This week, The LA Reporter is debuting The Doughnut Shop Interviews, a series in which we interview a major figure in local politics at a neighborhood doughnut shop. The LA Reporter also chats with people frequenting the doughnut shop about their views on the same topics.
For the first interview in this series, The LA Reporter talked to Raymond Meza, chair of a commission that’s helping to rewrite the Los Angeles city charter, and interviewed shop regulars at Monterey Donut in northeast Los Angeles about how they think changes to the charter could improve things in their community.
Meza, who is deputy chief-of-staff for the labor union SEIU 721, described the opportunity to sit on the Los Angeles Charter Reform Commission as “awe-inspiring” and a “privilege.” The last time comprehensive revisions were made to the charter was in 1999.
Any changes made to a city charter has the potential to shift politics in Los Angeles in a different direction — because it can change the powers of elected officials, how elections are conducted, what ethics laws are adopted and many other rules around city governance.
Ideas being floated now to the commission include increasing the number of LA City Council members; shifting city elections to ranked-choice voting or to process in which voters can rank candidates using a star system, similar to the type used for a Yelp review; strengthening oversight and the discipline process in the Los Angeles Police Department; and streamlining development project approvals so that they aren’t as subject to pushback from neighbors as long as they meet existing guidelines.
Looming over the commission is the leaked tape scandal that led to the resignation of a City Council president after she was caught in a recording with other council members and a labor leader discussing the idea of rigging district seats to ensure some of their political futures, all in a conversation filled with racist and homophobic banter.
The Los Angeles Charter Reform Commission was also formed amid a string of past and ongoing scandals over the past decade in which council members faced corruption charges and in some cases were convicted of them. Other troubles may become motivating factors for bringing about change through the charter — such as a financial crisis driven by growing personnel costs and high liability costs often out of the Los Angeles Police Department that had leaders planning to lay off more than 1,600 city employees, which have been since been called off following labor negotiations, and slashing away many city services. So there are ideas to reform the budgeting process and to plan better around city projects and the delivery of services.
The LA Reporter spoke to Meza at Monterey Donut, a beloved local spot in the small neighborhood of Hermon where every patron who walked in greeted the owner, Mrs. Lee, like their friend or family member. Some were residents of nearby communities like Highland Park, Monterey Hills, and El Sereno who grew up or spent years going to her shop, with one couple saying they spent one of their anniversaries there.
Manuel Berru, a longtime resident of the area who now lives in El Sereno, told The LA Reporter it would “be a blessing” if the charter reform commission were able to push through changes that bring accountability to the LAPD.
“I grew up here,” Berru said. “I see the way [the LAPD] operate. They're a little gang. They have laws behind them, but they have little cliques. And they do what they want to do, and get away with more than they should.”
Rachel, who walked into the doughnut shop with a sleeping newborn in a carrier, pointed to a growing number of young families moving into the area and said the city officials don’t seem to have caught up on that fact. She sees this in how there does not seem to be a good way for busy young families to weigh in on changes proposed in their community — including around installing stop signs and speed bumps or what amenities get put into their parks. She says she is also concerned about people experiencing mental health issues in the community, and says she wishes there were ways to learn more from public officials about how to help.
Usually it’s the people “with the loudest voices,” or at least those in the neighborhood who are retired and may have more time to go to meetings, who are being heard, she said.
“The city officials made an effort, but didn't think about appropriate times or appropriate ways to reach out to parents, you know, or like, the whole community — not just like, who can make it [out to meetings],” she said.
During his chat with The LA Reporter, Meza quickly inhaled a chocolate-glazed French cruller as he broke down the task that’s before the LA Charter Reform Commission over the next few months.
He said that changes to the charter is important for everyone in Los Angeles because it affects city services and public spaces like parks and streets. Those things affect quality of life, he said, and the question he thinks people in Los Angeles can ask around the charter include, “What do you want to see your city excel at? What do you want to see be done better in [your] city?”
Meza, who was born and raised in Montecito Heights by a single mother, and spent many evenings eating dinner at his grandmother’s house in Highland Park where the 20/20 news show with Barbara Walters was always on.
He describes himself as an “advocate who has worked for a labor union my entire adult life.”
He is part of a commission of 12 people. They are "really a citizens commission,” he said, and none of the members on the commission currently have served in public office.
“It is a benefit that this commission can say there are people literally like yourself … who care about the city, who love the city, who are doing their best,” he said.
There is supposed to be 13 members, but one seat is vacant. Their commission had a late start because the mayor and other city leaders dragged their feet on appointing people to fill the commission seats. And in the initial meetings during the first several months, commissioners were slow in diving into discussions about the policy issues before them, instead focusing more on how meetings and committees are set up and run.
They are on a schedule that has them submitting their final recommendations by early spring to the City Council and the mayor, who ultimately decides which — if any — of the recommended changes get placed on the ballot.
That means the commission has seven months, just over half a year, to come up with its recommendations — a short turnaround for examining complex charter language and deciding on what changes are best.
And the fact that the commission is only advisory, and has few levers of power — other than public sentiment, perhaps — is another layer of difficulty for the commission’s efforts, since they have to decide on a strategy for convincing city leaders that their set of proposals should be placed on the ballot.
Meza said in the interview that he wanted to “be honest” and set realistic expectations for the public about what they will actually be able to accomplish — he does not think they’ll be able to tackle LA’s biggest issues to the extent that many people would like.
But he added that the team that’s now assembled to study and recommend changes to the city charter will “do our best, we're going to work extremely hard, we're going to work more than humanly possible to get the work done.”
“It's a huge privilege, it's a huge honor — I feel that every single day,” he added. “I know a lot of other commissioners do too. And I think it's a good driving force to do the best that we can.”
Below are Meza’s responses from the interview on various issues on which the charter may play a role.
Housing: Meza pointed to housing as one of the hot-button issues before the commission, on which many people could be divided in Los Angeles if changes are proposed to how housing can be built. Some of the changes being proposed to the charter reform commission are aimed at increasing the number of housing units built in a city that is often more known for its spread out nature and single-family communities.
“There are people who could say that we need to build as many … housing units as possible … to address the high cost of housing in the city of Los Angeles,” he said. “And there are people who are going to disagree with that for a variety of reasons.”
While Meza said that as the Charter Reform Commission, “if the City Council or a Planning Commission makes a decision that they want to build something, then we want to make it easy for them.”
“We're looking at all the different steps that need to be done in order for there to be development of various sizes in the city of Los Angeles, and we're looking to see if there are any rules that either city officials or elected officials have potentially used to hinder the ability to develop in Los Angeles, and try to address some of those concerns,” he said.
Giving Los Angeles constituents more of a voice, and tackling corruption: Meza said that part of the reason a proposal to increase the number City Council members, is because people don’t feel like they have a political voice or much of a say on what their elected representative does. The theory is that with more council members, each would end up having smaller districts and represent fewer constituents, who would have a closer relationship to their elected representatives.
“A lot of advocates believe, and I think make compelling points, that increasing the amount of city council members will help in this area,” Meza said.
He also said the commission wants to try to address corruption by building things into the charter to help “detect corruption earlier.” That might include creating a public advocate position (a role that another major city, New York, has long incorporated that serves as a non-voting member that serves as a city watchdog), or a citywide inspector general position.
He added that the City Ethics Commission will be presenting recommendations “that we feel could provide tools” for addressing corruption.
And he said that “providing clarity on the removal of elected officials will also serve as a little bit of an additional deterrence to potential corruption.” That idea was born out of experiences in the past few years in which city leaders and others have been inconsistent in suspending and removing council members faced with corruption-related indictments or charges, and locked into drawn-out policy and legal debates over ways to fill vacancies after members have been removed. The problem around those issues have been pinned on vague language in the charter, and so one governance group, Fair Rep LA, presented models to the commission on more straightforward language used by many other cities that spell out what to do if a city leader gets accused of something or gets into some type of trouble.
LAPD discipline and accountability: Meza said it makes “a lot of sense” to look into the role of the LAPD, especially given the many questions around whether the local law enforcement agency was assisting or permitting the activities of federal enforcement officials — such as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Patrol and other Department of Homeland Security officials — during President Donald Trump’s immigration-related raids in Los Angeles.
Meza pointed to his recent experience during this summer’s raids, during which he helped — in his role as deputy chief of staff for SEIU 721 — to get “community partners from all over the city” to participate in daily marches to the federal courthouse, where the detention center was located. He said he also coordinated the logistics for a rally to call for David Huerta, president of SEIU California — which represents nurses, janitors and public sector employees, including LA city and county workers — to be freed after he was arrested by federal officials.
Through those experiences, he “witnessed a lot of the violence that took place … We were very concerned about what was going to happen with all the different law enforcement agencies, whether that was the LAPD, the National Guard, the Marines that were brought in. And so I've seen it first hand, and I understand why advocates are asking the [Charter Reform] commission to look into it, and the commission is going to be looking into it.”
But he also brought up the Christopher Commission, which was formed in the 1990s after the Rodney King beating, as being instructive for the current situation. He pointed to how that commission’s report called for “civilian oversight” of the LAPD, and “one of the reasons why is because there are pros and cons to having elected officials oversee the police department. No one can ever really guarantee the political dynamics of the City Council.”
And Meza pointed to the thorniness, and the complexity of the issue of public safety and the LAPD, saying that presents a challenge for the charter reform commission, which has seven months to create a set of recommendations.
“Just like housing, [with] public safety, there is a wide variety of opinions in Los Angeles,” Meza said. “I think there's going to be a lot of diversity of opinion on this topic, and I'm not scared of that, on any topic. I think it's important, it's people's rights, it's what should be done.”
“But I'm raising this just to say that it is a complex issue, and the commission is going to do its best to get a recommendation out in the amount of time that we have,” he said.
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