LA City Council Should Argue Over Real Issues

GUEST EDITORIAL-A silly spat between two Los Angeles City Council members raises a serious point about how LA’s lawmaking body conducts business to the detriment of the democratic process. 

Councilmen Bernard Parks and Curren Price are bickering over which man gets to sponsor the free Fourth of July fireworks show that annually draws tens of thousands of people to the Memorial Coliseum. 

Parks started the show in 2003, but the Coliseum has been in Price’s district since LA’s political boundaries were redrawn in 2012. 

The dispute has grown, with Parks charging that Price and the University of Southern California are trying to take away his show in retaliation for his opposition to USC’s takeover of Coliseum management. 

An LA resident’s first reaction might be: Haven’t City Council members got bigger things to argue publicly about? And the answer would be: Yes, they have, but they rarely seem to have those arguments publicly. Which is the real problem. 

The Parks-Price tiff is attention-getting in part because it’s such a rare case of council members actually hashing out a dispute in full earshot of the people they govern. 

Think about how frequently we see the City Council vote unanimously — or 14-1 or 13-2 — on important questions. Think about how rarely we see it vote 8-7, or anything resembling a contentious decision. 

Why is that? 

One reason is that the council is mostly liberal, even more than the city it represents. Only Mitch Englander is a registered Republican. Members often really are as like-minded as the vote tallies suggest. 

But there are other reasons. 

When members do disagree, they usually work out their differences before stepping in front of the gallery and the cameras in the council chamber. Council leaders encourage collegiality, but that can be taken too far if it means hiding disputes in executive session. 

This tendency to have the real debates behind closed doors seems to have only grown since the City Council began to be taken over by former state legislators. Seven of the 15, including council President Herb Wesson, previously served in Sacramento, where backroom wheeling and dealing is accepted practice. 

And one more factor: City Council culture gives huge power to each individual member over what goes on in his or her district. That spirit of collegiality, which sounds so nice on the surface, leads members to vote virtually automatically to support someone else’s local project if it doesn’t have citywide impact. 

This territorial impulse played into the Parks-Price flap. Their territories changed. 

Let’s have more public arguments. But about real issues. 

There will plenty of real issues after Mayor Eric Garcetti delivers his first State of the City speech Thursday and issues his first budget proposal. 

True, people want more compromise and cooperation from their elected officials than we see in Congress. But residents also want to see their representatives working, to hear the issues discussed, to be able to weigh in ourselves. 

There’s a balance to be found between collegiality and secrecy. Silly arguments shouldn’t be the only ones we hear about. 

If the City Council strikes that balance, it will warrant a celebration. With fireworks — and it won’t matter whose.

 

(This editorial expresses the views of the Los Angeles Daily News where it was first posted. More views and news at dailynews.com) 

-cw

 

 

 

CityWatch

Vol 12 Issue 30

Pub: Apr 11, 2014