Charter reform in the city of Los Angeles is proceeding apace. An appointed commission, made 64 recommendations to tweak familiar problems: city council size, infrastructure, personnel, and elections. The city council now decides whether to ask voters to approve the changes in November.
That may sound like a lot. But it’s nowhere near enough. Los Angeles faces existential threats that can’t be met by reforming the existing system. How much longer can LA government survive without the capacity to house its people, prevent corruption, finance economic transformation, and defend its people against fires and federal raids?
This moment requires a shift in focus, away from today’s elections and toward a re-founding of Los Angeles that answers huge questions not on the current political agenda.
What sort of rights, responsibilities and services do Angelenos require in this era of polycrisis? How should we rethink boundaries and jurisdictions to better address the threats from disasters or drone attacks? What sort of financial structures do we need to build infrastructure for the next 100 years.?
Meeting this existential moment starts restructuring.
Los Angeles County is home to 88 city governments, 140-plus unincorporated communities and dozens of special districts, which is why historian Robert Fogelson called it “The Fragmented Metropolis.” LA’s fragmentation has defeated attempts at regional planning for heat waves, drought, street-cleaning, infrastructure, and economic investment. Jurisdictional feuding just broke up the joint city-county agency on homelessness.
LA needs to amalgamate its governments to create a regional authority with the power, finance, and technical capacity to meet a tougher future.
This is not an academic exercise. Official negligence fueled the Palisades Fire. Firefighters left burning an arsonist’s fire that became an inferno and blazed through multiple jurisdictions — city of LA, Malibu, LA County, state park, federal land. Authorities in all those places failed to imagine a fire of such intensity. Narrow vision is deadly.
In the short term, the best way to unify Southern California would be to form a sophisticated, high-capacity regional government, like those of Tokyo and Seoul. Over the long term, Los Angeles should reorganize around ecological lines. Our struggles to manage earth, wind, fire, and water would be easier if our governments had boundaries matching those of our ecosystems, firesheds, and watersheds.
Such a reorganization would recognize, as another Berggruen colleague, Jonathan Blake, points out, that we can only thrive if the ecosystems that clean our air, filter our water, and pollinate our crops also thrive.
One sign of progress: A civic assembly of Angelenos, convened by this columnist and others, asked LA to recognize rights of its animals as “sentient beings.”
Of course, Los Angeles can’t address planetary threats on its own. That’s why our metro region needs a charter, and an unsiloed structure, to govern the earth together with the world’s other local governments.
Nation states — including the US — are destroying themselves through political conflict, corruption, and culture wars, so the responsibilities of governance are falling to localities. A greater LA regional authority could commit resources, personnel, technology, and democratic energy to integrating local governance with planet-scale policymaking.
LA’s natural allies in this work are not the dictatorial regime in Washington, nor “progressive” know-it-alls in Sacramento who extract tax dollars from our local economies to fund ill-considered statewide schemes. Rather, LA’s true friends are metro regions worldwide that share LA’s predicament and values — ecologically vulnerable coastal metropolises devoted to inclusion and creativity.
The most obvious partner for this work is Barcelona. Like Los Angeles, it’s a seaside region with a Mediterranean climate and profound housing problems. The difference is that Barcelona is one of the world’s best-governed cities, with a flexible, experimental structure that LA city government, still stuck in the 1980s, desperately needs.
It’s too late to bring Barcelona know-how into this year’s charter revision process. But we could classify the current commission’s recommendations as Phase One — and extend the charter review for four years, including LA County, its other 87 cities, and neighboring counties in the rethink.
Such a process would give LA the time, space, and global knowledge to reimagine itself — and reinvent what a city could be.
Joe Mathews is Connecting California columnist for Zócalo Public Square and publisher of Democracy Local.