Charter reform in the city of Los Angeles is proceeding apace. An appointed commission, made 64 recommendations to tweak\u00a0 familiar problems: city council size, infrastructure, personnel, and elections. The city council now decides whether to ask voters to approve the changes in November.<\/p>\n
That may sound like a lot. But it\u2019s nowhere near enough. Los Angeles faces existential threats that can\u2019t 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?\u00a0<\/p>\n
This moment requires a shift in focus, away from today\u2019s elections and toward a re-founding of Los Angeles that answers huge questions not on the current political agenda.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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.?<\/p>\n
Meeting this existential moment starts restructuring.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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 \u201cThe Fragmented Metropolis.\u201d LA\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
LA needs to amalgamate its governments to create a regional authority with the power, finance, and technical capacity to meet a tougher future.\u00a0<\/p>\n
This is not an academic exercise. Official negligence fueled the Palisades Fire. Firefighters left burning an arsonist\u2019s fire that became an inferno and blazed through multiple jurisdictions \u2014 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.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 Over the long term, Los Angeles should reorganize around ecological lines.\u00a0 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
One sign of progress: A civic assembly of Angelenos, convened by this columnist and others, asked LA to recognize rights of its animals as \u201csentient beings.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Of course, Los Angeles can\u2019t address planetary threats on its own. That\u2019s why our metro region needs a charter, and an unsiloed structure, to govern the earth together with the world\u2019s other local governments.<\/p>\n
Nation states \u2014 including the US \u2014 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.<\/p>\n
LA\u2019s natural allies in this work are not the dictatorial regime in Washington, nor \u201cprogressive\u201d know-it-alls in Sacramento who extract tax dollars from our local economies to fund ill-considered statewide schemes. Rather, LA\u2019s true friends are metro regions worldwide that share LA\u2019s predicament and values \u2014 ecologically vulnerable coastal metropolises devoted to inclusion and creativity.<\/p>\n
The most obvious partner for this work is Barcelona.\u00a0 Like Los Angeles, it\u2019s a seaside region with a Mediterranean climate and profound housing problems. The difference is that Barcelona is one of the world\u2019s best-governed cities, with a flexible, experimental structure that LA city government, still stuck in the 1980s, desperately needs.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It\u2019s too late to bring Barcelona know-how into this year\u2019s charter revision process. But we could classify the current commission\u2019s recommendations as Phase One \u2014 and extend the charter review for four years, including LA County, its other 87 cities, and neighboring counties in the rethink.<\/p>\n
Such a process would give LA the time, space, and global knowledge to reimagine itself \u2014 and reinvent what a city could be.<\/p>\n
Joe Mathews is Connecting California columnist for Z\u00f3calo Public Square and publisher of Democracy Local.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Charter reform in the city of Los Angeles is proceeding apace. An appointed commission, made 64 recommendations to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":198316,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[3933,125837,383,115289,48,52,51,47,50,49,445,69867,2268,13],"class_list":["post-296727","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-earth-sciences","tag-ecology","tag-economy","tag-ecosystem","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-natural-environment","tag-natural-sciences","tag-nature","tag-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296727","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=296727"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296727\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/198316"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=296727"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=296727"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=296727"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}