CommentsGELFAND’S WORLD--The city of Los Angeles has created a strange appendage to its governmental system referred to as the commissions.
We have commissions that oversee the airport, the harbor, the Department of Recreation and Parks, and even such tiny operations as Cultural Affairs. There are a lot of them. Appointment to a commission is considered to be an honor, and it confers a certain amount of influence. For a few high-power commissions such as the Board of Harbor Commissioners, there are additional perks.
Although commission appointments are subject to ratification by the City Council, it is the mayor who gets to make the nominations. (I'm ignoring the Ethics Commission in this discussion, a ripe topic for another time.)
In considering the broader topic of city government reform, we have been thinking about ways to give neighborhood councils real power. Any such power that we create should have at least the following minimal qualifications:
Such power should address a real problem
Let's start with the fact that the commission system presents a real problem. As an example taken from personal experience, I would like to point to the Board of Neighborhood Commissioners, the body that oversees the city's neighborhood council system.
We have had commissioners who knew almost nothing about neighborhood councils (one allowed as how he had attended one council meeting prior to his appointment, although he couldn't tell me its name). We have had commissioners who were frankly authoritarian, and one commissioner who ended up in prison. The current gripe is that the Board has had trouble making quorum due to the failure of members to come to meetings.
But the main issue for me and a lot of other people is that the quality of BONC commissioners is variable and unpredictable. One recent appointment of a clearly unqualified candidate was obviously made as a favor to local unions. In general, appointments seem to come as favors handed out by members of the City Council and followed by the mayor, or favors from the mayor himself.
The result of these BONC appointments has been a system which is as much a threat to the neighborhood council system as a support mechanism. What's missing is some advance assurance that appointees will be dedicated to the good of the system.
I bring up the BONC because I have a lot of experience in observing it in action and (a few years ago) trying to defend our system against some of its more dangerous inanities.
And that's just a commission that has little actual power. Imagine what goes into appointments to the Board of Harbor Commissioners, a group that has real power over a huge budget, that approves and disapproves contracts, and which has been (at some points over the past couple of decades) caught up in real life battles over environmental issues. (Hint: The harbor is responsible for a significant fraction of air pollution in the basin due to the number of port visits by diesel powered ships.)
Or think about the Airport Commission or the Building and Safety Commission. Each has responsibility over matters that can result in the loss of lives.
For the more important commissions, appointment is akin to a presidential appointment of an ambassador. You are not going to see a lot of appointees who were political opponents of the mayor. (Kevin James ran in the mayoral primary a couple of terms ago, but turned around and endorsed Garcetti, following which he got a well paid job on the Public Works Commission.) But you might see a trail of political contributions or representation of an influential group such as the longshore union.
Commissions have power and authority which affects all of us
The fact that commissioners are appointed, not elected, places them one step removed from voter control. A serious reform effort might imagine abolishing the whole commission system and simply revert their authority to the mayor himself. But if we are going to continue having commissions, we should put checks and balances into the process.
One way to do this is to give neighborhood councils the authority to veto such appointments. This proposal does not envision giving such power to any individual neighborhood council, but we can surely develop a plan for the system as a whole. For example, the critical appointments to the airport, harbor, DWP, and Building and Safety commissions could be vetoed by vote of one-third of the existing neighborhood councils acting within a 90 day period of the appointment. Veto authority over BONC appointments could be given to the neighborhood councils within the district to be represented by that person.
What would this mean in practice? For mayors with honorable intentions, it means that the veto power would never (or almost never) be used. Getting neighborhood councils to act in unison has been harder than pulling teeth, and we would expect the tradition to continue. But in the case of flagrantly political appointments of flagrantly unqualified people, we might develop a trend.
My view is that the people who oversee the Department of Water and Power ought to know something about engineering, or about business, or about management. There may be others with remarkable qualifications who could contribute to the board, but a history of making campaign contributions is not what the city should be looking for.
It is precisely this ability to stand up for the rest of us, the people who don't write the big checks, that the neighborhood council system should be based around. Veto authority over bad appointments to commissions would serve that end.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
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