The Charter Reform Commission and its staff don’t have to tell the public about their conversations with Mayor Karen Bass and other elected officials, including Los Angeles City Council members.
That’s sparked some concerns about whether much of the decisions of the commission — which has the potential to rebalance, shift and potentially threaten the existing power distribution at City Hall — are being made away from the public’s eyes.
But that may change after Wednesday, with the Los Angeles Charter Reform Commission set to take up a motion for a policy around communications with people outside of the commission.
The motion’s author, Charter Reform Commission Chair Raymond Meza, and the commission staff, have yet to provide details publicly on the motion, a day before the motion is set to be taken up at the 3 p.m., Wednesday, Jan. 21, meeting at Van Nuys City Hall.
Meza, who is appointed by the mayor, had previously defended the existing set-up of the commission — which is that there is no requirement that the commissioners, most of them appointed by the mayor and City Council leaders, divulge who they’re talking to when making decisions. Meza told reporter Teresa Liu of the Los Angeles Daily News for an article published Jan. 16, that their commission “was created by ordinance of the City Council and whatever rules the City Council puts in place, this commission will abide by.”
However, one of the members of the City Council, Monica Rodriguez, has been agitating for disclosures of what are known as “ex parte” communications that the commissioners engage in with any elected officials and their staff. Rodriguez introduced her motion to require this last August. It didn’t get scheduled by Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson until late last December.
Harris-Dawson, as the leader of the City Council, not only has the ability to decide when or whether issues get taken up by the City Council, he schedules items for committee he chairs, including the one where Rodriguez’s motion was assigned to. And also as part of his leadership he grants or takes away City Council members’ assignments and leadership roles for committees.
Rodriguez’s motion passed in City Council on Tuesday, Jan. 20, but any ordinance that may result from it likely wouldn’t go into effect until very late in the Charter Reform Commission process, unless other efforts are made to speed things up, such as an urgency provision.
Meanwhile, Meza’s motion had shown up on the Wednesday, Jan. 21, Charter Reform Commission agenda posted up after an advocate from a City Hall watchdog group, Unrig LA, raised concerns at a commission meeting on Saturday, Jan. 17, that Rodriguez’s motion may not go into effect in time. Unrig LA had previously recommended a disclosure policy, back in January 2024, to the Los Angeles City Council’s Governance Reform Committee. The City Council did not end up incorporating the policy.
Rodriguez’s ex parte disclosure motion that the Los Angeles City Council passed Tuesday still needs to be turned into ordinance language by the City Attorney’s Office. They voted to request that the ordinance by brought back by Jan. 27, a week from now. If the ordinance language fails to get a unanimous vote, it would need to come back for a second vote. Then, if the ordinance gets passed by the City Council, it goes to the mayor’s desk. The mayor can sign it or she could veto it. The mayor could also take no action on the ordinance, and it would go into effect after 10 days. After that the City Clerk would need to post and publish the ordinance, such as in a newspaper, so that the public can review it, which adds another 31 days. That means that as of now, any ordinance adopted for the Charter Reform Commission to disclose private talks, that results from the motion passed today by the Los Angeles City Council, would only go into effect very close to when the panel is set to wrap up its work in late March and early April.
“I wish it could have passed earlier,” said Chris Carson of the League of Women Voters of Greater Los Angeles, which supports a disclosure rule for the Charter Reform Commission. “We’re just really glad they’ve done it. They listened to the public and they responded positively and they passed it. That’s a good thing.”
Carson, who chairs the league’s committee that’s currently engaging closely with the Los Angeles City Charter Reform process, said that the secrecy around who commissioners are talking to has been “unacceptable.”
“There is a total lack of transparency,” Carson said. “People need to know what is going on.”
Carla Fuentes, one of the five commission-appointed members, told The LA Reporter that she supports their panel adopting a disclosure rule that includes “clarity around the nature of the communication and the general subject matter discussed, so disclosures are meaningful and consistent.”
Fuentes is also on the board of the League of Women Voters of Greater Los Angeles. [Added after first posting].
She said such a rule is “extremely important,” adding that “given the significance of the commission's work and the potential long-term impacts of charter reform, clear disclosure requirements for both commissioners and staff are essential to maintaining public trust and the integrity of the process,” Fuentes wrote in an email to The LA Reporter on Tuesday.
The commission’s work has faced questions throughout, including at the panel’s Planning and Infrastructure Committee meeting held in Pacoima last October. During a dramatic welcoming statement to the Charter Reform Commission, Rodriguez had raised concerns about the commission’s work being done without full knowledge of whether powerful politicians were steering the things from behind the scenes.
Since then, the commission has been unable to escape continued questions about what might be influencing their decision-making process.
During the public comment portion of Tuesday’s Los Angeles City Council meeting, Rob Quan, with the City Hall watchdog group Unrig LA, asked the members of the 15-person elected City Council body if they have been paying enough attention to the important process.
“Have you been paying attention to how Karen Bass is steamrolling this Charter Reform Commission?” he asked, during the comment.
Quan’s comment comes after the commission held the first meeting on Saturday, Jan. 17, of a six-person ad hoc committee that is being tasked with whittling down the work of the committee, which he noted “doesn’t have to follow normal Brown Act procedures.”
The mayor’s “appointees make up 30% of this commission, but somehow make up 50% of the new committee that's starting to cast big, decisive votes.”
Quan also touched on an issue that the City Council members may have a stake in.
“Some of y'all are itching to break up the City Attorney's office,” he said. “While [Mayor] Karen [Bass]’s staff tried to stuff that appointment power with the mayor, I convinced the committee to instead explore giving that power to the council. But Saturday, Karen's block of commissioners reversed that decision.”
Quan was referring to an option offered up by commission staff, which includes the executive director who was appointed by the Council President and the Mayor, in a staff report that recommended that if they propose having the City Attorney be changed into an appointed, rather than an elected role, that the mayor have the authority to appoint the attorney.
The idea to create an appointed city attorney role at the city had actually been recommended to the Charter Reform Commission by at least two members of the City Council, Tim McOsker and Nithya Raman. Raman said it would help to depoliticize legal advice for creating legislation and handling contracts.
Under the ordinance that established the Charter Reform Commission, the panel needed to have submitted proposals by last Oct. 30, for placement on this June’s primary ballot, and now that the earlier deadline has passed, by this April 2, for placement on this fall’s general municipal election ballot for Nov. 3, 2026.
The proposals before the commission include political hot potato items like police reform, as well as proposed changes that could shift public officials’ power, such as a proposal to expand the number of people on the City Council, or proposals that shift duties from an elected office to an appointed one. In addition to some City Council members’ recommendation on the City Attorney, there have also been others floated for changing the duties of the City Controller. One motion before the commission earlier this month had called for moving accounting duties out of the City Controller’s Office, for example, which prompted outcry from hundreds of people, including some who said they don’t usually engage with the charter reform process.
And there are major proposals around restructuring departments that build and maintain public infrastructure — such as streets, sidewalks and parks — affecting the the main ways the city level of government serves the public.
Disclosures could help the public know who is helping to influence commissioners, including those who have been appointed by elected officials. The ordinance that Meza referenced in his comment to the Daily News states that eight of the members of the 13-person Charter Reform Commission are appointed by elected officials, four by the mayor, two by the council president and two by the council president pro tem, which is like the vice president of the City Council. Those eight then choose the remaining five commissioners.
Diego Andrades, another commissioner who is appointed by the commission rather than an elected official, also shared that he supports the idea of disclosing “ex parte” communications, but he hasn’t decided yet on what might come before them Wednesday.
“I am not opposed to any disclosure requirements in general,” Andrades said in an emailed response. “I do want to get information from staff on whether this is practicable for our work. I'm also curious as to whether there's precedent for this kind of requirement.”
“I know the public has mentioned that the independent redistricting commission has regulations on ex parte communications … but our work is much different from that commission,” he said. “I am entering the meeting with an open mind, and I have not made up my stance just yet.”
Note: The story was updated to include Fuentes’s position on the League of Women Voters of Greater Los Angeles’s board of directors.
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