Charter Reform Commissioner Andrea Mac asks about the city attorney about protocol for allowing public commenters to speak at their meetings, after the mic was cut on Rae Huang (a mayoral candidate), picture at center front, when she tried to talk to the commission. Mac said they have tried to allow everyone to speak at past meetings. The panel’s chair told The LA Reporter, a day later, that their meeting had been disrupted. (Photo by Elizabeth Chou, The LA Reporter)
A panel that is rewriting Los Angeles city’s "constitution,” the Charter Reform Commission, is returning to meet at Los Angeles City Hall at 4 p.m. today, Feb. 18, a week after a previous meeting of the panel ended in chaos, with staff muting the mic on a public commenter, several commissioners packing up and leaving the meeting in protest, and Los Angeles Police Department officers being ordered to clear members of the public from the meeting room.
Before walking out of last Wednesday’s Feb. 11 meeting, some of the commissioners had raised concerns that the public was being silenced, and they questioned the chair over how he was running the meeting.
This all comes as the Charter Reform Commission, which is advisory, is coming up on their April 2 deadline for submitting their proposals to the City Council, and recent meetings have been critical for deciding on whether certain proposals will make the cut. Key, politically touchy issues such as LAPD accountability and reform have been proposed, but are at risk of being tossed — a key ad hoc subcommittee of the Charter Reform Commission recently recommended getting rid of a package of ideas for reforming and improving accountability in the police department.
At last Wednesday’s meeting, which ended abruptly, several people who signed up to speak to the commission had come to urge the panel to take up reforms aimed at reining in the LAPD amid ongoing reports and lawsuits accusing the police of brutal treatment of protesters in recent demonstrations against the federal government’s policies, and other serious incidents of misconduct over decades.
Among the speakers was Trina Traylor, the campaign and coalitions manager for the Los Angeles Black Workers Center, who opened her remarks by saying, “No more useless commissions that will allow people to continue to murder and abuse people with no consequences.”
Traylor, of the Los Angeles Black Workers Center, appeared to have been the last person officially permitted by the commissioner’s chair, Raymond Meza, to give public comment, with Meza appearing to try to enforce a one-hour, overall time limit on comments, with 30 minutes devoted to people in the room, and the other 30 minutes to people calling in.
After Traylor spoke, another speaker who walked up to the lectern expressed surprise after her mic was cut off, part way into her first sentence, in which she started to tell the commission that she planned to thank them for their leadership, “but the way you are treating everyone who is speaking here is disappointing." That speaker, Rae Huang, is a mayoral candidate challenging the re-election of Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass. When Huang noticed the mic had been cut, she said she would proceed with her comment, and walked in front of the lectern to speak.
At this point Assistant City Attorney Strefan Fauble, who was staffing the meeting, told Huang that she was “disrupting the meeting.” This was followed by Heath Kline, a member of the Woodland Hills Warner Center Neighborhood Council and another person who appeared to have lined up to speak, stepping in to say that what was happening reminded him of how people on neighborhood councils were being treated. Kline had spoken at a previous meeting about his disappointment in the subcommittee’s decision to entirely dispose of a set of proposals that a coalition of neighborhood councils had labored over in order to deliver to the panel.
The attorney, Fauble, then appeared to motion for a police officer to step in. Another commissioner, James Thomas, appeared to respond to Fauble by waving away the officer, saying several times, “We don’t need you all.” A member of the public in the audience could also be heard saying, “We don’t need the police.”
Thomas appealed to the City Attorney to allow the public comment time to be extended, saying, “give them six minutes, and they will sit down.” And he questioned the decision to clear the room, saying, “are you insane?”
Fauble then responds saying that the order to clear the room came from their chair. Thomas then directed his comments to the chair, asking him, “Ray (Meza), what’s wrong with you?”
Other commissioners also spoke up in the midst of the order to clear the room, with two of them saying the meeting seemed to be run in an out-of-the-ordinary way. “Most of our meetings have been operated in a very different manner,” Commissioner Carla Fuentes said.
Another commissioner, Andrea Mac, also spoke at length about her concerns with the way the meeting was run. “We've always heard from everyone in the room, and I think instead of just being transparent, and letting community folks know what the process is, we just silence them,” Mac said. “So I think that's kind of where I'm at. And if we're going to have this meeting without the public in the room, I personally feel uncomfortable staying for it."
Those three commissioners – Mac, Fuentes and Thomas – along with a fourth commissioner who did not speak, Michael Yap, packed up and left the meeting soon after. The departure of the four commissioners made it so that the commission could no longer take any further action during the meeting. The commission, which has 13 seats (with one currently vacant), needs seven members to have a “quorum” to take any action at a meeting. When the four commissioners left, only four other members were left in attendance. The commission could still gather without a quorum to continue to listen to public comment.
Fauble and the police continued to try to clear the room, telling them they will decide who to let back in. The four members who were left also packed up and retreated to a back room behind the meeting chamber, leaving the public in the room with the police officers. Fauble eventually emerged to confirm that the meeting had been adjourned.
There had also been some confusion expressed at last week’s meeting by the public about how they could sign up to speak. Earlier in the meeting, Jsané Tyler, a cousin of Keith Porter Jr., a Northridge man who was killed by an off-duty ICE agent on New Year’s Eve, told the commission she had tried to sign up at a kiosk, but the machine indicated “there were no meetings” taking place. When she tried to line up, she was told that another speaker was being called. A member of the public later got up to tell the commission that her cousin had been killed and to “respect the fact that she came all the way [here].”
All four of the commissioners who walked out of the meeting last week had applied with the commission to be on it, and are not appointed by elected officials. The other commissioners in attendance, Meza, along with Ted Stein, Christina Sanchez and Jason Levin, were appointed by the mayor or a member of the City Council’s leadership, such as the council’s president or a vice president.
In addition to concern among commissioners and members of the public over the fate of policing reforms at the Charter Reform Commission, the panel has also been plagued by ongoing concerns raised about how commissioners’ decision-making might be shaped by elected officials. Recently, commissioners, along with the City Council, voted to try to get more clarity on this by adopting rules for the commissioners to disclose any private conversations they have with the mayor, council member or any other elected official in the city and their staffers.
There has also been an effort to have commission staffers – such as the executive director, Justin Ramirez, who is appointed by the mayor and the council president – to also disclose conversations with elected officials, as concerns are being raised that elected officials could route or “backchannel” conversations via the commission’s staffers. So far, the effort to implement such a policy for commission staff has not been advanced and has been opposed by Meza, who is appointed by the mayor and is the commission’s chair.
Shortly after the Feb. 11 meeting ended, Thomas, who is the president of the San Fernando Valley NAACP, provided The LA Reporter with his reaction to what had just happened at the meeting, observing that their panel has in general been “dismissive of the API (Asian Pacific Islander) voice, the Black voice, and the Valley voice. And the Brown voice. And every voice. Except the mayor's voice.”
He also pointed to his effort to try to get the commission to treat Tyler, Porter’s “loved one,” with more sensitivity during the public comment period, to “hear her out because they are trying to dismiss reforms that would actually have a direct impact on her situation.”
He pointed to policies being proposed such as those that would give the City Council more authority over the LAPD, which would spread out that authority away from the mayor’s office. Those ideas have also been proposed by some members of the City Council. Thomas said that that after Tyler spoke, “they then tried to have a limit and stop other people from speaking, and there was only … four people left.” He said that would have amounted to six additional minutes of speaking time from the public. “Six minutes. They called the police, used police for six minutes,” he said.
About forty minutes after the meeting ended, the four remaining commissioners who stayed behind emerged into the rotunda of Los Angeles City Hall. The LA Reporter went to ask Meza for comment, but he declined to give comment, saying he would provide a response later. Meza called the next day saying he wanted to provide a comment.
“The commission meeting adjourned earlier than scheduled, after the commission lost quorum, following disruptions that made it impossible to continue to conduct the business,” Meza said. “I want to be clear, the commission values public participation. Community voices are not only welcome, but they are essential to the process.”
When asked if they’d ever turned the mic off on anyone in such a way, he responded that “the circumstances last evening had never happened before.”
“We had concluded 30 minutes of in-person comment, and we had also agendized 30 minutes of remote dial-in public comment,” Meza said. “I instructed the staff to transition to remote public comment after the 30 minutes were exhausted of in-person public comment, and that's when the disruption started. I continued to ask staff to transition to remote public comment, and that's when the mic was cut off. But there had never been disruptions like that in the past.”
Additional comments from Meza’s statement to The LA Reporter can be found here. A video of the meeting can be found here.
The topic of police accountability and reform is not expected to be taken up at this afternoon’s meeting. The meeting planned for this afternoon will include items that had been scheduled at the last meeting, but this time with a list of specific charter reform topics listed for discussion. There are four buckets into which the various charter reform proposals are categorized, and this meeting includes some of the topics from two of those buckets.
The commission will be taking up recommendations from the subcommittee around the “planning an infrastructure” category, which includes proposals to give more power to a director of public works. Right now, the leading entity in Public Works is the Board of Public Works. There had once been a more powerful director of public works, but that position was gutted. The other major proposals in this category including changing who gets to make decisions and how those decisions are made around development projects.
The commission will also be taking up recommendations under the “government structure” category, including the possibility of taking some of the duties of the elected City Attorney’s office – such as drafting legislative language or advising on lawsuits – and handing them over to an appointed City Attorney, leaving the elected office to handle criminal prosecutions. They’ll also take up proposals to lower the voting age to 16 for municipal and LAUSD elections, how commissioners are appointed and for changing how much time candidates for elected office get to collect signatures, and how many signatures they need to collect, to qualify for the ballot.
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