🐦 The LA Reporter, Issue 21: LA's history of political scandals prompts charter reform recommendations

The Charter Reform Commission's final report that dropped on Thursday goes straight to the point in the first few pages. According to the report, their panel was formed after a decade of corruption scandals, including FBI raids and investigations that have led to federal bribery and corruption charges against elected officials. Some of those cases have led to convictions. And there was the leaked LA Fed audio of powerful leaders scheming in the fall of 2021 to rig the political game board, during the redistricting process.

“Los Angeles did not arrive at charter reform because of one bad headline or one bad politician," the report states. “It got here because many Angelenos came to believe that City Hall had become too hard to trust, too hard to follow, and too easy for insiders to work.” The commission's report diagnosed the problem as structural, hence the need for reform at LA city's structural roots, its charter.

The members of the 13-person commission are now expected to go to LA city's leaders to pitch their recommendations for placement on the November 2026 ballot. If the City Council and mayor decide to take up these proposals, or any others they may have in mind, to voters, they would need to decide by June 17. 

The 300-page report picks out several major reforms to highlight. They include expanding the City Council from 15 to 25 members, moving the city to ranked choice voting in elections, and enabling city leaders to lower the voting age to 16. The reforms also include locking in a minimum, protected public infrastructure budget  and doubling the protected budget now in place for the Department of Recreation and Parks. 

The reforms also include a few ways to tackle LA’s budget troubles — including a recommendation for a chief financial officer position to be created, and moving the city from an annual budget planning schedule to a two-year timeline that gives leaders more breathing room to assess how to allocate funds.

They also recommend splitting up the City Attorney's office into two — creating a city prosecutor and a city attorney. This proposal is vehemently opposed by the current City Attorney, Hydee Feldstein Soto. 

And they are presenting charter language that would grant the Los Angeles City Council direct power over the Los Angeles Police Department — an authority that currently belongs to the Board of Police Commissioners, the members of which are appointed by the mayor. 

That last item almost didn't even make it onto the Charter Reform Commission's plate, after the panel’s executive director expressed doubts there was much time for the commission to take up the politically sensitive and weighty topic. 

But police accountability was among the top priorities of Angelenos that the Charter Reform Commission heard throughout the last nine months. And the report reflects that by including “police accountability” as among a short list of key issues that Angelenos told them were important. 

Other things the panel heard was that "representation matters," which they said should be addressed by enlarging the council. They were also told that elections ought to offer real choices, rather than force people to choose the "lesser of two evils," a reference to the recommendation for ranked choice voting. Angelenos also highlighted a weak ethics enforcement system, the city’s broken infrastructure, and underfunded parks system, as among their priorities, according to the report.

An interesting side note about this report: While the charter language in the package were all approved by members of the commission, the narrative and report that was packaged around them had not gone back to the commission for approval. The commission held their last meeting on March 24, before a draft of the report was completed.

You can read the report here, and the new council file opened for the report can be found here, with any actions taken around it expected to be logged there (Charter Reform matters were previously part of the 23-1027 council file series). Additional materials about the proposals and charter reform process can also be viewed on their website here.

Also just released is a Los Angeles Housing Department report recommending technical amendments to Measure ULA. The recommendations were largely made in response to concerns that Measure ULA “may increase costs associated with assembling financing or potentially delay loan closings,” in turn slowing down or even preventing affordable housing projects from being built. LAHD brought together “multiple working group meetings with key stakeholders including the United to House LA (UHLA) Coalition, Southern California Association of Non-Profit Housing (SCANPH), the broader affordable housing lending community, and the ULA Citizen Oversight Committee (COC), in order to collaboratively develop and vet a set of proposed technical amendments that would address lender constraints while also ensuring that the intent ofULA is upheld,” according to the report.

This week got to a rollicking start with Loyola Marymount University’s poll showing mayoral candidate Nithya Raman leading. Now, a new UCLA poll released at the end of the week, on Friday, reflected that there will be “volatility” in what happens in the next couple months in the lead up to the June 2 primary. This poll, conducted during the second half of March, found that significant 40% chunk of likely primary voters are undecided on who they’ll vote for. The poll surveyed 813 such voter. And this poll does restore the crown of leading candidate to Mayor Karen Bass, with 25% of respondents saying they would vote for. That was followed by Spencer Pratt with 11% and Nithya Raman with 9%. Rae Huang and Adam Miller were each at 3%. FM3 Research conducted the survey by phone and online. The poll was funded by the UCLA Luskin’s Los Angeles Initiative (which is headed up by former Los Angeles County supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky) and California Community Foundation.

City Council member Eunisses Hernandez sent out a campaign email this week pointing to three upcoming debates, saying that these are the “first real, public debates since candidates officially qualified for the ballot.” Hernandez also pointed to an earlier Streets for All debate in which all of the other candidates “mysteriously dropped out.” Meanwhile, there has been a call for candidates in one of the upcoming debates to drop out, with Nelson Grande and Sylvia Robledo issuing statements saying that they have decided not to participate in the April 9 Franklin High School PTSA debate at Franklin High School. A post that went up Thursday on the Instagram account for the Franklin PTSA now states that “previous PTSA post was used to share inaccurate and biased information with the implication that the PTSA is endorsing a candidate. We requested that the content be removed, but that request was not honored.” This post came about a week after another Instagram account had used a flyer for the April 9 forum in a post urging “all candidates for CD1 NOT to show up to this debate.” 

The budget advisory panel convened by City Council member Katy Yaroslavsky to study ways to generate revenue ideas for the city of Los Angeles will be meeting again today at 1 p.m. On the agenda is a presentation from City Controller Kenneth Mejia and an overview of the numerous, varied and often mysterious special fund accounts that the city keeps in its coffers. Special funds have long been a pet subject of the Budget and Finance Advisory Committee’s chair, Ron Galperin, who is himself a former City Controller.

LA city paid a vendor, Makai Solutions, $460,972 for vehicle lifts that were never delivered, according to a report released Thursday, April 2, by the City Controller’s Fraud, Waste & Abuse unit. The payment was authorized verbally, which was against rules in the city charter, by a superintendent who no longer works for the city. The rationale given for sending payment before receiving the product was “chaotic” situation created by supply chain delays during the pandemic. The city never got the lifts from Makai Solutions, “despite numerous follow-up attempts.” The report also states that “although the incident took place during a difficult period for citywide operations, safeguards remained in place to protect the City from non-delivery of purchased items. FWA [Fraud, Waste, & Abuse] investigators found that GSD staff circumvented several internal controls in order to authorize the prepayment to the vendor.”

The LA Reporter, and LA Material, reported this week on Controller’s race candidate Zach Sokoloff raising alarms that his opponent received $265K in matching funds due to a change in the qualification process. Sokoloff’s campaign consultant Rick Taylor said they did not decline a debate in writing, because doing so would have allowed City Controller Kenneth Mejia to hold a town hall as a way to qualify for the funds. This isn’t the first time a candidate appeas to have tried to “game” the process around the debate requirement for matching funds, according to Mar Vista Voice, in a piece that references the 2022 election in Council District 1 when then-incumbent Gil Cedillo received a check for matching funds despite refusing to debate his opponent Eunisses Hernandez (who eventually won the election and is the current City Council member).

Los Angeles Public Press’s Phoenix Tso provides a peak inside the cancellation of a Read Palestine Week event that was first reported by The LA Reporter. That talk, which had been scheduled for last Dec. 6, 2025, was to have been a talk between Jenan Matari, author of the children’s book Everything Grows in Jiddo’s Garden, and Nora Lester Murad, who wrote the young adult book, Ida in the Middle. Tso writes that an LA Public Library employee had “included links about the guests, Palestinian writer Jenan Matari and Jewish American writer Nora Lester Murad, calling them evidence of their ‘anti-Jewish hate.’”

Adam Rose, deputy director of deputy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, recently went to the No Kings rally to see how well LAPD was adhering to a federal injunction requiring the agency to allow reporters to cover protests. Rose said he witnessed the LAPD violating the injunction.

NoHo Locals is hosting two LA mayoral candidates, Nithya Raman and Rae Huang, at their next locals night at the North Hollywood brewery, Lawless Brewing. Those planning to attend were asked to RSVP here.

Thank you for reading. If you have any tips, corrections, suggestions or musings for The LA Reporter, please send them to [email protected].

If you like what I do and want to keep The LA Reporter in the field, you can provide financial support to me here. And if you want a sticker with my logo on it, include your email in your Ko-Fi tip message to me! Feel free to make the message private.