If Los Angeles is going to rewrite its city charter, should everyday Angelenos take charge of the effort?

The people who run Los Angeles government are skeptical.

Mayor Karen Bass, City Council President Paul Krekorian, and other city leaders have called for reforming the city’s main governing document—a quasi-constitution that is called the charter—for the first time in a quarter-century.

The momentum for charter change has come from community groups, civic leaders and media who want to see changes to L.A.’s scandal-plagued city council. In recent years, there have been multiple indictments of top city staffers and of four city councilmembers, along with a leaked tape of three councilmembers and L.A.’s top labor leader making racially prejudiced comments.

With 15 members representing 4 million people, the L.A. council is simply too small to be representative of the city’s diversity, or to be close to everyday people, since each member represents more than 250,000 people. In fact, L.A.’s council is one of the smallest and least representative big-city councils in the world. (That of Seoul, which I recently visited, has 102 members.)

Changing the size or structure of the council requires amending the city charter. Bass, Krekorian, and other city leaders are developing plans for a November ballot measure that would create a charter reform commission.

But in preparing this ballot measure, they are moving toward giving themselves the power to appoint most of the charter reform commission members. The end result of this would likely be an establishment commission, mixing technocrats, lobbyists, and experts who are allied with the most powerful labor, corporate, and philanthropy groups in the city.

This approach is predictable. Elected officials and powerful institutions in L.A. have a longstanding unwillingness to cede power to regular people. But creating such a top-down commission makes it harder for Los Angeles to seize a historic opportunity to empower its people, incorporate promising 21st-century ideas into governance, and become a bigger player on the world stage.

A politician-appointed charter commission also badly misreads the current political moment in Los Angeles. If charter reform is led by political elites, it might be met with the same public disgust that started the call for reform in the first place.

There’s a better way forward—one that would have more political credibility and deliver more new ideas. Cities around the world have used “people’s assemblies” (also called citizens or civic assemblies) to tackle hard questions, incorporate the best local thinking, and implement reform.

Ireland, to take one example out of hundreds, used a people’s assembly to remake its constitution. Closer to L.A., in 2022, the Northern California city of Petaluma convened a lottery-based assembly to address a bitter controversy over land use.

The members of such civic assemblies are everyday people who are drawn by lot. The lotteries are managed with technology to assure that the resulting assembly represents its jurisdiction in terms of gender, race, neighborhood, and any other chosen factors. These assemblies are designed not merely to ensure representation, but to keep powerful people from dominating the debate. Studies of people’s assemblies also show that everyday people bring more diverse concerns and new ideas into governing processes. In Ireland’s constitution effort, for instance, the changes included legalizing abortion and same-sex marriage.

Using a people’s assembly to reform the Los Angeles charter would not freeze out politicians or powerful interest groups entirely. They could testify before the assembly. Nor would it leave mission-critical work to amateurs. Los Angeles’ commission, like others formed by sortition around the world, could have the power to hire experts and technocrats to answer questions and help with research.

When I’ve pressed key players in City Hall about this idea, they’ve deflected.

Many point to a measure on the November ballot that would create an independent redistricting commission. They note that that body would similarly consist of everyday Angelenos.

But they seem to regard a charter reform commission of everyday people as a bridge too far. They prefer a commission with city governance experts, major interest groups, and their own political allies. In short, elite Los Angeles has a narrow view of charter reform.

To be fair, the council president, Krekorian, has been a public voice for freeing the charter reform commission to take on whatever topics it wishes. He and other council members have also wisely proposed creating a new process for periodic reviews of the city charter that would allow for more frequent amendments and updates.

But picking a commission of political allies will likely limit the agenda to only obvious and pressing issues, like homelessness or public safety. An establishment commission has no need to advance novel ideas or change the fundamental governance structure, because those changes might make life harder for their political patrons.

Sticking to the status quo would be a missed opportunity. LA., like other American cities, retains the same outdated, 20th-century corporate structure—with separate departments for separate functions—that divides local government into bureaucratic fiefdoms.

This charter is an occasion to incorporate 21st-century practices into local democracy and to remake America’s most entertaining city for a faster, digital, more globalized age. A new L.A. charter should incorporate new democratic processes (including increased use of the lottery assemblies I propose for the commission) and digital environments that allow citizens to do more decision-making and governing.

More broadly, Los Angeles needs a governing structure that gives the city more power and flexibility to solve not just local problems, but to address planetary challenges that shape life here: the environment, health, the economy, and corruption.

Some of the best thinking on how to do this comes from Angelenos. In their forthcoming book, Children of a Modest Star: Planetary Thinking for an Age of Crises, Jonathan S. Blake and Nils Gilman of Los Angeles’ Berggruen Institute argue for linking the governance of different cities to better address planetary concerns. They envision more powerful municipalities working in collaboration with each other and world institutions to address the problems our faltering nation-states have failed to resolve.

“National states should give up many of their governance functions, tasks, and decision rights: planetary functions should move to planetary institutions, while many other functions should move to local institutions,” Blake and Gilman write.

A new charter could translate such ideas into reality. It could grant broad new authority to the city’s well-managed international affairs office, commit the city to solving planetary challenges, and outline a governing process for the city to form and join new global policy-making bodies with other local governments.

These and other novel ideas are more likely to emerge from a charter reform commission consisting of everyday people who represent the diversity and madcap thinking of this city. New ideas are more likely to gain traction if they come from our neighbors.

So, let’s make the new charter a do-it-ourselves project.

The post Let’s Make L.A.’s New Charter a DIY Project appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

To govern a divided city, you need to balance your remembering with some forgetting.

That was my takeaway after moderating a recent public event that used Zoom to link live audiences in two famously divided cities, on opposite sides of the world.

One city, Belfast, is a place so full of physical divisions that the differences between people can feel inescapable. The other, Los Angeles, lacks a shared historical memory and thus manages to forget the depth and persistence of its divides.

Of course, these are two very different places. The city of L.A., with a population of 4 million, has 10 times as many people as Belfast and twice as many as all of Northern Ireland. But both are fast-paced, aggressive places that produce a lot of art. L.A. is Hollywood, and Belfast is a UNESCO City of Music (thanks, Van Morrison), and a center of literature (from C.S. Lewis to Sinéad Morrissey) and TV/film production (Game of Thrones).

And they face similar predicaments.

Both cities are defined, locally and internationally, by long histories of internal unrest and violence. The whole world watched L.A.’s riots in 1965 and 1992 (the latter the largest urban riot in U.S. history). And the whole world followed news of the Troubles, one of the 20th century’s most violent and longest conflicts, between pro-United Kingdom Protestants and pro-secession Catholics.

Over the past generation, both cities have celebrated progress in bridging divides. L.A. rebuilt South L.A. after the 1992 riots, and the city has seen greater diversity among its political elites. Meanwhile in Belfast, the 1998 Good Friday Agreement ended the Troubles, disarming violent groups and creating power-sharing between Protestants and Catholics.

But in the past decade, and especially during the pandemic, both cities experienced renewed divisions—racial and ethnic in Los Angeles, sectarian in Belfast. And those divisions have paralyzed governments in both cities.

Trying to understand how each city got to this point, our event began by turning the clock back a decade, to 2013, when both cities had more hope—at least, officially. That was when departing Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa declared that his city had gotten past its bigger problems, with “the old Los Angeles is fading in the rear-view mirror.”

That same year, leaders in Northern Ireland pledged to remove all of the physical walls and barriers separating Protestant and Catholic communities in Belfast within a decade—by the year 2023. They also promised to desegregate a city divided by religion.

Triumphalism in L.A. and Belfast did not wear well. Divisions have proved more durable than either city’s leadership anticipated.

In Belfast, stability and optimism waned after 2016’s Brexit, when Northern Ireland voted narrowly to remain in the European Union, but Britain as a whole voted to leave. A 2017 energy scandal then forced new elections, which produced a split result between the leading Protestant and Catholic parties causing persistent governmental dysfunction and inoperation. Since the 2022 elections, Northern Ireland has not had a government.

That lack, combined with Brexit-related cuts, has diminished government services, including vital health programs. And amidst the political turmoil, polls show rising sectarian divisions. This is true especially among the young, who were already too divided; less than 10% of Belfast children attend religiously integrated schools.

No wonder the walls dividing communities did not come down as promised this year, as people continue clinging to separation and the promise of security. Indeed, as I saw firsthand during a visit last year, Belfast has erected new divides—most of the “peace walls” now in place were constructed after the Good Friday Agreement.

A world away, Los Angeles also has gone backward. Racial, ethnic, and generational divisions grew more pronounced during the Trump presidency and in the pandemic, which saw more attention to high-profile local cases of police violence, as well as the Minneapolis murder of George Floyd.

Last year, a Loyola Marymount University survey found big increases in the percentage of Angelenos who say race relations are getting worse. Over two-thirds of Angelenos told pollsters that they expect to see new racial unrest, like what the city experienced in 1992.

Then came the leaked tape of Los Angeles County’s top labor official and three L.A. city councilmembers saying bigoted things about almost every major racial or ethnic group in the city—a recording that all but brought the L.A. city government to a standstill for months. Unrelated federal corruption investigations have ensnared a third of the city council, adding to the difficulty of getting anything done. Meanwhile, public anger grows at the city’s inability to handle increasing crime and homelessness.

A recent event linked the struggles of the two cities, organized by Imagine! Belfast (a democracy and ideas festival) and the Huntington Institute on California and the West at the University of Southern California. Panelists and audiences in both cities (one audience sat in Belfast’s Accidental Theater, the other at a USC library) lamented their divides but also offered ideas for progress that involved leaving some parts of the past behind but keeping those that might serve communities in the future.

Belfast’s many walls make divisions seems permanent and unchangeable, said Duncan Morrow, a lecturer and conflict mediator at Ulster University. But how can Belfast remove barriers that some people believe keep them safe? Perhaps, if walls can’t be removed, new integrated spaces and institutions can be built on top of them, Morrow suggested.

Los Angeles panelist Joumana Silyan-Saba, director of policy and enforcement at L.A. Civil Rights, said that divisions in L.A. are usually covert, and not confronted, until they “manifest as intercommunal divides, intracommunal divides, and—in the worst forms—they also manifest in civil unrest and violence.”

That argues for memorializing more of the city’s past conflicts, and making L.A. divisions more visible so that Angelenos must reckon more directly with them. Forgetting divisions in the name of getting along can sometimes make it harder to get things done. Silyan-Saba recounted how many conversations it took to gain widespread community support for the Expo Line through South L.A. and the large, ongoing expansion of L.A.’s Metro rail system.

Panelists and audience members in both Belfast and Los Angeles seemed most pessimistic about the ability of local governments to transcend divides (though Southern Californians were upbeat about L.A.’s new mayor Karen Bass and her devotion to getting Angelenos to “lock arms together”).

To a remarkable degree, Belfast and Los Angeles participants agreed that making progress in divided cities is unlikely to come from politicians. Instead, people themselves, through their institutions and organizations and movements, must lead the change. Belfast artist and photographer Stephen Wilson said that it was still important for divided governments to provide long-term resources to neighborhoods and promising individuals. “You don’t know who will turn into leaders in the future,” he said.

“The greatest power that we have is our civil society,” said USC sociologist Jody Agius Vallejo. “These dividing lines are created. They’re created over time. They’re created historically. They’re created to make advantages for some. And because they aren’t natural, we can change them.”

The post What L.A. and Belfast Have in Common appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.