Charter Reform Commission<\/a> reviews potential changes to the roles, powers and responsibilities of city officials and departments, including whether to expand the council. The commission\u2019s recommendations are expected to go to the City Council later this spring. The council will then decide what goes before\u00a0the voters.<\/p>\nThe current council size was set in 1925, when the city had approximately one-quarter the 4 million residents it does today.<\/p>\n
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Hernandez said the size of existing districts \u2014 including her own, which spans 22 neighborhoods and about 250,000 residents \u2014 makes it difficult for councilmembers to stay closely connected to their communities. \u201cMore people would have more access to their representatives,\u201d she said of the smaller districts.<\/p>\n
Soto-Mart\u00ednez pointed to neighborhoods such as Koreatown and Watts, which are split across multiple districts in ways that can dilute political influence.<\/p>\n
Both councilmembers, who are running for reelection, also cautioned that adding seats would shift power at City Hall. \u201cCreating more council districts, I believe, has to be paired with giving more power to the mayor,\u201d Soto-Mart\u00ednez said.<\/p>\n
Hernandez added that an expanded council would affect how city services are delivered.<\/p>\n
\u201cEverything in the city will change, even the office space in City Hall,\u201d Hernandez said.<\/p>\n
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\u2014Jes\u00fas Sanchez, Publisher<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Councilmembers Eunisses Hernandez and Hugo Soto-Martinez at a meeting of the Glassell Park Improvement Assn. Photo by Jesus…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":130500,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[1610,67084,49480,45533,67085,49479,48,52,51,47,50,49],"class_list":["post-130499","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-city-council","tag-council-district-1","tag-council-district-13","tag-eunisses-hernandez","tag-glassell-park-improvement-association","tag-hugo-soto-martinez","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130499","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=130499"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130499\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/130500"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=130499"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=130499"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=130499"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}