CommentsGELFAND’S WORLD—(This is part of a year-long effort by CityWatch to help inform and support city government reform.) In a previous article, I laid out the basics for creating substantive reform in the city government. The strategy is to make use of a ballot initiative process that we already have.
Today, I will talk about the desirability of cutting the salaries of City Council members. This is not only meritorious in and of itself, it is necessary in order to effect additional reforms.
First off, Los Angeles City Council members are paid way too much. The current base pay is $185,904 per year. It's nearly twice what members of the state legislature make and just a few dollars short of what the governor makes.
Equally to the point, it is nearly five times what the average Joe takes down in Los Angeles. A few years ago, the Los Angeles Times published a strong editorial pointing out the absurdity of our City Council's pay scale. Not the least of their arguments was this gulf between the incomes of working people and our electeds. We have a City Council system of little princes and princesses who can serve out their twelve years and retire on a generous pension. They begin to forget what it means to struggle for a living.
The first try: the Half-Off plan
A few years ago, city activists came up with an idea that was beautiful in its simplicity. To understand the half-off plan, you need to read one sentence from the City Charter:
Charter section 218 states: "(1) Salaries. Members of the City Council shall be paid a salary equal to that prescribed by law for judges of the Municipal Court of the Los Angeles Judicial District or its successor in the event that court is dissolved or reconstituted."
The genius of the half-off plan was that it consisted merely in adding the words "one-half" to the correct location in that sentence. The modified section would read:
"(1) Salaries. Members of the City Council shall be paid a salary equal to one-half that prescribed by law for judges of the Municipal Court of the Los Angeles Judicial District or its successor in the event that court is dissolved or reconstituted."
People loved the half-off idea. The typical response was, "Where do I sign?" If this proposal had gone on the ballot, it probably would have won easily.
The problem with Half-Off was that it would require an amendment to the City Charter. As I mentioned in the previous column, this requires 305,000 verified signatures. What it means in practice is that the organizers would probably want to collect something like 450,000 signatures.
Faced with the magnitude of the task, the half-off organizers found easier goals to pursue.
In isolation, the half-off concept is fairly difficult. But if we imagine it as part of a more ambitious, comprehensive plan to reform a number of problems all at once, then it becomes a crucial link that makes other reforms possible.
The only real problem with the half-off proposal is that it needs to be made more ambitious.
A comprehensive package of reform measures would go way beyond cutting City Council salaries. For example, we are going to need more elected representatives. That's a subject for another article, but here is the quick summary: In the current system, each council district is a fiefdom with a very large population which is ruled over by one council member. There is very little oversight of what any City Council representative does, since the culture of the City Council is that the representatives don't interfere with each other's decisions on strictly local matters.
We are left to deal with the eccentricities and knowledge deficits of our own council representatives. When they want to act like dictators, they usually get away with it. Fixing this problem of petty dictatorships (and it is a problem) will require that we expand the number of council representatives.
Voters don't usually like to create more elected offices because it means an increase in salaries and therefore in their tax bills. The strategy is to cut City Council salaries. We can add elected representatives but keep the total salary expenditure unchanged.
One Possible Remedy: Delete that sentence from the City Charter
The current Charter language links City Council salaries to that of state judges. It makes sense to delink the City Council salaries from the judges and define a more rational system that will encourage local citizen representation at the council level. If you look at smaller local cities such as Lakewood or Beverly Hills, you will find that they pay their City Council representatives little or nothing. Los Angeles might want to maintain a salary system for the part time borough representatives who would replace City Council reps, but we might be talking twenty-five or thirty thousand dollars a year for part time work. We would be represented by locals who live and work in our own neighborhoods or are recently retired.
Yes, we will have to find replacement language for that sentence in Charter section 218. It shouldn't be that hard.
On the other hand, if we cannot agree on a new system, the alternative is to keep the original linkage but insert a modifier such as one-fifth or perhaps one-sixth. Instead of half-off, we will have five-sixths off. It's not as catchy a slogan, but it fits better with comprehensive reform.
What if we don't do any of this?
The curious result of our City Council salary structure and the city's generous pension plan is that members of the state legislature see the City Council as the place to go for their last ten or twelve years of income before they retire. More and more, the city is being ruled by career politicians whose previous service has been in Sacramento rather than in your neighborhood.
Our council districts are also too big. It's not surprising that the people of Los Angeles feel distanced from their city government. How can we expect a City Council representative to know very many of his constituents, considering that there are about 266,000 in each council district? It would be like Wyoming having a state legislature with only three elected representatives, one for each quarter of a million people.
Addendum: In response to the previous column, there was a reader comment mentioning the concept of reducing City Council salaries. I don't know if you were part of the original "half off" group, but perhaps you heard about it at the time. I wrote about it back then, but the organizers were unable to move it forward at that time.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
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