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The role of the Los Angeles City Attorney has emerged as one of the hotter topics in the charter reform process, with two City Council members recently signaling to the reform panel that they think part of the elected attorney’s duties should be handed over to an appointed lawyer.
In August, LA City Councilmember Nithya Raman told the Charter Reform Commission that having the City Attorney be elected can lead to the “politicizing” of many of the matters they need legal advice on, such as drafting legislation and handling contracts. Raman said she worries the attorney’s duties in advising the council can be influenced by the policy platform a City Attorney campaigned on. She said that Los Angeles County has an appointed lawyer, known as the county counsel, that serves those functions.
“We have to depoliticize the role of a legal advisor to our departments, so that there is no confusion about whether a city attorney who has a policy platform is somehow politicizing those roles,” she said. She called the charter reform process “an opportunity for change” on this issue.
And this past Saturday, Tim McOsker told the Charter Reform Commission he’s had a change of heart from when he argued passionately for the City Attorney to be an elected post, during the previous go-around on comprehensive LA city charter reform more than two decades ago. McOsker sat briefly on the appointed “revision” commission in the late 1990s — one of two. The other charter reform commission was an elected one.
McOsker told the Charter Reform Commission he now believes it would be better to have an appointed attorney advise city officials on lawsuits, write ordinances and give advice to city departments. The City Attorney’s Office currently also prosecutes misdemeanors, so there could still be an elected position to handle those duties, he said.
It all comes amid signs of discord that have bubbled over in the last couple of years between members of the City Council and the current city attorney, Hydee Feldstein Soto.
During an interview earlier this month with CityWatch writer Mihran Kalaydjian, Feldstein Soto appeared to bristle at any proposal to convert the position she now holds into an appointed one.
“Charter reform is good,” Feldstein Soto told Kalaydjian. “What do I not want? I don't want my office to become appointed, and I think that if they do that it will be a poison pill in the entire charter reform process.”
Feldstein Soto has not responded to The LA Reporter’s requests for comment made over the last two weeks.
The Los Angeles Charter Reform Commission is expected to take up the issue of the City Attorney’s role soon. Diego Andrades, who chairs the commission’s Government Structure Committee, said they plan to take up the issue at their committee meetings, which are scheduled to begin next week. A schedule for when specific topics will be taken up should be released “shortly,” Andrades said.
Raman and McOsker’s suggestions to the Charter Reform Commission carry special weight. The panel recommendations on changes to the wide-ranging city charter are set to be sent in early 2026 to the City Council and the Mayor to be considered for inclusion in a ballot measure.
In addition to proposing changes to the commission, McOsker has also authored a motion with Councilmember Katy Yaroslavsky that calls for city analysts to explore different models for city officials to receive legal services, related in part to concerns over ballooning liabilities and legal settlement amounts the city faces. That motion instructs staff to draw up recommendations to send to the Charter Reform Commission. The council file for that motion can be found here.
While McOsker is among a handful of City Council members who have endorsed Feldstein Soto for re-election, he has also been among the more vocal in his criticisms of specific actions by the City Attorney’s Office.
In stunning committee remarks he made back in June 2024, McOsker openly fumed, saying he took “deep offense” to ballot measure language — related to the rules around firing police officers — that ignored his motion’s original instructions and that had been dropped on the City Council at the last minute.
More recently, McOsker expressed dissatisfaction over not being alerted about ballooning costs from an outside attorney retained to represent the city on a major homelessness case. His spokesperson told the LA Times last month the council member hadn’t been notified of a hefty $1.8 million bill for two weeks of work from an outside law firm, Gibson Dunn, that the city hired to represent the city for the case, despite McOsker and others instructing the City Attorney’s Office provide regular updates to the City Council.
The costs of the Gibson Dunn contract has since grown by millions more. Last month, the City Attorney’s Office asked for another $5 million for the Gibson Dunn contract. This week, a committee approved up to $5 million for the contract.
One of Feldstein Soto’s election opponents, Marissa Roy, ascribed the reason for the attention on the City Attorney’s role to the conduct of Feldstein Soto herself. She said that it’s due to the “gross overreach of this current city attorney, beginning with her overspending millions of dollars on pricey law firms without proper notice to council” and going into other issues such as the rejection of a contract for free tenant legal services, and advocating for a a donor to her campaign to monitor a failing affordable housing provider.
Meanwhile, Aida Ashouri, another challenger to Feldstein Soto, said she did not think major changes needed to be made to the City Attorney’s role, which she said should be kept an elected one.
Instead, she said that any abuses made by anyone assuming the City Attorney’s role could be countered with changes to the way the City Council is structured, such as by decreasing the size of each district and increasing the number of members on council. She said that she believes that would strengthen the power of the council in pushing back, because people on the council would be more representative of constituents. Ashouri said that an elected position would be more “impartial” and free of political influence.
The progressive political organization LA Forward has expressed a position on the City Attorney’s Office that is similar to what Raman and McOsker are proposing.
The group’s educational arm LA Forward Institute, which is separate from LA Forward, sued the city amid the Venice Dell affordable housing project in Venice getting stalled. In LA Forward Institute’s lawsuit, Feldstein Soto and the City Attorney’s Office are described as playing key roles in blocking the project.
David Levitus, the groups’ executive director, says that even outside of people’s feelings on the current City Attorney’s actions, there are larger reasons for why that position might need to be changed up in the city charter.
Levitus said he believes the City Attorney’s Office has too many duties tied into one role. “The office is too big,” he said. “It's too sprawling.
Instead, he suggested, the role could be split up into as many as three — an appointed counsel that represents the city in lawsuits, an office that drafts ordinances similar to California’s Office of Legislative Counsel, and a city prosecutor — since it can be difficult to elect one person who can handle all of those duties well.
“You might elect someone because you like them as a prosecutor, but what do they know about municipal law or vice versa?”