The Los Angeles City Council on Wednesday moved forward with a wide-ranging package of potential revisions to the city\u2019s constitution, including taking a first step toward giving noncitizens the right to vote in city elections.<\/p>\n
The noncitizen voting measure was part of a package of proposed City Charter changes that would be placed before voters on the Nov. 3 ballot. The package also includes a measure that would allow the council to set policy at the Los Angeles Police Department.<\/p>\n
The proposal to allow noncitizens to vote was proposed by Councilmember Hugo Soto-Mart\u00ednez and approved on a 10-5 vote. <\/p>\n
\u201cI believe it\u2019s a simple principle that should guide us: If you live in the city, contribute to the city, raise your family in the city and are impacted by the decisions made in the city, you deserve to have a voice in the city,\u201d Soto-Mart\u00ednez said.<\/p>\n
At the same time, the council majority sidelined other measures that had been recommended by the Charter Reform Commission,<\/a> including expansion of the City Council from 15 seats to 25 and a move to ranked-choice voting, where voters list candidates in order of preference.<\/p>\n \u201cI would have liked to have seen a more comprehensive charter review. But we are where we are,\u201d said Councilmember Tim McOsker in an interview Wednesday evening.<\/p>\n Still, McOsker said that important measures moved forward.<\/p>\n Under the council action Wednesday, the city\u2019s lawyers will draft ballot measures dealing with a host of other topics \u2014 establishing of a director of Public Works, switching to a two-year budget cycle (instead of every year), establishing a capital infrastructure plan to guide the city\u2019s infrastructure planning, increasing the monetary penalty for ethics violations and other changes. <\/p>\n The council will still need to cast another vote for the measures to appear on the ballot.<\/p>\n Yet to be decided is how the proposals will be packaged on the ballot. The city attorney\u2019s office submitted a recommendation on Tuesday<\/a> to break up the charter into a number of amendments. <\/p>\n If approved by voters this fall, the noncitizen voting measure would enable to the council to pass an ordinance allowing noncitizen residents of Los Angeles to vote in citywide and Los Angeles Unified School Board elections. Councilmembers Bob Blumenfield, John Lee, McOsker, Adrin Nazarian and Monica Rodriguez voted no. <\/p>\n Rodriguez said the city needs more information about whether Los Angeles County, which runs city elections, would be capable of handling the change. She also questioned whether, at a time of federal immigration crackdowns, the city would end up putting noncitizens in greater danger by adding them to a voter database.<\/p>\n \u201cGiven the dynamics that we have right now, what we\u2019re creating is a list of individuals that could then just be the target [of] another potential federal administration,\u201d she said. <\/p>\n On police oversight, the council voted 10-5 to put a measure before voters that would allow the council to set policy at the police department. Currently, the five-person, civilian-run Board of Police Commissioners, appointed by the mayor, has that responsibility.<\/p>\n Soto-Mart\u00ednez said such a measure would have given the council more power over police during last year\u2019s immigration raids. The council already would have been able to end pretextual stops if it had authority to set policy itself, he said.<\/p>\n \u201cIf council had the power to do this we would have made tremendous positive changes in this city,\u201d Soto-Mart\u00ednez said earlier this week during a meeting of the Rules, Elections and Intergovernmental Relations Committee.<\/p>\n Some council members stressed caution over the proposed change.<\/p>\n \u201cI think the city should be very careful to examine whether the proposal solves a demonstrated problem or merely shifts authority,\u201d Lee said during the rules committee meeting earlier this week. \u201cThis could unintentionally politicize policy decisions and create instability as policy priorities shift with each election cycle.\u201d<\/p>\n The city\u2019s police union said Wednesday that the city failed to meet and confer with it over any of the proposals at the LAPD, as required under the collective bargaining process. The union asked the council to suspend consideration of charter amendments that affect its members.<\/p>\n The council also backed a proposal to double the amount of money set aside for the Department of Recreation and Parks, which has struggled for years with staffing cuts and aging facilities.<\/p>\n Under the City Charter, the agency receives a minimum allocation equal to 0.0325% of the assessed value of all property assessed for taxes within city limits. The council voted 14-1 to draft a charter amendment doubling that allocation.<\/p>\n The increase had been sought by a coalition of park advocates, who said the park agency never recovered from cuts that began during the Great Recession. A council committee recommended a smaller increase earlier this week, arguing that the city would not be able to afford such a big increase during a four-year ramp-up.<\/p>\n In a compromise, Rodriguez pushed for the parks allocation to be doubled, taking it to 0.065% \u2014 but over a 10-year transition, instead of the four that was previously considered. Park advocacy groups welcomed the deal, saying it would make park space, recreation facilities and senior centers more accessible.<\/p>\n \u201cKids, seniors and families all across L.A. are going to get what they need and deserve,\u201d said Sarah K. Friedman, a manager of special programs for the advocacy group Trust for Public Land.<\/p>\n Blumenfield cast the lone opposing vote, warning his colleagues that the proposal would tie the hands of future councils, making it much more difficult for them to balance the budget during difficult financial times.<\/p>\n \u201cThe more things we wall off, the more difficult that process [of balancing the budget] is going to be for all of you,\u201d Blumenfield said.<\/p>\n The Department of Recreation and Parks received a $292 million minimum allocation this year, out of a $359 million budget. On Wednesday, the council asked its budget team to report on the amount of money that would be allocated as a result of Rodriguez\u2019s proposal.<\/p>\n The last time the city took up a large-scale update of the charter was in 1999<\/a>, amid an effort by some San Fernando Valley civic leaders to secede from Los Angeles<\/a>.<\/p>\n For some advocacy groups, this latest attempt came as a huge disappointment. Some of the long sought changes, such as council expansion and ranked-choice voting, were recommended by the Charter Reform Commission.<\/a> The council\u2019s five-member rules committee tabled those ideas<\/a>, saying they need more study.<\/p>\n Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson said it would be better for the city to \u201cdo it right than to do it fast\u201d when changing the charter. He proposed creating a new committee to examine the implications of adding 10 more council seats. <\/p>\n \u201cA bigger council makes the mayor more powerful than the mayor would be now,\u201d he said earlier this week. \u201cIn every city that has a large council, the mayor is vastly more powerful than the situation that we have in L.A. today.\u201d<\/p>\n Mike Bonin, a former councilman who is now executive director of the Pat Brown Institute at Cal State L.A., said he had hoped that after four years, the City Council would approve at least one major reform, like council expansion. <\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s the great punt of 2026,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s an underwhelming result for a lot of effort.\u201d<\/p>\n The call for a larger council was revived four years ago<\/a>, following the leak of secretly recorded conversation<\/a> between three council members and a labor leader that featured racist and disparaging remarks. An ad hoc committee focused on reform spent several months discussing the issue, only to forward it to the 13-member Charter Reform Commission. <\/p>\n The commission endorsed the idea of adding 10 council members, a move that would reduce the size of each council district to roughly 159,000 residents, down from 265,000.<\/p>\n The council\u2019s decision to shelve so many reforms will only fuel public apathy and distrust, said Ross Weistroffer, an organizer with Fair Rep LA Coalition, a group of nonprofits that pushes for good government and fair representation.<\/p>\n \u201cWe don\u2019t need further study,\u201d he told the council. \u201cWe need further courage from our electeds.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Los Angeles City Council on Wednesday moved forward with a wide-ranging package of potential revisions to the…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":874902,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5123],"tags":[9110,1582,276,2451,6283,21059,2961,224,2444,5337,289,355622,242657,15429,224800,153,6514,9111,2452,1628],"class_list":["post-874901","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-ballot","tag-ca","tag-california","tag-city","tag-council","tag-council-member","tag-la","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-times","tag-losangeles","tag-measure","tag-minimum-allocation","tag-monica-rodriguez","tag-noncitizen","tag-other-change","tag-policy","tag-proposal","tag-voter","tag-week","tag-year"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116768817987175339","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/874901","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=874901"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/874901\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/874902"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=874901"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=874901"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=874901"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}