The Council Sent the Reforms to Committee. We Should Take Them to the Voters.
On June 30 the Council referred two reforms to committee rather than place them on the ballot. Voters do not need its permission to amend their own charter.
On June 30 the Los Angeles City Council kept two charter reforms I testified for off the November ballot. One would have let the Council set policy for the LAPD by ordinance. The other would have let the Council extend the municipal vote to residents regardless of citizenship status in citywide elections and Los Angeles Unified School District board races. Last week the Council voted to send both to the City Attorney for drafting. When the drafted language returned, it referred them to the ad hoc charter committee rather than place them on the ballot.
The vote to draft the police measure was 9 to 6. A vote to draft is not a vote to place, and some members were quick to say so. True enough. But a majority does not order the City Attorney to draft a measure it means to bury, and nothing in the language that came back explains what changed. “More study” is the stated reason. Democracy deferred is the result.
The timing is not subtle. On June 18 the Los Angeles Police Protective League sent the City a letter demanding a meet and confer process and threatening to sue if the police accountability measure was not pulled. On June 30 the Council pulled it. The union got the outcome its letter asked for, days before the ballot deadline.
The demand had no merit. The amendment changes no wage, hour, or condition of employment, the changes that would require bargaining under state law, and it leaves the discipline of individual officers untouched. The union's own letter conceded the measure would bring greater accountability. The Board of Police Commissioners and the department had already declined to join the reform process, promising their own reforms by March; a meet and confer demand at the deadline asked for a closed-door redo of the open process they skipped.
Keeping the measures off the ballot costs more than the measures themselves. A ballot campaign is itself democratic education: it forces a citywide argument, in the press and on the doorstep, over who controls the police and who belongs to this city. Win or lose, that argument reaches hundreds of thousands who will never read a commission report or sit through a committee hearing. Referral cancels it before it can begin, and the reforms wait in committee while the conversation a campaign would have forced never happens.
This is the move the Council has used before. Council expansion and ranked choice voting were already sent back for study. Police accountability and residential voting now join them. The ad hoc committee has no deadline. Reforms that go in are not required to come back.
If the Council will not place these reforms before voters, Angelinos still have a route of their own. A charter amendment can reach the ballot by petition, without the Council’s approval. That path is slower and more expensive than a Council vote, but it is the one lever the Council does not control. A qualified initiative, or the credible threat of one, changes the Council’s incentives. It makes inaction cost something. It puts the committee on a clock.
There is a sharper reason to take that route than speed or leverage: the versions the Council drafted are the versions the Council could tolerate. The residential measure only permits some future Council to extend the franchise, and the police measure moves policy authority without binding it to anything. A petition is written by the people who file it, which means it can extend the franchise on adoption rather than defer it, and carry the accountability the Council left out: an end to the Board of Rights, the Chief's authority to terminate, a Council override on retention. The petition is where we stop asking the Council for the thin version of what we came for and write the one worth passing.
The work now is to make that threat real, which means holding the coalition together and keeping the residents who came to testify engaged, confirming what it takes to qualify a charter amendment by petition, the signature count and the filing deadline, and identifying the next election it can reach. Pressing the ad hoc committee at the same time. The initiative is what gives that pressure teeth.
The Council had the votes and chose committee. The voters do not need the Council’s permission to amend their own charter. That is where we go next.