County Federation of Labor President Ron Herrera.

The recording centered on the city’s redistricting process to redraw council seats, but was laced with racial slurs about another councilman’s white son and other disparaging comments about other officials and the city’s black and brown communities.

After the audio became public, angry protestors joined California officials and political candidates to condemn the comments and call for the councilors to resign. Martinez quit within days but Cedillo stayed on until his term ended last year. De León remains on the council.

The City Council has wrestled with the creation of an independent redistricting commission over the past few years.

Under the current system, the 15-member council has the final say over district maps. Elected officials can also appoint their own members to the redistricting panel. The state and county already have independent redistricting.

Los Angeles City Council President Paul Krekorian has pushed for an independent commission in the past but the matter was dismissed by some other council members. He said he thinks it’s time for change.

“We’re at a turning point in the history of this city,” Krekorian told The Epoch Times in a statement. “In the wake of recent violations of the public’s trust and failures to meet the standards of integrity the people deserve of their elected officials, we can no longer accept business as usual.

“The people of Los Angeles are calling out for fundamental reform, and we intend to deliver it.”

New L.A. City Council President Paul Krekorian presides as the council holds its first in-person meeting since he became president in the wake of a leaked audio recording in Los Angeles on Oct. 25, 2022. (Mario Tama/Getty Images)

Recommendations

The reform project has placed three recommendations on the table and plans to present them to community groups over the next several months.

“The idea here was to try and find a way to address not just the very public, and very awkward, and very embarrassing events of last fall ... but also to deal with the underlying issues,” said Gary Segura, project co-chair and professor at the University of California–Los Angeles’s Luskin School of Public Affairs.

First, the group suggests creating two redistricting commissions—one for the City Council and a separate process for electing Los Angeles Unified School District board members. Each commission would have 17 members, comprised of residents who can represent the city’s diverse communities, according to the project.

The commissioners would serve for the 10-year redistricting process and would be adults over the age of 18 who are residents of the city at the time of service and for the prior three years. They would not have to be legal citizens but could not be office holders, former political candidates, city employees, political appointees, lobbyists, campaign staffers, or married or related to officials, the group decided.

“Our research found that commission memberships are increasingly open to non-citizens and there are no apparent legal obstacles to doing so,” the group wrote in the report.

San Francisco, Costa Mesa, Santa Ana, and the state also allow noncitizens to serve on commissions, the group added.

Resizing the City Council

City Council districts would shrink as part of the project’s goals, but the number of council members would grow from 15 to 25. Each council member today represents about 260,000 people in their districts.

The group recommends growing the council to 21 districts and four at-large council members elected to represent the entire city.

Smaller council districts could decrease the cost of local election campaigns in some cases and provide more opportunities for new types of candidates to run or win. The at-large seats could add more citywide perspectives to council, according to the project members.

Los Angeles voters have considered expanding the council three times—in 1970, 1985, and 1999—but rejected the idea each time, according to the group.

A person walks past signs posted outside City Hall calling for the resignations of city councilors in the wake of a leaked audio recording in Los Angeles on Oct. 18, 2022. (Mario Tama/Getty Images)

Ethics Reform

Lastly, the project group recommends ethics reforms. The changes would allow the city’s Ethics Commission to approve the City Council’s ethics legislation and have the authority to place legislation directly on a meeting agenda.

Between June and September, the project group intends to gather community and stakeholder input by holding focus groups and creating a public opinion survey to improve the package of governance reforms to be placed on the November 2024 ballot.

“I think we did a deep, deliberative process,” said project participant Boris Ricks, a project also an associate professor of political science at California State University, Northridge. “We brought forth some recommendations that could really be beneficial. This would be historic for the city of Los Angeles.”

While the city’s attempts at reforms in the past haven’t been successful, things are different now, Ricks added.

“I think the time is right. The climate is right,” he said. “We want to ensure the residents of Los Angeles are represented and their needs are being met.”