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"Pay no attention to those men behind the curtains": An ethical examination of Los Angeles charter reform activities 1996--1999 by use of crisis management

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"Pay no attention to those men behind the curtains": An ethical examination of Los Angeles charter reform activities 1996--1999 by use of crisis management

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Content “Pav no attention to those men behind the curtains”:
An Ethical Examination of Los Angeles Charter Reform
Activities 1996-1999 by Use of Crisis Management
by
Michael Anthony O ’Malley
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(Religion and Social Ethics)
May 2001
Copyright 2001 Michael A. O’Malley
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UM! Number: 3 0 2 7 7 5 9
UMI
UMI Microform 3027759
Copyright 2001 by Bell & Howell Information and Learning Company.
All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against
unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code.
Bell & Howell Information and Learning Company
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UNIVERSITY OF SO U TH ERN C A LIFO R N IA
THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY PARK
LOS ANGELES. CALIFORNIA 90007
This dissertation written by
MlcME L AtiTtfD/jy o 'm IIeY
under the direction of hJaft..... Dissertation
Committee; and approved by all its members,
has been presented to and accepted by The
Graduate School in partial fulfillm ent of re
quirements for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Dean o f Graduate Studies
Date M ay. .IX .% .2 Q Q X .
DISSERTATION COMMITTEE
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of Tables iv
Abstract v
Forward vii
Chapter One - Background 1
Introduction 1
Method of Study - Grounded Theory 2
Case Model - Crisis Management (CM) 7
Overview of the Subsequent Chapters 16
Chapter Two - Los Angeles Background 19
Political Culture 20
Economic Culture 32
Cultural Culture 38
LA Conclusions 43
LA Charter History 54
Calendar of LA Charter reform events 68
Comparison of Governance Systems 72
Chapter Three - Theme I - Crisis Management and Rationalization 79
CM and The Charter 79
Rationalization and the Corporate Culture 88
Events through a CM Lens 96
Chapter Four - Theme II - Consensus (Can’t we all just get along”) 118
The bill of rights 118
Council Size 127
Singular Document 132
Consensus 136
Scope of Participation 142
Chapter Five - Theme III - Government as Machine 161
Mayor’s Hiring and Firing of General Managers 161
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Compartmentalization
Leadership and Personnel
168
175
Chapter Six - Theme IV - NBCs as Reform 198
NBCs as Panacea 198
Representation 210
Chapter Seven - Analysis and Conclusions of the Case 224
Summary of Findings 224
Designed to Fail or Create Crisis 233
The Design Flaws are One Focus of Ethical Inquiry 245
Chapter Eight - Speculative and Scholarly Alternatives 252
Framing Models for Alternatives 252
Alternative Ways 265
Russell Model Alternative 266
Radical Individualism/Civic Embeddedment Alternative 278
Bibliography 289
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LIST OF TABLES
Table 2-1 - National Income Disparity Figures 1977 and 1999 37
Table 2-2 - Organizational Chart of the City of Los Angeles 1996 62
Table 2-3 - Chart of Major LA Charter Reform Studies 65-66
Table 2-3 - LA Charter Reform 1850 - 1997 66-67
Table 2-4 - Charter Reform Calendar 69-71
Table 2-5 - Council Size in Major US Cities 74
Table 2-6 - Council Size in Major California Cities 74-75
Table 4-1 - District Size in California and Los Angeles 130
Table 5-1 - Defections from the Appoint Charter Commission 185-186
Table 8-1 - UST Design Structure Implementation Matrix 271
iv
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ABSTRACT
Good management is an ethical concern. The case o f Los Angeles,
California’s (LA’s) charter reform activities from 1996-1999 provided an opportunity
to evaluate the ethical consequences of the corporate ideas o f a city’s civic
management by examining the assumptions, methods, and results o f LA’s activities.
This dissertation employs Grounded Theory and Crisis Management to ascertain the
degree to which the city’s charter reform activities responded effectively to the crises
which had sparked them.
The dissertation begins with an overview o f LA’s historical values which
yields a portrait of a city dominated by a private ethos overseen by a typically
structured, yet feudalistic, municipal government. The riots of 1992 revealed that the
city had foundational civic problems which required its social management
assumptions to be questioned. Still, rather than respond to this legitimacy crisis, city
managers chose to react to a legal crisis because their corporate cultural
understanding knew how to supervise a legal crisis but was threatened by a legitimacy
crisis. This resulted in a rationalizing reform process which was overly narrow,
obscured potentially helpful signals, and created no enhanced crisis preparation for the
city.
Further evaluation of the themes of consensus, ‘government as machine’, and
Neighborhood Councils (NBCs) demonstrated that charter reform became a contest
between groups of elites within an accepted management oligarchy which was masked
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by the appearance of consensus. The use of a mechanical approach to reform pre
packaged relationships between ideas and groups thereby blocking certain warning
signs, devaluing others, and identifying persons vulnerable to scapegoating. Finally,
LA’s new NBC system lacks sufficient independence to create the dynamic tension
required for it to serve as a check on these hegemonic civic managers.
The dissertation concludes that the best hope for improved corporate
performance lay in the inclusion of design elements currently missing from LA’s civic
management system. These elements are holism, self-examination, and
transformation. These elements are characteristics of the study o f social ethics. Since
Unbounded Systems Theory integrates these missing social ethical elements into
corporate management, it was used as the basis for creating two speculative models
of civic management.
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FORWARD
It may take a village to raise a child, but it takes a civilization to edudate a
scholar. No scholar can accomplish anything in a vacuum; we are all beholden to
those that have gone before us, inspired us, and laid a foundation for us. The purpose
o f this forward is to thank those who have served this role in my life. Chief amongst
them is my dissertation committee. Dr. Ian MitrofFs work provided the basis for my
research and gave me academic direction and vision. Jonathan Kotler, J.D., has been
a mentor and friend in addition to an example o f how one living in an abstract world
can still fight the good fight in the real world. Finally, my chair, Dr. William May, has
afford me lessons in discipline and rigor; without his seriousness of purpose, this work
would have been much different and not nearly as good.
There have been other academic supporters and mentors to whom I owe
thanks. Dr. H. Eric Schockman has been invaluable. Dr.’s Xandra Kayden, Stephen
Erie, and James Ingram III have provided political insights and personal support.
Academic support has come from Dr.’s Aditi Gowri, Terry Copper, Stephen Toulmin,
Dallas Willard, Marvin Kaiser, John Crossley, John Orr, Jennifer Wolch, Jo Ann
Farver, and Mark Ridley-Thomas; and I am in their debt. Additionally, I have been
fortunate in being able to discuss my ideas with colleagues; I wish to offer them my
appreciation. They include: Belinda Lum, David Armstrong, George Abdo, Swasti
Bhattacharyya, Peter Brau, Dr. Steve Byars, Ruth Cecire, Royce Gurbic, Liora
Gubkin, Roger and Martha Gustafson, Dr. Joel Heim, Doug Harrison, Rev. Glenn
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Libby, Dr. Barbara McGraw, Scott Metzler, Bradley Myers, Dr. Scott Smith, Peter
Spoto, and Cleve Stevens.
I owe acknowledgment to several others who have been supportive of my
efforts. To the staffs of the USC Religion and Social Ethics department, of the USC
Writing Program - who allowed me to learn to teach - and of the USC Graduate
School - who kept me afloat during my years o f study - I am deeply appreciative.
Similarly the staffs of the two charter commissions were helpful in allowing me
access to people and information that was vital to this work. The staff of Councilman
Ridley-Thomas and he himself deserve a special thank you for putting me firmly on
this road and supporting my efforts.
My final, and deepest, statement o f gratitude is reserved for Jacqueline Dawn
Yount who not only proofread every page of all of the drafts of this work, but whose
love, support, and patience was the one thing without which I could not have
succeeded in this endeavor.
Los Angeles, December 2000
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CHAPTER 1 - BACKGROUND
INTRODUCTION
“For the destructive, paralyzed ‘Third World’ where I have spent most of my
life, it is important, simply, that such a possibility as Los Angeles exists” (444). These
are the words o f Eastern European reporter Ryszard Kapuscinski, and they capture
well the motivation behind this study. The case of the City o f Los Angeles’s 1996 -
1999 charter reform activities is of social importance for many reasons. The sheer size
of the city and its preeminence in American and world culture deem any serious
examination o f its governmental structure as noteworthy. But as insinuated above,
there is a more normative reason which contributes to the significance of this study,
and it centers more around LA’s position in relation to the future than it does around
the present. This normative reason is that the LA city charter would be creating not
merely a municipal corporate management structure for the residents of southern
California, but it could also be offering a model for others seeking solutions to their
own civic strife and an alternative to the historical paths of oppression and violence.
This is because LA is a defmer, an advocate, and an exporter of values throughout the
world.
LA is already the largest US city without a majority population; one of its
nicknames is the “capital of the Third World”. This multi-ethnic situation will only
increase and replicate itself elsewhere as globalism increases. Our largest state,
California, is on the verge of becoming, and indeed some governmental figures say it
has already become, a state with no majority population. Will this diversity lead to
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situations like Rwanda, Bosnia, Chiapas, or East Timor? If we are to avoid this
increased diversity creating quagmires full of social splintering and strife, it will be
because the governmental structures of these areas will be at Once flexible enough to
accept difference while still being socially legitimate enough to maintain order. This
issue was at the core of LA’s charter challenge; how it met that challenge would
create a model on which others locales could draw in the next century. It could have
created a blueprint for growth or for entropy. If one of the richest, best educated,
most communication savvy, and desirable locations in the world could not make its
social order work, what chances do the poverty stricken areas with few resources and
long histories of conflict have?
So, the case o f the City of Angels’s governmental review on the most
fundamental of levels was and is important beyond its mere political intricacies. Local
experts such as Dr. Xandra Kayden and Erwin Chemerinsky have already done such
political analyses. However, LA charter reform has not been thoroughly examined
from the normative, value exporting perspective suggested above; such an analysis is
the intent of this work.
METHOD OF STUDY - GROUNDED THEORY
In order to achieve the normative analysis suggested above, we need to
examine the 1996 - 1999 LA charter activities from a wider sweep than the merely
political; we need to employ an ethical perspective. We do not do this by bringing to
this study a pre-conceived judgement on the ethical merits of LA’s actions during this
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period; rather, we seek to clarify the features and structures of these actions in a
manner that offers us an explication of the values and assumptions employed by those
involved. Then, we can evaluate these actions and assumptions in terms of competing
ideals of the public good. This is an ethical diagnosis. In more academic language, in
stressing the values exported we are utilizing consequential analysis; we are
employing the results of the reform effort to uncover the formalistic assumptions or
underlaying values of the reform process. We can then examine the appropriateness
o f those assumptions and values for good public management by using a model o f
corporate management. We do this to test a hypothesis that I developed very early in
the reform process. The hypothesis was that the truly important issues of our civil
union, such as justice, liberty, and equality in which our political pedigree is founded,
were not merely lacking in the debate, but that we were incapable o f making such
issues a meaningful part of the public debate. It seemed to me that they had been
excluded from the discussion by design. This was particularly odd as a charter
discussion was more open to foundational questions that most political discussion as
it was liberated from the restriction of having to say within the parameters of
established civic law. In order to test this observation, this analysis was conceived.
We will employ a specific method designed to achieve just such an analysis. It
is called Crisis Management, or CM; and, it is especially well suited to our
examination. It utilizes the same type of emergence technique to which we aspire.
This type of thinking draws on the insights of a sociological method called, Grounded
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Theory. Its derivation is described this way by Dr. Barney Glaser in the seminal
book, Basics o f Grounded Theory, “the fundamentals o f Grounded Theory, the
underlying analytic methodology, are in very large measure drawn from the analytic
methodology and procedures of inductive quantitative analysis laboriously discovered
by researchers and students in the Department o f Sociology and the Bureau of
Applied Social Research at Columbia University in the 50's and 60's” (7). As the name
suggests, the focus of this method of inquiry is to critically analyze a set of data in a
manner that permits conclusions to be ‘driven by the data’ or ‘grounded in the facts’
rather than molding the data to fit a conceptual or mathematical model as is too often
the situation in the case of applied or statistical analyses. The thrust is to understand
emerging insights rather than forcing ideals onto a reality that is not suited for them;
the subtitle of the book is “Emergence vs. Forcing”. Glaser states this focus quite
plainly, “Let us be clear, the whole of grounded theory is based on emergent patterns
... Grounded Theory is systematically and purposely focused on emergent patterns
consistent with its attended joy of discovery” (85).
He goes on to summarize the process a few pages later:
In grounded theory the analyst humbly allows the data to control him
as much as humanly possible, by writing a theory for only what
emerges through his skilled induction. The integration of his
substantive theory as it emerges through coding and sorting is his
verification that the hypotheses and concepts fit and work and are
relevant enough to suggest. They are not proven; they are theory. (87)
This is the aspiration of this case study. The theoretical conclusions that arise from
this case, do just that: they come out of the case. The intent is to “keep it real,” to
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adopt a popular phrase of critique use by undergraduates in the 1990's; or to put it
more scholarly, “The facts, it is often said, speak for themselves. They do not always
speak clearly, however, nor are they self-interpreting” (Rubenstein and Roth 292).
This study is not directed at the creation of a master theory or new philosophy; its
conclusions are solely a function of this case.
What is the data of the case? The sources from which we will construct this
case study may be classified as being from one of three principle groups. The primary
source material was the activities of the two LA Charter Commissions. This includes
the hundreds of hours of meetings over the last four years of both the 21 member City
of Los Angeles Charter Reform Commission, or Appointed Commission (henceforth
denoted as the ACC), and the 15 member Elected Los Angeles Charter Reform
Commission (sic), or the Elected Commission (henceforth denoted as the ECC).
Further, these groups have produced a great amount of textual support materials - the
most significant o f these are the 1925 and 1999 Charters themselves; and, there are
media accounts o f their actions as well. The second type o f source is the words of
those involved; these meetings were matters of public record, the media coverage of
the reform activities was extensive, and almost all of the key players in these
proceedings were very open to questioning throughout the length of the reform
activities. This included commission members, staffs, public officials, organizational
leaders, and academics. Many of their statements will be utilized mainly as subtext.
The third source of data on which we will base our analysis is important secondary
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texts. Many writings on pertinent subjects, including works on Los Angeles,
American political history, political theory and practice, sociology, philosophy, ethics,
law, and urban planning will provide insights and background we need to shift
through the various perspectives and arguments that are a part o f the case data; a
complete bibliography is included at the end of this work. The intent here is to digest
the data as it was so that it could then be integrated into the ethical sensitivity sought
as per our Grounded Theory method. “The requisite conceptual skills for doing
grounded theory are to absorb the data as data, to be able to step back or distance
oneself from it, and then to abstractly conceptualize the data;” this is our goal (11).
But, this strong grounding in the real world is but one o f the advantages of the
adoption of this methodology. Another advantage that it offers us by Grounded
Theory is its ability to utilize the gaps in the data as data. With quantitative data, you
can only make judgements on what is in front of you; but, often times, especially in
politics, what is the most telling or significant is what is not said. Such omissions
played an important role in this charter case. From the patterns emerging from the
data, categories and themes can be identified. These themes point to the assumptions
and values which give them substance and give meaning to their distinctions. These
assumptions and values are the basis for stories of justification which can then be
judged as either proper justifications or merely rationalizations and stories o f denial.
Stories of denial are often more easily observed by what is denied, not said, than what
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is said. Grounded Theory allows us to identify such stories by omissions. We will
employ a specific model of this method.
CASE MODEL - CRISIS MANAGEMENT (CM)
The ideas of Grounded Theory have been used by Dr.’s Ian Mtroff, Christine
Pearson, and Katherine Harrington to create an applied ethics model for businesses
called Crisis Management or CM. Simply put, CM was created to assist corporate
managers in dealing more effectively with crisis in light o f the authors’ extensive
experience with organizations in with corporate crises. The model is explicated in
their book, The Essential Guide to Managing Crisis: A Step-by-Step Handbook for
Surviving Major Catastrophes. It was written in response to the dearth of quality
research on the subject; they saw the then-current handbooks and approaches to
managing crises wanting, and they sought to correct this significant oversight with
their own compilation. They begin: uThis book is for those that need to know the
essentials of crisis management, or CM. This includes all executives in key
management positions, no matter what their job of function or the size or nature o f
their organization. It is intended also for those who work in the public or not-for-
profit sector and those in the private for profit sector” (iii). While it certainly can be
argued that we all would profit by knowing how to deal effectively with crises, the
book was written with organizations in mind as it comes from a systems approach.
This means that it is focused on how systems, like corporations, are guided (or not as
the case may be) by those given charge for them in responding to threats to those
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systems. While GM is outlined and applied in the chapter on CM and the Charter,
there are some assumptions about which we need to be explicit in order to understand
how and why CM is a useful lens for our ethical case study. But, before that
explanation, a brief word of background on systems theory is in order.
Systems theory is the outgrowth of one basic insight: “It is well known that
group phenomena are in general very different from individual. Groups can influence
their individual members to take positions that by themselves none of the individuals
may support’’(Mitroff and Linstone 94); one need think no further than the ovens of
Auschwitz for confirmation of this. An indistinguishable assertion is made by the same
Dr. Ian Mitroff who authored the CM Handbook. In his book co-authored by Dr.
Harold Linstone, The Unbounded Mind: Breaking the Chains o f Traditional
Business Thinking, it is stated, “Groups can systematically distort both the gathering
and the resultant interpretation of important numbers, especially if significant
outcomes hang in the balance'’(94). This is at the core o f systems thinking; but its
origins are more formal and philosophical. Edgar Singer of the University of
Pennsylvania, "was one of the most important participates in the foundation of the
modem systems approach”(Mitroff and Linstone 92). “The upshot of Singer’s
analysis was that there were no elementary or simple acts in any science or
profession to which supposedly more complex situations could be reduced. Every act
or action preformed by humans was complex and therefore had within it a complex
series of other actions”(s/c Mitroff and Linstone 94).
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This meant that multiple parts and inputs needed to be considered if one
sought to understand all actions by and about humans. Further, “in a complex system
there is no way of getting outside it to reach a purely objective number that will
satisfy all parties'’ (Mitroff and Linstone 96-7). Systems theory emerged earlier in this
century as a foil to the modem, empirical, behavioral, objective approach to analysis
and was in response to the myopic failures of that approach, such as Nazi Germany,
nuclear weapons, income disparity, the Viet Nam war, the American economic
collapse in the 1970’s and so on. As a result, Singer developed a more encompassing
mode of inquiry. “This fundamental notion of interconnectedness, or nonseparability,
forms the basis of what has come to be known as the Systems Approach. In essence,
the Systems Approach postulates that since every problem humans face is
complicated, they must be perceived as such, that is, their complexity must be
recognized, if they are to be managed properly” (sic Mitroff and Linstone 95). This
systems approach is the intellectual soil out of which CM grows.
CM employs five major assumptions which serve to ground the model in
reality and ensure that the ideas, patterns, and themes generated by CM are a function
of emergence and not ideas being forced on the actions or realities of the case. These
assumptions also serve the same purpose for our case study and must be evaluated for
appropriateness to this function on this, the methodological, level. The first of these
assumptions is CM’s idea of threats to the system. It is borne out in CM’s definition
of crisis; CM claims, “There is no single, universally accepted, definition of a crisis,
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although there is general agreement that a crisis is an event that can destroy or affect
an entire organization” (Mitroff et al 7). This is further elaborated:
A crisis can affect the very existence of an organization, a major
product line, a business unit, or the like. A crisis can damage, perhaps
severely, an organization's financial performance. A crisis can also
harm the health and well-being of consumers, employees, the
surrounding community, and the environment itself. Finally, a crisis
can destroy the public’s trust or belief in an organization, its
reputation, and its image. (Mitroff et al 8)
This last point about public trust is especially applicable to a study of government;
but, the core methodological concept here is that the definition o f crisis cannot be
controlled by the organization even though the organization must have a label for it to
be able to speak about it. But, crises are not just uncontrollable; they are inevitable as
well. “The book is also guided by the assumption that in today’s world, it is not a
question of if or whether an organization will experience a crisis; it is only a matter of
what type of crisis will occur, what form it will take, and how and when it will
happen” (Mitroff et al 5).
Both of these framing propositions, and the next three as well, are subject to
empirical verification more than theoretical justification; they are grounded in reality
not abstract theory. From these first two postulates, the authors begin to assemble a
plan of action. This plan begins by identifying the third assumption of CM; it is that
preparation can have a positive impact on the future. “Based on our academic
research and professional consultations, we found the critical factor in determining
how well an organization will perform during a crisis is how well prepared it is before
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the crisis occurs” (Mitroff et al 6). This preparation has two dimensions to it. First,
there is the CM plan, ipse: second, there is the capacity for executing the plan. “In
other words, the best-formulated crisis plans,” the book avers, “will be useless if an
organization does not have the capacities required to handle a crisis. Indeed, an
organization may actually be worse off if it substitutes a set of crisis plans and/or the
ability to ‘think on its feet' for a competency in CM” (Mitroff et al 7).
This preparation is informed by the final two assumptions. The first of these
two is that preparation matters beyond its direct effects. “A helpful rule to bear in
mind is that there are no secrets in CM. In the event of a crisis, your organization’s
response to each of the preceding questions and issues not only will be discovered but
also will most likely be publicized. As a result, your ability to respond will become the
grounds on which your organization will be judged” (Mitroff et al 21). While private
corporations might have greater and more intense ability to control internal
information than public corporations, public corporations, which are the focus of this
case study, have next to no such ability. The American political culture thrives on
such disclosure as a source for political victories and attacks on opponents;
California, with its Brown Act that mandates an extremely high threshold of public
openness for all governmental activities, is even more dedicated to public disclosure
than most governments. This brings us to the final assumption that we need to
highlight about CM, one especially important for our examination, that CM is holistic.
“Effective CM is systematic ... [it] is not a function of how well an organization does
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on one part o f [CM] in isolation from the others, and it is not the sum o f separate
activities ... In a crisis, poor performance in one area is not compensated by
exceptional performance in another’ (Mitroff et a l 19-20). The authors make the
analogy of multiplying by zero, if any area of CM fails, it makes the entire equation
equal to that zero. Holism is important if we seek to make use of omissions in the
data; if our methodology was not all encompassing then these omissions would be
beyond our scope and remain unnoticed.
As stated, CM will be utilized in much greater detail in Chapter 3; but, for
now, these 5 assumptions (uncontrollability, inevitability, effectiveness of preparation,
disclosure, and holism) combine to ground our analysis and frame our activities in a
way to permit patterns of organizational action to emerge from the data. The degree
to which the assumptions underpinning these actions is invalid, will be the degree to
which the CM model is necessary; the degree to which the assumptions contradict
reality will be the degree to which the crisis is heightened and corporation is to blame
and is acting poorly. Despite the abstract lessons offered us by CM, these lessons are
not merely hypothetical matters. Very specific and individualistic problems are
identifiable; ''threats to the individual or the ‘self arise from the existence of a class of
organizations that can only be termed crisis prone ... These organizations play and
perpetuate a set of destructive "games’ that Mitroff and Puchant have identified that
literally threaten the physical and mental well being o f their workers” (Mitroff and
Linstone 156). Beyond the workers, the customers are threatened in additional ways;
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and, when the corporation is our public corporation, we are all those threaten
workers. These are ethical matters, and CM will be the inquiry system we use to
illuminate them.
One final methodological point remains to be made as it is of particular
importance to those professionals in the field of public administration. Is it
appropriate to employ a private sector model to a public corporation? Peter J.
Robertson and Sonal J. Seneviratne believe it is. In their article, “Outcomes of
planned organizational change in the public sector: a meta-analytical comparison to
the private sector,” in Public Administration Review, they claim that their, “Findings
suggest that, by and large, organizational interventions [of the systems approach type]
are just as successful in both sectors”(547). This is the case because “organizational
‘ publicness ’ can be viewed as a continuum, with any given organization characterized
as more or less public”(550). This conclusion reflects the nonseparability postulate of
the systems approach. These researchers aver:
with no consistent differences between the public and private
organizations, planned organizational change efforts potentially could
be equally successful in both arenas. Ultimately, o f course, this is an
empirical question, and two prior studies have addressed this issue. In
the first, Golembiewski, Proehl, and Sink (1981) examined the results
of 547 OD [organizational development] applications that used a wide
range of interventions taking place between 1945 and 1981. Their
analysis indicated that public sector interventions, which constituted 47
percent of the programs reviewed, displayed a pattern of results very
similar to the private sector programs. About 84 percent of the public
sector interventions generated positive (i.e., at least partially
successful) results, as compared to 89 percent in the private sector. A
more recent study by Park (1991) estimated the relative success rates
of a single category of interventions in public versus private
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organizations by examining the results of 154 cases of Quality Circle
utilization during the time period 1978 to 1988. The highest level of
success was found more frequently in private sector cases, and public
sector cases more frequently exhibited no positive change, but he
concluded that the overall success rates are substantial in both sectors
[thus] the efficacy of OD interventions is not limited by the public
nature of their context. (Robertson and Seneviratne 550)
So, not only can organizational development - systems approach - work in the private
sector, “These reviews of the OD evaluation literature suggest that, relative to the
private sector, the efficacy of OD interventions is not limited by the public nature of
their context” (Robertson and Seneviratne 551), according to these researchers. So,
real world evidence suggests strongly that CM is appropriate to this public case.
This being the case, what can we expect from CM as applied to this case by
extrapolation from the private sector experience? For this, we must turn again to
Mitroff and Linstone. In The Unbounded Mind, they re-vision corporations positing
that, “the modem factory and business corporation are Idea Systems”(4). The
utilization of CM requires a new perspective on corporate industries as service-driven
rather than manufacturing or product-driven.
The Service Factory rejects the idea that factories must have four walls
that are rigidly bounded in time and space. At the heart o f this concept
is the notion that a factory is an unbounded, open system. In other
words, a factory must be extremely aware of and sensitive to its
environment so that it can incorporate quickly developing information
on the shifting needs and wants of consumers. As a result, nearly
every one of the key and sacred assumptions that governed design of
business in the past is being rethought and in many cases overthrown
and replaced with fundamentally new assumptions, (sic Mitroff and
Linstone 4-5)
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This transition has been particularly slow in public corporations despite the logic of
and desire for making such corporation service driven. In speaking of these outdated
business assumptions, Mitroff and Linstone conclude that, “We confused and took for
granted short-term, temporary, conditions as permanent advantages that existed for
all time” (7-8). These are almost the same words that Reinhold Niebuhr used to
describe our cultural actions after World War II, “The social and historical optimism
o f democratic life, for instance, represents the typical illusion of an advancing class
which mistook its own progress for the progress o f the world” (2). This is true o f
ever-prosperous LA to the nth degree. As a result, our success-drunk public
corporation has only been moved to make changes when disasters have made us
incapable o f looking the other way. This is in line with Mitroff and Linstone’s
conclusion, “Crisis may be the best, if not the only, teacher on how to create an
economy that is better matched to the needs of today’s world” (10). From this, we
can deduce that CM will be offering a critique of the public sector organizations
which will bring them into the information/service age of the present. This is perfectly
in keeping with the purpose of charter reform.
Certainly in the case of LA in the late 1990's, few, if any would attempt to
claim that local government is an ethically organized entity. However, since the
government is the social apparatus for alleviating crises, this means that it is a fitting
organization upon which to cast our evaluative gaze; and, CM is a proper tool for
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doing so as governments can be viewed as our public crisis management mechanisms.
Mitroff and Tinstone use these words to make the same point:
The knowledge and examination of key assumptions are the main
components of critical thinking. One o f the best ways (but ndt the
only) to engage in critical thinking is to examine the philosophical
ideas and assumptions that form the base for the tools and techniques
of professional education ... [this] is fundamentally an assessment of
the adequacy of the foundations on which all professional education
rests, (viii)
CM gives us the ability to question the values and assumptions o f our corporation’s
rationale or regime thinking; therefore, CM can be understood as an ethical inquiry
system as it deals with questions of ultimate value. It is a system that has an
intellectual pedigree dating back to the Aristotelean idea o f “politics as the master
science”, which would in the modem translation be, “ethics as the master science”.
Nothing is more ethical than good management. Public good has many meanings and
perspectives, and we shall spend the next chapter exploring the major ideas of public
good Angelenos have embraced as well as their impact; however, while the definition
of good public management is certainly debatable, CM provides a justifiable inquiry
system and starting point for that definition. So, we are now set to ethically evaluate
the case before us.
OVERVIEW OF THE SUBSEQUENT CHAPTERS
It is hoped that the chapters subsequent to this one present a logical sequence
for the examination of this case based on the methodological axioms already stated.
The overarching rationale of the study forms a flow of ideas that directed the
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positioning of the following chapters. After this introductory chapter, we complete
the background necessary for an in-depth understanding of the case study by
presenting a short history of LA and its political, economic, and cultural spheres up to
the time of the 1992 civil unrest. Chapter 3 then begins the case study. In it, we
examine the charter activities through the lens of CM; this examination leaves us with
our first theme for deeper analysis. It is the theme o f rationalization; it is explored as a
second springboard (with CM) to the next three chapters. They provide us with the
devices to distill patterns of corporate civic behavior that account for the substantial
gaps in the analysis; we can, then, examine themes that emerge from the patterns
these gaps highlight. This is precisely what we do next; chapter 4 is on the theme of
consensus; chapter 5 is on “government as machine”; and chapter 6 is on NBCs
(neighborhood councils). This completes the case study and the next chapter is
devoted to specific ethical analysis of the case. Finally, in chapter 8, some possible
applications o f the insights provided are offered; they constitute a mere re-visioning of
the entire discussion and present two examples o f alternative approaches to this case
as the opening salvo of a new discussion and perhaps a new civic understanding.
WORKS CITED
Glaser, Dr. Barney. Basics o f Grounded Theory. Sociology Press: Mill Valley, CA.
1992.
Kapuscinski, Ryszard. “Second Thoughts about America’s Racial Paradise”, from The
Aims o f Argument, ed. Timothy Crusius and Carolyn Channell. Mayfield
Publishing: Mountain View, California. 1995. 442-445.
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Mitroff, Ian, and Linstone, Harold. The Unbounded Mind. Oxford University Press;
NY. 1993.
Mitroff, Ian, Pearson, Christine, and Harrington, Katharine. The Essential Guide to
Managing Crisis: A Step-by-Step Handbook for Surviving Major
Catastrophes. Oxford University Press: NY. 1996.
Niebuhr, Reinhold. The Children o f Light and the Children o f Darkness. Charles
Scribner’s Sons: NY. 1972.
Robertson, Peter J. and Seneviratne, Sonal J.. “Outcomes of planned organizational
change in the public sector: a meta-analytical comparison to the private
sector,” Public Administration Review, Nov-Dee 1995, Vol. 55 n6. 547-558.
Rubenstein, Richard, and Roth, John. Approaches to Auschwitz: The Holocaust and
its Legacy. John Knox Press: Atlanta, Georgia. 1987.
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V CHAPTER TWO - LOS ANGELES BACKGROUND
This section will cover the historical, political, and cultural background o f LA
necessary to understand the context o f the 1990's charter reform movement. Rather
than present a monolithic account of the history of LA which would be
counterproductive to our systems approach, the best way to approach this daunting
amount o f background is by presenting it from different paradigmatic viewpoints.
This has the advantage of presenting not just the events but some context to them;
further, it illustrates the reenforcement and contrast of important events which can
always been seen in different manners by those holding different values. While an
exhaustive presentation is beyond hope here, three principle paradigms can be
borrowed from the work of philosopher Jurgen Habermas as being essential for
society. They are the political, economic, and cultural spheres. So, we will begin
with a brief political history of the LA with emphasis on the 1925 charter and the
background o f its adoption. Next, we will outline the rest of the 20* century with a
second concentration on the late 60's and the legacy which that crisis period has had
as it is integral to the activities of the 1990's, especially the Watts riots, the election
of Tom Bradley, and the two failed charter reform efforts. Then, we will have arrived
in the early 90's and the context created by the abdication of Bradley, the economic
recession, Proposition^, the civil unrest o f 1992, and the Rodney King trial. The
next section will sketch the economic history of LA from farming to oil to the 90's
recession. The third section will be on the cultural history of LA and its present state
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or states. These sections will allow us to draw some generalizations about the
subsystems of LA and as a whole system to sketch a picture of what Angelenos value.
Then, finally, we will look directly at the history o f charter reform in LA ending in a
comparison of LA’s governance system with that o f other municipalities. In sum, this
will provide us with a common ground on which we can begin the specific
examination of the 1999 LA Charter, its likely impacts, and its creation.
POLITICAL CULTURE
A natural starting point for our ethical case study o f the governing document
of the city is an understanding of the political culture o f that city. While this history
could be the subject of books, and has been (a particularly good one is The
Fragmented Metropolis by Robert Fogelson), I will render an all too brief overview
of some of its key characteristics. From its Native American origin as a home to
multiple tribes to its August 26, 1781 founding as E l Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la
Reina de los Angeles de Porciimcida to Edward Doheny’s striking oil in downtown
in 1892 - what might be called the pre-water days - the LA basin has been primarily a
refuge. Since the Shoshonean Indians called the basin the “valley o f smokes”, it
served as a disaster-prone, semi-inhospitable area capable of supporting only a
minimal population. Despite this, the Mediterranean climate, semi-abundant wildlife,
good port, small river, and strategic location provided enough support to forge a
home for a small agricultural population of hearty Spanish and Mexican missionaries
and pioneers from the 1780's until the Mexican defeat in the 1840's.
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The 1850's began the next chapter in LA history with the ceding of California
to the US and the discovery of gold in the new state. In the years during and after the
Civil War, LA became the end of the frontier; it was left relatively solitary to control
itself. This is the period romanticized in writings such as Zorro and Ramona; this
independent, solitary spirit is still a part of LA today. LA left connection to the rest
of civilization to other locales; San Francisco became the more cosmopolitan city,
home of the gold rush. LA was the end of the west, and those still seeking a new start
often headed to its friendlier climes. A good example o f this was a branch o f the
Mormon Church. Following orders from the US government, they dispatched a
battalion of soldiers to take LA as a part of the Mexican war as the US feared the
local independents who were a part of the Bear Flag revolt would attempt to secede
and form their own country as they spoken often of doing; the US feared the city
becoming a Mexican stronghold or the beginnings of a new nation. Arriving in 1847
and after securing LA for the US, the Mormon battalion established a settlement in
San Bernardino which they maintained initially as a possible beachhead, or
deserthead, for expansion of the church empire to the sea or should the church be
chased from Utah as it had been from the Midwest. As a result, this area was, and
still is, referred to as the Inland Empire. A later example of persons trying to start
anew was that of Abbot Kinney. Taking advantage of the climate and location, he
founded an area that he called the “Venice of America” by building canals south of
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Santa Monica in 1907. To this day, these canals still exist in the area o f the city called
Venice which includes the widely acclaimed home to Bohemians, Venice Beach.
During these pre-water days, the city was run politically and in most other
ways by the Southern Pacific Railroad who controlled transportation, real estate,
finance, and employment. As result of this and physical disadvantages, LA was by no
means a lock on, or even likely to, obtain supremacy amongst the new cities battling
for resources in California or the Southland. By this time, San Francisco was the
money and cultural capital of the state; Sacramento was the political center. In the
Southland, San Diego had a better port, and LA was inland from its ports which in
reality were really property o f the cities o f Long Beach and Santa Monica. The
wealthy patrons of the Southland at the time preferred Pasadena with its “healthier
mountain air”, and finally, Santa Barbara had all that LA did and a cooler weather
pattern. In 1890, after the boom of the 1880's collapsed, the city population was
only 50,395 out of the 101,454 in the county, or 49.7%. LA could have gone the way
of Barstow or San Juan Capistrano had it not been for a unique combination of
circumstances in the form of natural resources and the ability to leverage them
through commitment and opportunism. Ten years later, in 1900, the population of
the city had swollen to 102, 479, a 103% increase; and, the city was now 60.2% of
the county population which had risen to 170,298, a 68% increase. What made the
difference was the Doheny’s oil discovery and the boom it created; that bit o f natural
fortune fueled the city’s initial momentum and is still contributing to this very day.
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This combination of natural resources and opportunity seekers issued in the
next phase of LA’s history, what might be called the boosterism stage. There are
three major parts to this early growth phase. The first set the stage for all the growth
LA has experienced since; that growth element was the 1907 passage o f the bond to
build the LA Aqueduct to bring water all the way from northern California. This
water turned a semi-desert into a land flowing with milk and honey. Equally as
important as the obvious environmental transformation the water permitted was the
effect the water rights had on the thirsty region. They gave LA the predominate
position in Southern California, as the movie Chinatown has popularized. The
annexation of the San Fernando Valley in 1915 is a good example of this effect. The
second growth effect was that of the consolidation o f the motion picture industry.
Surviving early challenges from New Jersey, Santa Barbara, and Culver City,
Hollywood emerged and remains as the screen capital of the world; this is particularly
ironic since Hollywood was actually laid out by a Kansas Prohibitionist named Harvey
Wilcox. But, that does point to the third part of this early growth phase, a new
political culture. In 1903, LA, bulging from the influx described, adopted some
political reforms in an attempt to wrestle power away from the Southern Pacific
Railroad; these reforms were initiative, referendum, and recall. Then, these political
innovators actually used these devices in 1909 to remove corrupt mayor, Arthur
Harper.
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This watershed illustrates that LA had created a new political culture, and this
political culture was primarily a product of three larger forces. The first was a
response to a corrupt political establishment run by the Southern Pacific Railroad; the
second was a desire not to replace this tyranny with the forms of political tyranny
being developed in the east. In the east, the influx o f immigrants, particularly those
from the Catholic areas of Italy, Poland, and Ireland, was giving rise to political
machine in areas such as Boston, New York, and Chicago. Angelenos did not wish to
trade Boss Railroad for Boss Tweed; USC professor H. Eric Schockman called it a,
“groundswell o f revulsion with political machines and corruption of urban East Coast
regimes” (58-59). LA was also growing by immigration, but it was primarily from the
Midwest comprised of Anglo Americans, and this influx had fueled the success of the
Socialist Party in LA from 1902-1915. With support from militant labor organizers
and intellectuals such as Upton Sinclair, the party candidate, Job Harriman won the
1991 mayoral primary only to lose the general election by a few hundred votes. This
was because before the general election, two Socialist leaders, the McNamara
brothers, were convicted of bombing the LA Times building. The party declined from
there under pressure from a coalition of progressives and conservative Republicans.
However, they had demonstrated that the type o f immigrant, labor, and reform
coalition that provided the base for such political machines in the east could be
created in LA. The victorious coalition’s resulting reluctance to facilitated such social
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means combined with a prevalent sentiment which was conditioned by the third force
o f the political culture, a strong belief in individualism.
Whether it had its origin in the wild west, Ramona past, utopian beliefs,
disillusionment with the rest of the world, or a combination of the above, even these
first real Angelenos had a desperate belief in the individual and mistrust of
consolidated power which they felt could only lead to corruption. Their Protestant
roots reenforced this idea of humans as corrupted and centralized (read Vatican)
power as a evil in itself. Further, this fiercely independent electorate saw itself as the
heir to the same anti-tyranny political philosophy that gave birth to this nation. They
were the last true Americans, responsible for the preservation o f the American
political dream. Even the name California reflected this belief; it was taken from “Los
Serges de Esplandian,” a Spanish romance in which California was an imaginary
island that was an earthly paradise. Suspicious of centralized power, they believed in
an idea of progress and of creation through personal initiative and corporate
verification; thus, they were designated as the heirs to the legacy o f the Progressive
Party of Theodore Roosevelt by historians. And, this is still the bedrock o f the
political culture of LA. One need look no further than the cultural leadership role LA
played in the 1960's or to Proposition 13 in the 1970's or to the expansion into
Orange County in the 1980's or to the election of Richard Riordan in the 1990's to
confirm this assertion.
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It was out of this Progressive milieu that the 1925 Charter o f the City of Los
Angeles was produced. It remained the political blueprint of the city until July o f
2000. The Growth Machine, as urban planner Bill Fulton calls it in his book, The
Reluctant Metropolis, that had begun with Doheny’s oil strike was now in full gear
and would remain so until the 1970's. By 1970, the population o f LA was 2,811,801
(27.4 times its 1900 population) and the county held 7,055,800 people (41.4 times its
1900 population). The vast majority of this growth was generated by persons coming
from outside LA into the “promised land”. Still, the Freeholders who wrote that 1925
charter were members of, 'The most white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant city in the
nation,” at the time (sic Schockman 62). In their individualistic rebellion against the
corruption of the railroad-run government and the party machines o f the east coast,
they created a nonpartisan local election system with a weak mayor and citizen
commissions. To be fair, some of these ills were avoided; but, what was most
significant about this structure was that all of the possible mediating mechanisms for
the development or routinization of public consensus were removed. As a result,
“ public relations, not party discipline would become the key to electoral and
ultimately, governing success,” as Schockman so aptly puts it in his essay, “Is Los
Angeles Governable? Revisiting the City Charter” (sic, 60,). A governing consensus
was designed to be and became the product of a consciousness o f a core group of
like-minded influential citizens. One side saw this group as forward-minded thinkers
with the public good, not ideological dogma, driving them; the other side saw this an
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upper middle class and business hegemony that excluded immigrant voices, socialist
views, and minority empowerment. Regardless of one’s conclusion, and I feel there is
some truth in both, it is here that the foundation for LA’s civic management based on
a private ethos was politically institutionalized.
Despite the 1925 Charter’s weak mayor system of decentralized power,
during the 1930's, Mayor Frank Shaw ran a corrupt city. After excesses of corruption
forced the recall of Shaw, Fletcher Bowron was elected mayor in 1938; he served
until 1953. The 1940's and 50's brought huge growth to the region on all levels due
primarily to war production spending guided by Bowron. He was a conservative
Republican who is generally regarded as one o f LA’s most effective mayors; his many
administrative reforms and management of LA expansion came to be lauded even by
Democrats. However, his support of the internment of Japanese citizens during WW
II, a position he recanted at war’s end, caused him great personal sorrow. In an
resulting attempt to become more public minded, Bowron became a staunch
supporter of integrated public housing. This position drew him the ire of the real
estate and downtown lobbies who orchestrated his 1952 defeat. Norris Poulson was
chosen to represent these powerful interests; and, from 1953 to 1961, he served these
directing lobbies well. Private growth, business expansion, and development of its
supporting infrastructure were the focus of Poulson’s terms; but, for good or ill his
biggest legacy will remain the luring of the Dodgers from Brooklyn. In 1961, the man
who would come to be know as Mayor Sam was elected. Sam Yorty served from
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1961 to 1973 and will be remembered for his traveling, opposition to the Great
Society legislation, the Watts riots (which he blamed on Martin Luther King), tax
reduction, and freeway building. So, despite the weak mayor system of the 1925
charter, from 1933 - 1993, LA has had only 6 mayors which is as many as it had from
1913 - 1933 or from 1900 - 1913, mayors who had undisputed lasting effect on the
city and its government despite serving under a document that relegated them to
being “weak mayors”. The findings o f the Rand study for the two commissions helps
us to make sense of this, and it will be discussed in the comparison of governance
systems sections.
But, in truth, the post-war city was run by a group of downtown elites; the
most blatant manifestation of which was the Committee of 25. This was a shadow
government established for, “choosing public officials for appointment or election and
setting agenda for public policy” (Pitt and Pitt 101). It consisted of business leaders,
attorneys, the President ofUSC and the Chancellor of UCLA, and media executives.
The Committee is strong historical evidence for Schockman’s claim that LA’s
political culture was a business and upper middle class hegemony even before the
election of Richard Riordan and his reorientation of the local government toward that
hegemony. This story of re-emergence also accounts for the hegemony’s fall from
grace. The Watts riots of 1965 changed the political face of LA. The subsequent
race-defined, or identity politics, re-election of Mayor Yorty in 1969, galvanized the
previously excluded ethnic communities to create a coalition under African American
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Councilmember Tom Bradley. The coalition’s success began with his election in
1973 and would last for the next 20 years. Not surprisingly, during this transitional
period we saw the last formal attempt, and failure, at changing the city’s charter; this
is explored in greater detail later in this chapter. This westside/South central or
liberal-Jewish/ black coalition changed the political climate in LA as long
disempowered groups gained access to the political mechanisms of the city which
they could now use to their own advantage.
However, this change was not successful in transforming the system. This is
because the private ethos of the 1920 reformers merely morphed into a new anti
government manifestation and these newly empowered groups could be coopted will
the increases created by growth without challenging the established order.
Proposition 13 and tax revolt of the mid-1970's was utilized in concert with new
CEQA environmental requirements that empowered the NIMBY (not in my
backyard) - no growthers to create protection for those that control the political
culture against the new coalition’s desire to use government to change it. This was
LA’s version of what Alan Wolfe, the Director of the Center for Religion and Public
Life observed, “Americans prefer strengthening ties among people they know to the
alternatives of either looking out for no one or looking out for everyone” (A23). This
resulted in new growth pattern such as gated communities to localize protection
dollars, user districts to protect revenues, and an acceleration o f the flight to the
suburbs, particularly sections of the west Valley and Orange county. These patterns
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negated the new access of this public-rendering coalition seeking to balance municipal
power and prevented them from balancing the civic scales. As a result of this and
other influences from the state, the Bradley coalition was increasingly forced to play
“the growth game” as federal, state, and local tax dollars dried up. In one way, this
growth-first strategy characterized by Bradley shining- but largely empty - downtown,
permitted the Bradley coalition to remain in power since it could not offer a true
challenge to any of the core assumptions or control devices of the business and upper-
middle class hegemony.
Bradley’s only real political success was to create limited access to a small
number of new comers who eventually became new civic players. But, these groups
soon entrenched themselves leaving some of the west-siders and African Americans to
benefit, but the tide did not rise enough to lift all boats as evidenced by the fact that
the Asians or Hispanic Americans were not included. No civic mechanisms changed;
a groups of counter elites emerged. As long as the pie was getting bigger, the
creation of more elites was acceptable to everyone; but as the economy took a
downturn in the late 1980's, there was not enough money or power to go around for
all the elites and battle lines were re-drawn for the first time in 20 years. This
became obvious when an event of the same caliber that brought Bradley’s people to
power occurred; only this time, it would sweep his coalition from power. That event
was the civil unrest in South Central in 1992 or as it was popularly known, the
Rodney King Riots. But, the bursting of the growth bubble had long since insured
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tKat the coalition’s days were numbered as the public pie had already shrunk below
acceptable levels. So, it is that rich Richard Riordan of “LA Law” fame, the
encapsulation of an upper middle class business person, become the Mayor in 1993 by
a wide margin. This solid victory of Riordan, a Republican, occurred at a time when
the county registration was 1.9 million democrats (54.9%) and only 1.1 million
republicans (32.3%). Riordan is a mayor in the mold of Norris Poulson who emerged
as a hegemony candidate after a reform-attempting mayor was defeated
Thus, the political heritage of LA can be it can deduced from its histoiy. The
allegedly conservative reference and book of facts about LA, Los Angeles A to Z,
describes that heritage in this overly simplistic manner:
Politics in Los Angeles has, since early in the century, been shaped by
at least four forces: a nonpartisan electoral process; the dominance of
downtown business and civic leaders in city politics from the 1920s to
the 1960s; the increasing importance o f suburban communities since
that time, with a resultant loss of strength in the center; and on-going
shifts of power resulting from immigration and ethnic change. (397)
The nonpartisan elections have supported a culture of elitism which has been for at
least the first half of the century an elitism of business and the ‘haves’. The second
half of the 1900's has seen these ‘haves’ attempt to stave off political encroachment
on behalf of the growing ethnic population by use of its economic and persuasive
powers. All of this set the stage for a battle, sparked by civil unrest by the ‘have-
nots’, over whether LA would actually shift a significant amount of its municipal
power to the growing ethnic populations and ‘have-not’ concerns or whether the
‘haves’ would be able, as they have in the past, to convince the new arrivals that the
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only way out of their situation is to become one of the ‘haves’ and that they know
best how to steward ‘having’. Thus, it was that charter reform was initiated to
answer this foundational question for the political identity o f the city.
ECONOMIC CULTURE
From the beginning, in LA, “the living has been easy”; at least, if you are on
the right side o f the tracks. Originally an agricultural, military, and religious concern,
the pattern of the dynamic economy that LA is, was irreversibly set when Doheny
struck oil in 1892. Since then, oil and its downstream byproducts, automobiles,
shipping, and aerospace, have been a major components of the LA economy. Equally
obvious is the impact that the movie industry has had, and still has, in LA; currently,
this sector is the city’s largest employing group. Real estate, because of LA’s
constant growth, has been a major economic player as well, especially when one
includes its inputs and the employment created and driven by the building industry.
This prevailing growth pressure has made merely living here, a capital gain; this was
poignantly illustrated by the Proposition 13 battle where even this benefit of increased
housing value created by spiraling demand became too expensive for the middle class
to assimilate. With such a large population, consumer goods are a natural staple o f the
LA economy as well; LA is, “like you know, totally”, the home of the Mall as the
Valley-girl icon would say; from Rodeo Drive to restaurants to surfing products retail
sales generate huge revenue throughout the Southland. Behind all of this is the
necessary banking sector, a sector that has been reduced in importance in recent
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history. Finally, a city of this size must have a large public support sector to function.
The city is the single largest employer in the area; and, if you add the schools, parks,
museums, and other civic functions, the numbers employed are highly significant. A
final industry that must be mentioned is the garment industry which employs, or
under-employs, thousands of immigrant workers and fuels immigration to the area.
The post-WW II economy was built on a strong manufacturing base.
Everything from automobiles to clothes to missiles to tacos to houses were produced
here. Most of which were consumed here as well. But, the 1970's recessions that
changed the US economy created restructuring in LA as well, it was delayed in its
arrival until thel980's and did not reach its zenith until the early 1990's. In 1970, LA
county was home to 50% of all of California’s manufacturing jobs, by 1989 the total
was 41%, and by 1995 the total had slipped to 36%. The combination of corporate
dependence on offshore cheap labor and the reductions in the aerospace and defense
sectors lead to extreme job displacement which drove the unemployment rate to 9.7%
in 1993 or almost 450,000 persons. However, even then, the wheels of a new engine
for the LA economy were gaining speed as telecommunications, entertainment,
apparel, light manufacturing, and international trade posted gains (Gabriel 25).
This highlights one of the less obvious facts about the LA economy which was
discovered during the recent recession, LA has one of largest concentrations of small
business in the world. According to LA 2000 - a city for the future, 95% of LA
businesses have 50 employees or less. (53). This second tier economy was the engine
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that pulled the region out of its early 1990's slump. Although it has never garnered
the respect it is probably owed, the idea of the small, entrepreneurial business is a part
of the independent, make-your-own-dream mindset that permeates Angelenos. All of
these factors have combined to make LA a hub, a crossroads to the pacific rim,
Mexico, and beyond. But, none of these descriptive details tells us much about how
Angelenos think about their money.
The economic culture is as imbued with the private ethos as the political
culture. LA is not known, the way New York or Boston are, for its charitable
organizations or philanthropy. It is known for its tax revolt of the 1970's, its
resistance to mass transit because of the cost, and its stealing water from hundreds of
miles away. The recent overwhelming resistance to any form of public subsidies for
an NFL franchise which cost us that team is an telling example. Finally, there is the
case of the problem plagued LA Police Department (LAPD); it is massively
understaffed for a major city, and crime is certainly a reality. Crime has become
associated with LA and is usually cited as one of the principle reason for business and
citizen relocation; however, rather than generate public money to solve this problem
that is damaging on all levels, Angelenos prefer to solve the problem with private
expenditures in the form of gated communities, car and house alarms, and security
guards. LA is known for its millionaires, as documented below, and the belief that
even the middle class here can afford a maid. (That may be true but only because of
the ability to exploit undocumented workers not the per capita or median earnings in
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the region as we shall see.) Wealth here is a private concern to be used for one’s own
purposes with as little governmental interference as possible. This illusion was
shattered with the Watts riots of 1965. Those on whose backs much of this wealth
had been build, objected to this exploitative system in a non-economic manner that
could not be ignored. The public reaction was to appease these protesting groups by
the syphoning off of some of the newly created wealth in their direction and by finding
other groups to replace them at the top o f the exploitation list. Groups were coopted
as they moved up a rung on the social ladder; but, they were no nearer the top even if
they were farther from the bottom and better able to keep their head above water.
Where there once had been black domestics, now African American moved into the
expanding public sector and other jobs while non-documented immigrants who lacked
any legal ability to defend themselves were now hired as underpaid domestics, as the
Michael Huffington incident reminds us.
Even some of LA’s more important industries are privately, rather than
publicly, oriented. Two examples come to mind: finance and government. As most
world cities have a strong financial sector, the fact is that the considerably smaller San
Francisco is the financial hub of the state. But what LA is a world leader in, 9th, is
financial support services, such as accounting, lawyers, and consultants. We have no
professional football team but many of these professionals are represent by persons or
firms in LA. In a similar fashion, LA city government is dominated by a powerful
civil service and union establishment that protects the individuality o f the workers.
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This was certainly an preference of the city’s founding fathers, and they succeeded
wildly. So well so that one of Mayor Riordan’s continuing political fights has been
over expanding the number of and ability to hire exempt positions. What arises from
this trend is a continuation of prioritizing and institutionalizing, if not enshrining, the
private economic ethos in the larger culture of LA.
Of course, this description is an overgeneralization; still, its trends are
unmistakable and accurate. But, as growth ground to a halt in the 1980 due to nearby
competition, such as Orange County, and the national recession, so did the new
economic opportunities. LA found itself in the red while the place to be, Orange
County, was going bankrupt. The only population growth in LA at the time was in
the immigrant populations. So as the painful shift to the service/information economy
was forced on LA, the manual labor opportunities dried up. The frustration of groups
of skilled workers newly displaced, downsized, or priced out were touched off by the
spark of racism into a new set of riots in 1991. They underscored how little had
really changed since 1965. Growth of any type in the 1990's was only occurring if
one has a seed idea or a small plant or a dot com; for those without plants or even
seeds, such an emerging economy had nothing to offer.
If all that has been previously concluded is true, the economic patterns of
LA’s history should direct the political patterns, and not surprisingly they do. They
are both forms of power and the both depend on mass support or buy in. And, the
idea of the American dream as a byproduct of wealth was alive and thriving in both
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America and LA in the 1990's, as it had been throughout their respective histories.
Nationally, the Congressional Budget Office reports:
TABLE 2-1 - NATIONAL INCOME DISPARITY FIGURES 1977 AND 1999
Household
Groups
Share of all
income
Avg. after
tax income
Percent
Change
1977 1999 1977 1999
lowest 1/5 5.7% 4.2% $10,000 $ 8,800 down 12.0
2n d low 1/5 H.5 9.7 . 22,100 20,000 down 9.5
middle 1/5 16.4 14.7 32,400 31,400 down 3.1
2n d high 1/5 22.8 21.3 42,600 45,100 up 5.9
highest 1/5 44.2 50.4 74,000 102,300 up 38.2
highest 1% 7.3 12.9 234,700 515,600 up 119.7
(Johnston AD
)
These national figures are in lock step with local figures as reported two days
following. “One startling fact: Los Angeles’ 50 richest men and women are worth
roughly $60 billion and are getting richer every day, while one out of every three
children in the county is growing up in poverty” (Newton A1 & A24) The article
continues that more than 20% of county residents live below the poverty line, 16,450
for a household of four, which is up from 1990's roughly 15%; 236,000 people are
estimated to be homeless. Finally, 6% of the households bring in more than $150,000
a year which is a higher percentage than the national or state figures” (Newton A24).
These numbers are confirmed by the National Center for Children in Poverty: “More
than 13 million American children, 3 million more than in 1979, live in poverty. Here
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in California, where 1 out of 6 of the nation’s poor children live, child poverty has
been particularly stubborn” (Terry A10); the Center reports that in California 23.3%
of children are living in poverty and that is up from 14.4% in 1979.
From this, is it quite obvious that while the US, and even more so LA, are
certainly place where one’s financial desires can be achieved, they are only such a
place for, at the most, the top 40%. For the other 60+% o f us, the mountain is
steeper everyday; and perhaps, these two effects are indivisible. What was the
corporate civic, political response to these trends? The response was to elect a
business driven mayor who was set on privatizing city services - the local holy grail of
political action in the 1990's - and reducing all public subsidies such as affirmative
action and bilingual education. This is hardly a case o f the political sphere attempting
to balance or correct an ailing economic sphere; rather, it is a political system that is
kowtowing to a economic rationality as people buy the argument that government is
first and foremost a drain on the economy.
CULTURAL CULTURE
This section should be re-titled, Cultural Cultures, if it is to have any validity
in Los Angeles. In direct contrast to the LA o f the 1920's, “Today it is one of the
most ethnically diverse communities in the world” (sic Schockman 62). No one can
claim to be an expert on the literally 100's of cultures that survive and thrive in LA; I
will make no such claim. However, as one might deduce from the enshrinement of
individualism in LA and the fear of immigrant machines, formal city apparatuses for
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assimilation of outsiders are virtually nonexistent. Most people who came here did so
because they were running away from some form of cultural, political, and/or
economic despair or they were running toward some dream of private success to
make them untouchable by society. Neither of these ideals is conducive to
assimilation. This is why LA is often described as a city of neighborhoods, or as the
local National Public Radio station called its municipal exploration series, “The
United States of Los Angeles”. It is a local cliche to say that there are over 100
languages spoken in the LA Unified School District or that there are 50 foreign
language newspapers printed in the County. Cerritos has been called the most
ethnically diverse urban place in America.
What is also well known is that LA is the only major US city with no majority
population. The 1990 census reported LA was 40% Latino, 37% Anglo, 13%
African American, and 10% Asian, and city estimates for 2000 have these figures at
45.6% Latino, 32.2% Anglo, 9.4% African American, and 12.6% Asian. However, in
1999 (despite a 25,000 per year gain in Latino voters since 1994) researcher Antonio
Gonzales calculates that Latinos are a mere 17.7% of the registered voters (Hinojosa-
Ojeda B13). Further complicating matters, the Latino population is overwhelming
Catholic which differs culturally from the Anglo-Protestant or African American
Baptist or Westside Reform Jewish communities. Despite this slice o f reality, one
would think because of the overall census numbers that the heirs to the Anglo-
Protestant hegemony of the 1920's would have trouble retaining control of the city
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institutions; but, the 1993 election of Richard Riordan over minority supported Asian
candidate Michael Woo demonstrates this is not the case. As David Fleming, Studio
City attorney, local activist, and advisor to Riordan put it, “He would not be mayor
without the Valley. You take away the Valley voters and Mike Woo would be
mayor” (McGreevy, B4). The valley is largely an Anglo enclave, especially if one
narrows it to the voting sections of the Valley. But more for the purposes of this
examination, the 1999 LA City Charter would not be in place if not for the Valley
voters. Two days after the June 1999 election, the Daily News, which sees itself as
the Valley’s newspaper, trumpeted a Page A1 story titled, “Valley turned Charter
tide”, documenting how the 65% pro-Charter margin in the Valley off set strong
defeats in minority areas. (A more complete election discussion can be found in
chapter five.) What is easily distilled from these numbers is that cultural containment
and struggle are consistent elements of LA’s history.
The more cynical analysts claim that the Anglo minority uses a divide and
conquer strategy on the various larger minorities to retain its power. By the use of
formerly formal and now informal discrimination, the Anglo community places
pressure on these minorities until things become unbearable and violence erupts.
Then, they use that violence as a rationale for increased institutional control. The
1992 civil unrest is just the latest example, but the Watts riots of 1965, the Zoot suit
riots of the 1940's, the WWII internment of the Japanese, and the Boyle Heights
deportations of the 1930's illustrate that this is a recurring device. Strong municipal
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unity mechanisms are in short supply in individualistic LA, and the fear of infection of
the body politic provides an easy and obvious mechanism that works to the advantage
of the upper middle class professional community which is overwhelming Anglo.
Other more subtle forms o f violence have been equally effective controls before they
were outlawed. Because Hispanics were “subversive” in the 1930's it was
permissible, if not necessary, to red line their mortgage applications making it nearly
impossible for them to get credit to create the wealth needed to change their personal
or community situation; likewise, deed restrictions were utilized to keep undesirables,
meaning those from other races, out of good neighborhoods. To this day, “Data
further indicate sizable racial and neighborhood disparities in homeownership and in
mortgage loan origination” (Gabriel 29). In this way, the fault lines o f cultures are
moved to create friction and to support the call for a singular ordering.
Adding strength to this interpretation, is the case of an undiscussed LA ethnic
minority that does not fit this mold, an exception to prove the rule - if you will.
Despite the ethnic make up annunciated above, the 15 member LA City Council had,
for most of the 1990's, three Hispanics (for the corresponding 45.6% of the
population), three African American (for the corresponding 9.4%), and no Asian (for
the corresponding 12.6%) in this constituent body. The ethnicity (not counting Anglo
as an ethnicity) with as many Council Members as these three groups combined (63%
of the total population) - 6 Members - was the Jewish community. This community
has wielded enormous influence in LA. With a Jewish population that accounts for
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nearly 10% of the US total, second only to New York; there are more Jews in LA
than in Tel Aviv and the amount rivals Jerusalem. The impact of European Jews on
the burgeoning movie industry in the 20's and 30's is well known. But, please be
clear that my point is certainly not to insinuate anything that can possibly fuel the all
too prevalent fires o f anti-Semitism or Jewish conspiracy theorists', 1 bring this story
of contrasting ethnic treatment to the fore because it is a real pattern and as such
requires explanation. It brings up the question: what is different about the Jewish
experience in LA that allowed it to avoid the divide and conquer minority game that
the cynics claim. Are the cynics wrong or is deeper insight available through this
examination? The story of the LA Country Club certainly tells o f anti-Jewish
discrimination; but, it is equally well know that a major, it not the major, component
of the successful Bradley coalition was the westside Jewish community. Based on my
knowledge o f LA’s history and economics coupled with my advanced study in both
urban planning and religion, I am forced to conclude that the key element that
differentiated the Jewish experience from that of other minorities in LA is that the
Jewish community’s valuation of professional careers and an economic compatibility
of their religious beliefs with the upper middle class professional ideology has made
them more comfortable with and successful in LA than the Hispanic Catholics or the
Baptist African Americans or the Taoist/Confucian/Buddhist Asians. In short, the
Jewish, and particularly Reformed Jewish, religion’s centrality of valuation o f and
locating responsibility in the individual, as opposed to positing that humans are flawed
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by original sin and redeemable only through external support, i.e. God’s grace,
compliments and parallels the private ethos of LA. If this analysis is accurate, it
would explain why this group does not fit the cynics appraisal o f minorities in LA
while still not discrediting that model of social control.
However, there are reasons to find this entire cultural analysis overstated,
even if it may be essentially accurate. The cultural diversity that is LA is
overwhelming embraced and valued. Its variety o f cultures is more typical of a third
world city than a first world one. LA is politically and economically important, but it
is as a cultural center that LA is unsurpassed in the world. “The Dream Factory”
exports its ideas of culture to every continent. The matrix o f cultural differences and
similarities produces a dynamic, interesting, entertaining, and progressive LA culture
that is rightly the envy of millions. The bedrock of this diversity is freedom, to join or
not to join, to do nor not to do, to be or not to be. LA is, as the Eagles put it,
“Everything, all the time”; it is the dream or desire of people the world over, and we
have it all. I know of no one here who wishes to lose this civic attribute; and if a cost
is involved, it is easy to be sympathetic to the call that the price is worth it for such a
gift. In my mind, LA is the most seductive city on the planet.
LA CONCLUSIONS
In light of all of these observations, the biggest question of this section can
now be met. Is there a distinctively LA culture? What value or values are the most
enshrined in the LA public milieu? What limitations do they place on competing
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management models advocated for, and by, the members of the charter debate? If the
values of Angelenos (and by extension, any other community) are theirs to chose,
how can this choice be respected and foster without creating an atmosphere of hatred
and unjust exclusion, as was witnessed in the South during segregation or in South
Africa during apartheid? What are the implications of these answers for the ethics of
our corporate system? What stories do we tell each other to justify our public
management? How do we define social justice? Did Rodney King receive justice?
Did O. J. Simpson? Is there an acceptable moral minimum for our public corporate
activities? These are ethical questions; these are charter questions. There answers
necessitate the widest and wisest type of reflection and analysis.
But we are far from the first to contemplate these questions; learned people
from the past have examined such issues and leave some sagely warnings which we
would be prudent to employ to inform our thinking. Habermas offers these words of
advice, “The reflection that is required extends beyond the production of technical
knowledge and the hermeneutical clarification of traditions to the employment of
technical means in historical situations whose objective conditions (potentials,
institutions, interests) have to be interpreted anew each time in the framework of a
self-understanding determined by tradition” (53). Here, we are being reminded that
our examination is at once imbedded in history and people but simultaneously unique
requiring grounding in the reality at hand; this is very much in keeping with system
theory analysis. Likewise, Bertrand Russell offers an equally astute caution on the
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omissions of memory and the corresponding need to look at the failures as well as the
goals. “When 1 speak of the evils of the present day, I do so, not to suggest that they
are greater than those of the past, but only to make sure that what is good in the past
should be carried over into the future, as far as possible unharmed by the transition.
But if this is to be achieved, some things must be remembered which are apt to be
forgotten in blueprints of Utopia” (48-9). This is a chilling reminder when placed
next to this quote from the LA critical City o f Quartz by Mike Davis, “Yet, by hyping
Los Angeles as the paradigm of the future (even in a dystopian vein), they tend to
collapse history into teleology and glamorize the very reality they would construct”
(86). Finally, revisiting a quote by Rabbi Greenberg, for content this time, prompts
us about the dangers of sanctification of our western value set by describing their role
in the Holocaust. He warns:
Thus again, highly laudable values (secular democracy, universalism,
liberalism) are deeply implicated in creating the background for a
relatively undisturbed pursuit of mass murder. The colossal human and
moral failure needed to make possible such cruel slaughter has deeply
tarnished the credibility and validity of all these values. In other
words, no matter how valid a philosophy appears to be, no matter how
internally convincing and autonomously persuasive it is, if it has the
capacity to serve as a ground for unmitigated evil, then it must be
challenged, shaken up, rethought - if it is to survive at all. (20)
These are somber words to keep in mind as we attempt to identify the values of LA
that emerge from our all too cursory examination of LA’s past and our definition of
the limits of its culture.
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In any argument, one must begin with premises. In geometry, which is a
branch of mathematics devoted to conclusions based solely on proofs, the endeavor
begins with postulates. These postulates cannot be proven; they just appear to be
true. Likewise, our premises cannot be proven; they are patterns that emerge through
observation, reflections, and study of the subject. They demonstrate their
foundational worth in a combination of their explanatory value, their empirical
verifiability, and ultimately in the general utility to which they can be put; so, they are
grounded and reality based rather than constructed. It is posited that some postulates
for the study of LA can be extracted from its history and its public milieu; it is
necessary that we do this in order to prevent arriving at conclusions that merely echos
the original intellectual position of the reviewer (comparison to and critique of John
Rawls are intended); if we seek for our conclusions and patterns to emerge from the
reality and its data rather than to define them a priori (as Rawls would have us do),
we must ground our patterns “in the framework of a self-understanding determined by
tradition,” as Habermas put it, or corporeality. A touchstone is required, as stated
earlier, to arbitrate between personal claims of the viewer and social claims of the
reality. In our case, that touchstone is the methodology of grounded analysis through
CM and an ideal of LA built on common ground of our shared experience and mutual
understanding. The identification of premises for that understanding is the task at
hand.
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If “the dream factory” or “the growth machine” that LA is has a singular
value, it would be individualism. The claim that LA values its private orientation
above all else is hardly breaking news. But the mere obviousness o f it provides no
small measure of validity to the claim. Privacy, “letting it all hang out”, religious
variation, clothing variety, artistic vitality, and political expression are but a few
manifestations of this value. California has been synonymous with a “do your own
thing” mentality from its wild west days, to its Romonci days, to its becoming a Mecca
for utopian groups at the turn of the century, to the building of the aqueduct, to
forging new industries of film and aerospace, to the counter-cultural days o f the
1960's, to the environmental regulation and Proposition 13 1970's, to the
entrepreneurial days 198Q's of Orange County, and right up to the Silicon Valley
driven 1990's. LA sees itself as a refuge, if not the last refuge, for free thinkers and
individualists. The degree to which this is accurate is debatable; however, the degree
to which Angelenos believe it is unmistakable. Failure elsewhere has not been a bar
to success in LA. Noted urban planner Sir Peter Hall put it this way, “Los Angeles
was the city of novelty, the place that from the start was determined to owe nothing
to history” (520). Carey McWilliams penned it thusly in her classic, Southern
California Country: An Island on the Land, “Here, under ideal testing conditions,
one can discover what will work, in houses, clothes, furniture, etc. It is a great tribal
burial ground for antique customs and incongruous styles. The fancy eclectic
importations soon cancel each other out and something new is then substituted”
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(369). Finally, state historian Kevin Stan- of USC calls LA, “The Great Gatsby of
American cities; it envisioned itself, then materialized that vision through sheer force
of will” (69) . Taken together, the picture these experts draw is one of new
expressions, where every one is a prince or princess (as in Malibu Barbie) of their
own world. But in each of these quotes, it is the emergence o f individual dreams
which are empowered by jettisoning the baggage of cultural restriction to allow one’s
own personal power to emerge. This begins with the individual; Gatsby was an
individual, an individual with an agenda, albeit a psychotically romantic one. So, from
this we can deduce that the meta-value o f LA is individuality. This is further
demonstrated by the observation that this pattern affects all other patterns visible in
LA.
There are four other value patterns that deserve special mention for our study.
They are all framed by the initial value of individualism and transcend the surface
characteristics of the city. For example, the multicultural demographics of LA are
undeniable, but how these demographics affect the city at large is constrained by the
values that are LA values. Mexicans workers do come to LA in large numbers and
bring their culture with them, but they are at the mercy of the city’s economic and
political environment which restricts their impact. They may be able to rally political
support because of Constitutional protections but due to local political realities such
efforts will not be of use outside of their council district; zoning laws dictate much of
their housing choices; and without a green card their job choices are limited and
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exploitable. More to our point, there are no political organizations on the level o f the
immigrant machines of the east at the turn o f the century to support these people
because LA does not value such things. The LA spirit is, “The spirit that comes from
those accustomed to following their dreams: entrepreneurial, individualistic and
freedom-loving” (B17), to use League of Women Voters’ Director, Dr. Xandra
Kayden’s words. These four value patterns are by no means exhaustive, they are
merely of special significance to our study. They are perfectability, rejection of
concentrated power, voluntariness, and connectivity.
LA, like Gatsby, is always trying to overcome its limited origin. In the case of
LA, it was the remoteness of location and the constrictions of lacking a sufficient
water supply. These characteristics were echoed in those who chose to settle here
and build the city. “The great southern California experiment”, as it is often called,
has attracted experimenters. The laboratory atmosphere has enticed both persons
with ideas and people restricted elsewhere by human or natural elements or both. But
unlike fatalists who would not be sufficiently motivated to try anew, those traversing
to LA thought they could do better and were willing to cross the frontier to try.
Then, once the area was established and going well, those wishing to do better saw
this as a land of accomplishment and success. So, the ethos was established and sold
to the country as success just waiting to happen. The prototypical stories of the
waiter who is really an actor or the woman discovered at a sofa fountain or an actor
who can go on to be president are LA stories. Still, they are stories of individual
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success; there are no great corporate stories like that of IBM in Armonk or Citibank
in Wilmington or Wells Fargo in San Francisco or Microsoft in Seattle. The closest
thing to these Fortune 500 companies is perhaps Lockheed/Martin but even it is
named for individuals and is a specialty or boutique defense enterprise that pails in
comparison to corporate leader Boeing.
The major industry in LA is the film industry, and at least since the collapse of
the studio system in the 1960's it has been dedicated to making stars and money more
than industrial infrastructure. It is a business of artistic expression in which control by
the individual beat out control by the industry. Perfecting one’s craft or demonstrating
ones’ talent are the driving forces that compete with the desire to make money in
Hollywood; but, they share the trait of doing better in one’s chosen medium of value.
Creating synergies of these individualistic realms is the beneficial side of the LA
experience and the social goal of many Angelenos. The area of endeavor is not as
important as the drive to succeed at it and to better one’s self. This is a pattern that
crosses cultural lines, immigrants are here to get better lives, and class lines, the rich
want to be the super rich. This valuing of self-interest as the intersection of
perfectability and individualism is an LA cultural value pattern.
Another such pattern is a rejection of concentrated power. Although this gets
a fuller treatment in the consensus chapter, the basic point is that the LA civic culture
was formed in response to fear of the twin bosses of corporate concentration as
practiced by the Southern Pacific Railroad and the immigrant bosses of the east coast
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cities which were too real a possibility given the centrality of immigration and recent
socialists successes during the 1910's. As a result, Angelenos sought to create an
environment to moderate both forms of concentration. Through municipal ownership
and the use of citizen commissions, the city founders hoped to check the influence any
one person could wield over the city. But, this value goes beyond just the
governmental system. LA is home to more small businesses than any other city in
America; LA has more ethnic groups than any other city in American and is the only
major city without an ethnic majority group; there are more varied, newer, and larger
numbers of religions in the area than anywhere else; and zoning favors the single
family dwelling, especially of the California bungalow variety, over higher density
land use. It is indicative of what Mike Davis calls, “LA’s fear of crowds” (257) which
after the LA Lakers’ 2000 championship and riot seems highly rational. People here
do not even consider themselves residents of LA; when asked, they are from the
Valley or the Westside or South central or Pico Union or Boyle Heights or the
Harbor which further exemplifies this decentralized preference. The continuing
advocacy for non-partisan elections is another testament to the overarching nature of
this value But, this is a value pattern we would expect from a city with a primary
value of individualism.
A third logical value pattern is that of voluntariness. In LA, people join
groups from The Conservancy to the local homeowners groups to the neighborhood
youth soccer league to the taxpayers’ revolt that passed Proposition 13 to the
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chamber of commerce to the lobbying effort of one’s choice. This is logical because
there are no strong mechanism to compel their affiliation. As individuals with no
centralizing structure, the only way to create aggregate action is to join or build a
group of one’s own free will. The committee legacy is one part of this equation and
the entrepreneurial legacy is another. But, there is no corresponding history of
political parties or borough governments or trans-ethnic coalitions or multi-class
interest assemblies. Even the public space in LA is becoming increasingly private or
only voluntarily open to the public; “Today’s upscale, pseudo-public spaces ... are
full of invisible signs warning off the underclass ‘Other’” (Davis 226). People would
prefer to have voluntary rent-a-cops than the LAPD as the expansion o f gated
communities attests. If individual choice is sacrosanct, then the only kind o f a
permissible associations between people must be voluntary. But, this can only happen
if people can be brought together without coercion; and, this brings us to our final
value pattern, the pattern of connectivity.
LA also holds connectivity very dear; the freeways are probably the most
obvious example of this. Other examples include the type of pursuits at which we
excel, for instance, aerospace, telecommunications, TV/film, and internationalism.
Freeways are for individual cars, not mass transit; TV and films are for individual
viewers as opposed to theater or sporting events which are group activities -
remember that LA has no NFL franchise and the other teams are poor draws in
comparison to cities such as NYC or Chicago or even Boston; LA is home to ethnic
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neighborhoods, not integrated communities. But, this archipelago is connected by the
most advance automotive, telecommunication, media, sales, and technology resources
in the world. Since individual Angelenos wish to better themselves, they must be able
to reach other individuals - but only the ones with which they wish to associate. Once
they voluntarily put themselves out into the world for their own agenda, they need to
have a way to get to others and the city culture has supported this value by creating
malls, auto centers, freeways, cell phones, airports, speciality neighborhoods,
restaurants, edge cities, and mechanisms to reach markets outside of LA. But, this is
all within the constraints of the private ethos, so these are point-to-point connections
of the person-to-person nature. LA’s fear of crowds prefers the phone call to the
loud speaker, the homeowners’ lobbying to the political demonstration, as evidenced
by the recent 2000 janitors’ march that caused traffic problems and created a general
“what is this thing” reaction. When we have group actions we prefer the atomized
approach of a riot or the controlled anarchy of the 3r d Street Promenade or Old Town
Pasadena or cruising Crenshaw, Sunset, or Whittier, not the orchestrated action of
class protest.
Connections can be overloaded and break down, as our freeways do regularly,
but in so doing they control themselves and prevent wide scale coordinated public
action. This techno-control is highly valued here in LA as it generally alleviates the
need for more costly, more obvious, and more oppressive control mechanisms.
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However, every now and then this self regulation system breaks down at horrendous
cost, and we have riots.
LA CHARTER HISTORY
There are two types of cities in California: charter cities and general law cities;
in its history, LA has been both types. General law cities are governed by a template
of laws created and maintained by the state for controlling local municipal affairs; the
majority of California cities are of this variety. However, some of the oldest and
largest o f California’s cities are charter cities. These cities, such as San Francisco and
Los Angeles, have more control over local matters than general law cities because the
rules for governing these cities are embodied in and controlled by their city charters
and not the state legislature. So, a city charter can be thought of as something of a
constitution for a city as it is the foundation for local law. Despite this fundamental
nature, a charter must not be understood as a statement of the rights of the people;
strictly speaking, a charter is a statement of the limitations on a local government.
What this means is that since the US, in general, and California, in particular, have
strong traditions of home rule, we believe in a system o f local control where the
power resides in the resident population but is exercised by the government. So, a
charter limits what a local government can do in executing the power of the people.
This is why a city charter needs to be very specific in its granting of powers to a
municipal government; because, in general terms, it is taking the exercise o f these
powers, and only these powers, from the citizens of that area. This is why Art. I, Sec.
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2, page 2 of the 1925 Charter began with, “The City ofLos Angeles, in addition to
any other rights and powers not held by it, or that hereafter may be granted it under
the constitution of laws of the state, shall have the right and power, subject to the
restrictions in this Charter contained: ...,” and it precedes to enumerate these powers.
The second section of Article I of the 1999 Charter does the same thing in slightly
different wording. (Art. I, Sec. 1 is on creating a corporate entity outside of state
power but in accordance with state and federal law.)
Both of these types of California cities were a part of LA’s civic history in the
pre-1925 charter days. From the time we entered the union and become a state in
1850 until 1889, the city of LA was governed by state law even on the municipal
level. LA adopted its first city charter in 1889 in an attempt to foster economic
growth and municipal efficiency. This charter institutionalized two key governmental
mechanisms that are still a part of the city structure today. They are the use of
commissions to direct city departments and the council-mayor form of government.
As would become a habit with LA, this charter remained in force until 1925, but it
was amended early and often. In 1903, the city adopted initiative, recall, and
referendum by means of charter amendments; in 1911, the government was
substantially overhauled with the introduction of civil service, competitive bidding,
and non-partisan elections. Despite these, and because of these, reforms by populous
politicos, in 1912 a board of freeholders was elected to draft an entirely new charter
which they did. It was rejected by those same voters that had empaneled its authors
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four years earlier. Then, in response to corruption and organized crime another board
of freeholders was elected in 1923 to draft a charter, but this time it was adopted in
1925: 126,058 (87 %) “yeas” to 19,287 “nays”; and, it remained in force until 2000,
albeit with many changes along the way.
“The 1925 charter rested on the philosophy of checks and balances and
featured a weak mayor, a stronger council, a plethora of civilian commissions, and a
host of department heads who often acted autonomously” (Pitt and Pitt 266). This is
the generally accepted view of the LA charter. The Rand report on charter reform
produced for the 1990's reform activities put it this way:
Citing the twin needs for governmental efficiency and economic
growth, and fearful of partisan and special interest politics, reform
proponents institutionalized the shift from legislative to executive
power and from elected to appoint officials ...In sum, power was
diverted from the council and diffused among the mayor, council, the
commissions, and the general managers. Underlaying this was a fear
of concentrated power in a single group, especially one that was
viewed as susceptible to “boss rule”. The 1925 charter pursued a
strong social reform agenda as well by establishing districts rather than
at-large elections (as a bow to “one person one vote”), providing an
anti-discrimination provision governing city employment,
institutionalizing the initiative and recall processes, and permitting a
form of neighborhood government by allowing borough-level powers.
(McCarthy et al 10-11)
While this description does give us the content of the Charter, it understates the
weaknesses of the document. Los Angeles AtoZ puts forth the same ideas in this
manner:
voters elected a new board of freeholders which produced the charter
of 1925, but its effect on corruption [its rationale for adoption] was
less than decisive ... Operating on essentially a negative philosophy,
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the freeholders dispersed power in city hall so as to prevent
precipitous action and expose overt wrongdoing. By the same token,
city government became unnecessarily rigid and slow to meet the
demands of the rapidly expanding population. As the framework could
not accommodate the increasing demands for new and efficient
government services, reformers resorted to piecemeal reforms, which
filled the charter with details better left to administrative or legislative
action, For example, a city charter amendment was needed to add the
“s” in Municipal Arts Council. (Pitt and Pitt 266)
These two views have important similarities and differences.
The similarities center on the reasons for reform and the basic understanding
of the governance structure. There is little dispute that three major elements framed
the thinking of the freeholders. First, they were reacting to the corruption of the
Southern Pacific Railroad dominated city government. Second, in light of
immigration realities and Socialist successes, they were fearful of the political
machines of the east cost, especially the most famous of the group the Boss Tweed
machine in New York. These machines were fueled by immigrant population and
driven by the political manipulation of their opportunist demagogues. Despite the city
having been created by immigration, (the population went from 100,000 in 1900 to
over 575,000 in 1920) almost all of this influx had been from elsewhere in the country
especially the Midwest. As a result, the city was almost 90% Anglo American despite
its Hispanic and Native American origin; this at a time when Ellis Island alone was
processing 5,000 new immigrants a day and New York’s population went from 7
million to 10 million. Still, this was generally considered a favorable ethnic profile;
but, it was threatened by the fact that LA was attracting and needed to attract growth
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from other areas; “growth in the 1920's was viewed as ‘the major business of the
region, its reason for existence’’’(McCarthy et al 17), yet it was something over which
the city had only limited control despite how critical it was to the city’s survival. This
possibility of increased ethnic diversity coupled with the tendency o f people to pay
greater attention to specific local needs presented the growing city with a problem in
managing infrastructure growth and business expansion. And, city services,
demographics, and economic well-being were the keys to political control; the
freeholders needed to structure a government to prevent these forces from creating or
becoming victims to west coast political machines.
The third and final element framing the 1925 Charter thinking was a
progressive social agenda. Rooted in a Protestant Great Awakening, the technological
progresses of the industrial age, and philosophical pragmatism, the Progressives had
faith in the innate goodness of people that they believed had been warped by social
conditions; Dr. John Chambers puts it this way in his book, Tyranny o f Change:
America in the Progressive Era, 1900-19J 7, “the progressives sought to modernize
American institutions while attempting to recapture the ideals of sense of community
which they believed had existed in the past... They took the lead in establishing a
social agenda for modem America” (107).
There is much debate about the Progressives, but the core o f their agenda can
be distilled.
Richard Hofstadter, saw it [The Progressive Era] as a movement led
by declining gentry and middle-class professional anxious about their
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loss of status and the threats to the social order posed by the corporate
wealth and the industrial masses. Another school of interpretation, led
by Gabriel Kolko, asserted that progressivism was conservative and
was dominated by the new corporate managers and financiers, who
sought to control government. Still others, such as David Thelen,
suggest that it was radical in its potential for building coalitions of
consumers across class and ethnic lines. Samuel Hays and Robert
Wiebe determined that the progressives continued the long-term trend
toward rationalization, bureaucratization, and centralization in an
industrial society. (Chambers 107)
There is some truth in each of these interpretations. But rather than an in-depth study
o f these schools what is important to our analysis is the way these various elements
combined to create a social agenda, especially in the LA of the 1920's.
The progressive agenda centered around four principal categories of issues.
There were: the business regulation movement to make business more responsible to
American Values and the public interest; the direct democracy movement to reform
the political system; the social justice movement to aid the exploited; and the social
control movement which, “represented a coercive effort by old-stock Americans to
impose a uniform culture based on their values” (Chambers 113-114). We should
take note that the first three of these movements are mechanisms that served to
achieve the fourth. All of these Progressive values are clearly demonstrated in the
1925 Charter. The business regulation movement was typified by the creation of
municipal ownership of the key infrastructure providers, most importantly the
Department of Water and Power (DWP) and the Harbor. The direct democracy
movement manifested itself by the use of district voting, recall and initiative, and the
creation of a weak mayor system. The social justice movement was actualized in the
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continuation of the civil service, use of commissions and the empowerment of
department heads, the anti-discrimination provision, and competitive bidding.
Finally, the social control movement directed the rest in a meta-narrative fashion. The
employment of non-partisan elections, the switch to appointed commissioners, and
the prioritization of growth, efficiency, and the American way above all else
institutionalized the political culture that was to dominate LA to the present day.
In specific terms, what the 1925 Charter did was create a somewhat unique
form of government for a major US city. No major US city is governed by a
commission system; and although LA is not either, it can be and is argued that the real
power in LA is in the commissions. Still on paper and in most interpretations, the
City Council is the governing body of the city; and, we employ a council-mayor
governance system. The Council is comprised o f 15 members elected by district as
per an alternative measure that appeared on the 1925 ballot with the 1925 Charter
passing by a 88,275 (62%) to 53,441 (38%) margin. All legislative powers reside
with the Council subject to the Mayor’s veto; however, the Mayor’s veto can be
overridden by the Council. This is one o f the reasons the Mayor is considered by
many as weak. For instance, the Mayor can fire the general manger of a department
but the Council can, and has, overridden the Mayor leaving the department head in
place; this results in department heads playing to the councilmembers’ wishes rather
than the Mayor’s, negating the Mayor’s power to fire or control the departments.
The Mayor is the chief executive of the city and has veto power over the Council; but
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as mentioned, this can be negated by the Council. Likewise the Mayor has the ability
to hire and fire general managers and commissioners, but this too is subject to Council
approval. The Mayor’s main source of power is through the budget process over
which he has greatest control. An organizational chart of the LA city government is
attached on the next page. It is confusing as most department are run, in one fashion
or another, by either boards or citizen commissions; they are what at least one local
expert calls the “shadow government” o f LA; they and the departments they control
are the core of LA government.
There are three types of city commissions: 27 of LA’s 39 city commissions are
advisory, 5 have policy making authority, and 7 have both policy making authority
and control over their own budgets. Commissioners serve mainly as part-time, non
paid volunteers for five year terms. The commissions with policy making authority
and budgetary control are believed to be of greatest importance, and this is why they
control their own funds. The utility of this protection from city officials in the cases
of commissions such as the Ethics and Retirement and Pensions Commissions, is fairly
straight forward. However, the independence of three large “proprietary’
departments has been a source of constant struggle for our municipal government.
These three departments are Water and Power, the Harbor, and the Airport; despite
their being vitally important to the management o f the region, they operate without
council involvement under the direction of the voluntary appointees of the Mayor.
Thus, 12 o f the departments of the city, and the most important of them at that, are
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TABLE 2-2 - Organizational Chart o f the City o f Los Angeles 1996
II
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Formefly Included I n P e rs o n n e l O e p e r tm e n t
run in effect by committees of amateurs with no elective mandate. This means they
are beyond the direct control o f the Mayor or Council except for their ability to
control the personnel in the committees - although the passage of Proposition 5 in
1991 gave the Council the right to veto any board’s or Commission’s action.
But, this was precisely the intend of the progressive freeholders of 1923. The
differences of the effects of these Progressive mechanisms on public policy are more
interpretive and created the litany of historical viewpoints highlighted previously. The
writers of the Rand report do no view the Mayor as the weak link in the chain nor do
they see the government as unworkable; they see the Mayor’s budgetary control and
commission appointment as highly influential and the government as having created
the thriving LA of the present which means it must have worked on many levels. Drs.
Pitt who wrote Los Angeles A to Z do not find the picture as rosy. They look at the
attempted uniformity of culture and decentralization as resulting in corruption and
falling far short of the lofty aspirations of the 1923 freeholders. Both sides have
evidence to support their cases. LA has survived and thrived in the 75 years under
the 1925 charter. But, how much of that was a function of the 1925 charter?
Certainly, the Progressive agenda was embodied in the 1925 Charter, but to what
degree was it following and to what degree was it creating an LA agenda? Perhaps, it
was an appropriate agenda in 1925 in mono-cultural, growth dependent LA. But, is
no longer so in the LA o f 1999 full o f ethnicities and sprawling out of control?
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To step outside o f this theoretical questioning for an instructive example let us
look at an issue of great importance to this study, that is the issue of sub-
governmental units or borough government. As mentioned, the 1925 Charter
permitted the creation of borough level governments. This could be claimed as
another example of the direct democracy movement of the LA Progressives, but
nothing could be further from the truth. San Pedro was incorporated as a separate
city in 1888, and it encompassed what would become the LA harbor district; it was
annexed into the City of Los Angeles in 1909, as was Wilmington (incorporated in
1905) which helped to connect this harbor area to LA. Strong local opposition to the
annexation of the harbor by these cities was overcome by three carrots offered by LA
to the areas. First, one carrot was the water rights that would be created by the
recently begun LA Aqueduct. Second, residents were promised passage o f a bond
issue for harbor improvement which was in fact passed in 1909. The third carrot was
an agreement and charter amendment that the areas could form borough governments
should they desire to do so in the future. This provision was carried forward into the
1925 Charter.
There it lay unused until the early 1950's when, feeling exploited, the areas
attempted to create borough governments as per its Charter stipulation from years
gone by. This resulted in a court case, and in 1953 the borough provision of the 1925
charter was ruled unconstitutional by the state Supreme Court because it covered only
the two areas and not the entire city thus granting unfair rights to these areas. In
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1973, the provisions were dropped from the Charter all together. So, we can see that
politics had more to do with this provision than ideology, but equally important we
can see that uniformity of culture won out over direct democracy in the name of
equality. Practicality is not a neutral word; it is a triumph of one set of values over
another. The history of the LA Charter from 1925 to 1999 is a history of changes to
extenuate and solidify the Progressive goals of growth and cultural uniformity in the
face of minority expansion and calls for greater resident empowerment.
But, there is little doubt that there were a multitude of “piecemeal” changes in
the1925 Charter before its decommissioning in 1999. We can start by looking at the
attempts to overhaul the document completely; the first attempt was in 1934 only 9
years after the 1925 Charter’s passage. But, as the chart illustrates, there were many
others:
TABLE 2-3 - CHART OF MAJOR LA CHARTER REFORM STUDIES
(Chart continues on page 66)
YEAR NAME REASON RESULT
1934 Minuteers’
Association
To curb
corruption of
Mayor Shaw
Submitted to
Council which
filed with no
further action
1943 Beebe
Commission
To empower new
Mayor Bowron
Council voted 8 to
5 not to place on
ballot
1946 Government
Research Inc.
To balance the
Bowron reforms
insufficient
support to force
Council action
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1949-1953 Little Hoover To institutionalize
the legacy of
Bowron
broken into
charter
amendments with
mixed success
1962-1963 Town Hall Yorty’s call for
stronger mayor
Debated but no
changes resulted
1962-1964 League o f Women
Voters
To re-balance the
feuding
government
insufficient
support to force
Council action
1969-1971 Reining
Commission
Yorty appointed
to reduce
dysfunction in
government &
create a legacy
Changed
significantly by
Council and failed
at ballot in 1970
and 1971
1997-1999 ACC and ECC Riots and
Secession
Drafted joint
charter passed by
voters
(McCarthy e ta l 11)
We can see why Dr.’s Erie and Ingram call LA, “a city obsessed with perfecting
itself’ (McCarthy e ta l 11). This is even more obvious when we look at the changes
made to the 1925 Charter in the form of amendments since its adoption.
TABLE 2 -3 - LA CHARTER REFORM, 1850 - 1997
(Table continues on page 67)
TIME PERIOD CHARTER CHANGES
ON THE BALLOT
CHARTER CHANGES
APPROVED -
PERCENT
1850 - 1924 (Total) 160 95 - 59%
1925 - 1929 36 22 - 61%
1930 - 1939 95 56 - 59%
1940 - 1949 85 56 - 66%
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1950- 1959 76 64 - 84%
1960 - 1969 76 69 - 91%
1970 - 1979 72 53 - 74%
1980 - 1989 61 50 - 82%
1990 - 1997 42 39 - 93%
1925 - 1997 (Total) 543 408 - 75%
(McCarthy e ta l 11)
In total, there have been 8 major movements to rewrite the city charter, 543
amendments proposed by Council, and 408 actual revisions. And, “Four issues have
dominated these amendments: the operation of the proprietary departments
(especially in the 1925-1961 period), civil service, pensions, and elections” (McCarthy
et al 11).
The Rand report makes an important observation. It states: “The contrast
between the relative success of piecemeal and comprehensive reform is suggestive for
current charter efforts. Specific amendments focused on narrow issue stand a better
chance for passage than systematic reform” (McCarthy et al 12). Certainly the
empirical evidence from 1925 - 1997 supports this conclusion; 75% o f the
amendments passed and none of the charter reforms was successful. The result of
these actions has been the creation of a document that is over 600 pages rife with
contradictions and is more of a detailed manual of operations than a concise statement
of governmental limitations. Yet, this piecemeal or incremental approach is more
than mere accident. The decentralized philosophy of the 1925 text fosters a
compartmentalized approach and the stress on checks and balances facilitates
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contradictions. Finally, a reliance on the people and voluntary associations involved
in government rather than the formalized organizations of the society for fear of their
becoming political machines creates a dependency on group think - be it of a
commission, the Council, or public consensus - to check both power hunger
individuals and the pliant masses as opposed to strong civic institutions.
All of this was drawn into a history quickly articulated by Marc Haerele o f the
LA Weekly writing in an article in the LA Times on the eve o f the new charter taking
effect. He narrated:
LA’s political roadside is littered with the bones of previous attempts
to change the city’s progressive-era government. These failures proved
that the accumulating unwieldiness of city government favored
agencies more interested in battening their power than serving the
public. Accordingly, it is no real surprise that the last disco-era charter
revamp died at the hands of the Department of Water and Power. But
things have changed since then. The insider-dominated city that had
long worked well for a majority-white population didn’t really serve
the new non-white minority community. Then the city dragged its
economic keel in the early ‘90's; after the defense-industry shrinkdown
and before the new-media boom, unemployment and homelessness
rose, property values and urban satisfaction sank. Then the old power
structures eroded. The mighty DWP had to shed nearly half its
employees. The Los Angeles Police Department was humiliated by the
1991 cop beating of Rodney King and riots the following year, which
also discredited Mayor Tom Bradley’s multicultural ideal. Richard
Riordan’s autocratic, top-down administration won victories over the
city’s establishments but seemed to many Angelenos even more remote
that its predecessor. Services declined, the San Fernando Valley
secession, movement, perhaps the key element in the return of charter
reform, revived, and Riordan wasted months before even voicing his
opposition to it. With the city’s existence at stake, and with traditional
charter-change opponents in disarray or in ruin, the moment for
change was at hand. It was a moment lasting four years. It would be
romantic - and dishonest - to say that citizen groups sprung up across
the city and marched through the streets, demanding reform. The
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cause really arose among the city's vocational keeners: the chamber of
commerce, the homeowners associations and the urban-policy wonks.
These factions, who so often disagree about everything, finally
managed, on two separate, long-running commissions, to agree about
the charter. (M6)
P A T .F.NDAR. OF LA CHARTER REFORM EVENTS
The specific development of the charter activities will be major focus o f the
next chapter; however, it is appropriate to end this history with a calendar o f chapter
reform events. The next chapter’s elaboration identifies the significance of the events;
still, they are a part of our history. Certain definition will make this history more
comprehensible. ACC is an abbreviation for the Appointed Charter Commission;
ECC is for the Elected Charter Commission. The Boland Bill was a bill introduced
into the State Legislature which would have increased local control over secession
activities. Finally, CM stands for Councilmember, and NBC stands for neighborhood
councils.
TABLE 2-4 - CHARTER REFORM CALENDAR
Before 1996
4/29/92 Acquittal of the Rodney King officers causes three days of civil unrest
6/8/93 Richard Riordan elected mayor ending Tom Bradley’s 20 years of
service
1996
6/96 Boland Bill is introduced and passed in the State Assembly
6/6/96 The Economic Alliance of the San Fernando Valley proposes
reforming the city charter as an alternative to secession
6/11/96 Seven CM’s support call for charter reform
7/31/96 Valley leaders begin a petition drive to authorize a charter reform
panel
8/6/96 Responding to valley pressure CM Wachs proposes a citizen panel on
charter reform
8/8/96 Mayor calls for a citizen panel to reform city charter
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8/13/96
8/22/96
9/10/96
10/30/96
11/21/96
12/21/96
12/26/96
1997
1/7/97
1/8/97
2/27/97
3/29/97
4/3/97
4/3/97
4/8/97
5/9/97
5/28/97
6/3/97
6/30/97
7/7/97
8/5/97
8/20/97
9/23/97
12/17/97
1998
3/25/98
5/31/98
6/10/98
6/26/98
7/7/98
7/27/98
7/28/98
Council President Ferraro drafts plan for an appointed charter reform
panel
Boland Bill to facilitate secession of The Valley killed in State Senate
Council agrees to form advisory committee on charter reform
Petition for elected charter commission submitted with 300,000
signatures
ACC has first meeting
After a week of legal wrangling, the reform initiative petition is
certified
Federal court orders that ECC elections must be by district
Council in closed session, excludes charter reform initiative from April
ballot
Federal judge orders council to place charter reform initiative on the
April ballot
ACC names Dr. Sonenshein as Executive Director after interviewing 4
finalists
Mayor raises over $1.9 million to promote charter reform effort
LA Times poll shows 76% had not heard o f charter reform measure
ECC candidate and Teachers’ Union President, Helen Bernstein, killed
in car accident
Election - Riordan reelected (61%), charter reform measure passed, 8
ECC members elected
Council panel approves mayor’s budget with funding for the ACC
ACC holds first public meeting at Valley College
Final 7 ECC members are selected in runoff elections (labor wins a
majority)
ECC members sworn in
First ECC meeting (money main topic)
ECC requests public financing from council
100's of applications are submitted for the ECC Executive Director job
ECC gets $350,000 in public funds (to supplement $100,000 private)
ECC hires new Administrative Director, Geoffrey Garfield and Policy
Director, Dr. H. Eric Schockman
ACC votes to expand mayor’s power in the firing o f general managers
ECC endorses elected NBC’s with decision making power
ECC’s private summit creates controversy
Joint committee agrees on language for mayor’s powers strengthening
ECC votes to reject bill of rights in the charter
ECC votes to broaden mayor’s powers
Labor attacks ECC proposal
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8/5/98 ACC releases 30 page summary of key recommendations
9/15/98 ACC has first of seven neighborhood open houses
10/13/98 ECC member Dennis Zine is accused of lewd conduct, relieved o f duty
10/20/98 ECC approves placing council size issue on ballot separately
10/28/98 ACC holds final (of seven) neighborhood open houses
10/29/98 Chairs of panels resume talks on joint document after extended hiatus
11/4/98 Panel announces preamble writing contest open to high school
students
11/7/98 LA Constitutional Convention by ECC
11/17/98 ACC releases draft charter
11/18/98 Compromise on finance evaporates
12/8/98 Mayor gets to fill ECC vacancy created by the resignation of long
absent Archie-Hudson weeks before a key votes
12/10/98 Compromise committee adopts position on the hire/fire issue
12/18/98 Panel chairs reach key compromise
12/28/98 ECC releases its charter version
1999
1/5/99 ECC rejected compromise proposal and voted to pursue its own
charter version
1/8/99 Mayor urges two panels to resume talks on a compromise proposal for
reform
1/11/99 ECC approves a compromise package with ACC concerns
1/13/99 ACC votes 12-1 to refer proposed compromise package to special
conference committee
1/20/99 Compromise is hammered out by chairs and supported by the Mayor
1/26/99 ECC approves unified package
2/1/99 Both charter panels adopt compromise (exclusive of wording)
2/24/99 Joint committee unanimously approves compromise charter package
2/27/99 ACC approves compromise version of charter
3/1/99 Council unanimously agrees to put charter on June ballot
3/16/99 Majority o f Valley secessionists back charter
5/25/99 Political arm of LA’s labor movement votes to oppose charter
5/27/99 Mayor urges voters to support charter
5/28/99 Last of many organized labor groups comes out against the charter
5/29/99 Group of religious and civic leaders announce support of document
6/1/99 Majority of Council announce opposition to the new charter
6/3/99 CM Wachs resigns leadership post in protest of council’s rejection of
reform
6/8/99 New charter passes by a wide margin (60% of 16% turnout)
7/16/99 CM Chick selected to lead city charter implementation panel
8/10/99 Seven members ofNeighborhood board named (3 from the Valley)
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COMPARISON OF GOVERNANCE SYSTEMS
So, how does the government of the 1925 Charter compare with other city
governments in California and the US9 At its most basic level, LA is a mayor-council
structural government. Of the top ten cities in America all with populations in excess
of one million, 6 have this structure. Four cities, San Diego, Phoenix, Dallas, and San
Antonio, have council-city manager governance systems. In those cities between
500.000 - 1,000,000 in population, 13 have mayor-council systems and only one, San
Jose, has a council-manager structure. So, 79% of the largest cities in America have
the same municipal structure as LA; but interestingly, of the 5 that do not, two are in
California and all are in the southwest - Texas, Arizona, and California. These are all
states associated with the western frontier of the cowboy. In the next tier o f cities,
200.000 - 500,000, we find the only large cities to be governed by commissions;
Portland, OR, St. Petersburg, FL and Toledo, OH. The rest of these cities are mayor-
council systems 54% and city manager type 42%. In the remainder of the 100 largest
US cities, 41% are mayor-council and 59% are city manager with no commission
governments. It thereby follows that a mayor-council system is predominate in cities
over 500,000 people and a council-manager form in cities with populations under
250,000. Only 3 of these 100 use a commission structure; but, we must be careful in
remembering that LA does employ commissions to run most of its departments and is
arguably a commission run city even if it is not structured as such. Certainly, it is a
hybrid.
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Another facet of the LA government is the number of elected officials. In
addition to the Mayor, the City Attorney, the Controller, and the 15 Council members
are all elected; the first two citywide and the latter by district. Of the largest US
cities, 6 elect their council by district, 2 (Houston, Philadelphia) have mixed at-large
and district elections, and 2 (Dallas, Detroit) have only at-large elections. Two other
LA city officials of note are the CAO, Chief Administrative Officer, and the CLA,
Chief Legislative Analyst. CAOs are not uncommon in US cities as 67% employ
them; however, most of these cities are smaller in population (<250,000), and west
coast cities favor CAOs as 92% of them have one. The CLA is very powerful as this
position directs the council’s floor activities and coordinates between the Council
members; as such, it is an appointed position with some type of person handling this
function in all cities. In LA this person takes on more importance than merely being
a clerk, but this is a function of the size o f the city and its decentralization o f power
more than anything else. The election o f the Controller and City Attorney impacts the
structure in that it means that they are not appointed by nor responsible to the Mayor.
This obviously weakens the Mayor in relation to some other mayors; but again, this is
the norm in American today.
The size of the LA Council is unusual. It is small for either a US or California
city; the evaluation of this depends on a larger context than is presented in this factual
section and this point will be discussed later. Saying that, the facts of council size are
laid out in the next two charts.
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TABLE 2.5 - COUNCIL SIZE IN MAJOR US CITIES
City Residents
per
council
1997
City pop.
Total
council
District
council
At-large
council
District
size
Los
Angeles
229,908 3448613 15 15 0 229,908
New
York
143,789 7333253 51 51 0 143,789
Phoenix 131,119 1048949 8 8 0 131,119
San
Diego
127,997 1151977 9 8 1 143,997
Houston 121,578 1702086 14 9 5 189,121
Detroit 110,226 992,038 9 0 9 -
Average,
w/o LA
105,773 2195464 - - - -
San
Antonio
99,891 998,905 10 10 0 99,981
Philadelp
hia
89,662 1524249 17 10 7 152,425
Dallas 73,059 1022830 14 0 14 -
Chicago 54,635 2731743 50 50 0 54,635
(McCarthy et al 92)
TABLE 2-6 - COUNCIL SIZE IN MAJOR CALIFORNIA CITIES
(Table continues on page 76)
City Residents
per
council
1997
City pop
Total
council
District
council
At-large
council
District
size
Los
Angeles
229,908 3448613 15 15 0 229,908
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San
Diego
127,997 1151977 9 8 1 143,997
San Jose 81,688 816,884 10 10 0 81,688
Anaheim 70,533 282,133 4 4 0 70,533
San
Francisco
66,789 734,676 11 0 11 -
Average,
w/o LA
64,946 - - - - -
Fresno 55,222 386,551 7 7 0 55,222
Long
Beach
48,206 433,852 9 9 0 48,206
Sacramen
to
46,746 373,964 8 8 0 46,746
Oakland 45,787 366,926 8 7 1 52,418
Santa
Ana
41,547 290,827 7 7 0 41,547
(McCarthy et al 93)
A dimension of LA’s governance structure that is a focus o f continuing debate
has been the power o f the Mayor. LA is called a weak mayor system because relative
to other cities, our Mayor has fewer unchecked powers and the Council is designated
as the governing body of the city. As a result, mayors from 1925 on have sought
charter reforms to enhance their powers. But to what degree is this true. The Rand
report spend much time examining this issue citing powers and comparisons; their
conclusion is, I feel, a fair one. They aver:
In terms of veto, appointment, and budget powers [of the mayor],
then, Los Angeles is comparable with cities its size. James Svara
defines a strong mayor system as involving “a mayor with extensive
powers and integrated administrative control over staff.” Given the
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limitations of civil service, one might argue that Los Angeles’ mayor
fits this definition. What the office loses in competition with executive
boards it gains in terms of extensive budget powers, including the item
veto. The city’s government cannot be termed a weak mayor system
just because there are commissions. (McCarthy et al 91-92)
The point here is that the Mayor has tremendous power to have access to, persuade,
and budget the rest of the city; the Mayor still has the bulliness pulpit. The Mayor
can be the most influential person in the city; but the Mayor may not be given the
most power. Still, the office’s power is considerable especially in the context o f a
highly decentralized power structure. Can the Mayor, as is the case in cities like
Chicago and New York, dictate city direction by mere caveat or whim? No. But,
does this make the office weak? It is not weak merely because it is not stronger than
all others, not even the Council is not that strong.
That is precisely how the 1923 freeholders wanted it. What the 1999
residents want is another matter. What we can conclude about LA’s governance
structure vis-a-vis other cities is enumerated by the Rand’s report on this subject.
“Like most of the nation’s large cities, Los Angeles uses the mayor-council system,
gives the mayor appointment, veto, and budget powers, and elects its councilmembers
by districts rather than at large. In sum, in most respects of its governance, Los
Angeles is a typical big city” (McCarthy et al 95). It is bigger than most as are its
districts, but it is not aberrant. LA is a city of princes as is typified by the
councilmembers who preside over their own fiefdoms. The late councilman Gilbert
Lindsay used to refer to himself as “The Emperor of the 9t h District”. The 1925
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Charter in its fear of centralization and desire to create space for each of us, created a
municipal feudalistic structure. The “council-barons” have their areas; the
homeowners have their area; and, the businesses, churches, and schools have their
areas. But, what structural components are there to unite this archipelago? Few to
none, with the few being either external enemies like crime, pollution, or control by
“others” or growth and expansion which are viewed as benefits to all.
WORKS CITED
Chambers II, Dr. John W. Tyranny o f Change: America in the Progressive Era,
1900-1917, St. Martin’s Press: New York. 1980.
Daily News, “Valley turned Charter tide”, 8 June 1999. A l.
Davis, Mike. City o f Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. Verso: New
York. 1990.
Gabriel, Stuart. “Remaking the Los Angeles Economy”, Rethinking Los Angeles.
Eds. Dear, Michael, Schockman, H. Eric, and Hise, Greg. Sage Publications:
Thousand Oaks. 1996 pp. 25- 33.
Habermas, Jurgen. Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science, and Politics.
Beacon Press: Boston. 1971.
Haerele, Marc. “The Great Charter Awakening Sneaks Up on City Hall”, Los Angeles
Times. 25 June 2000. M6.
Hall, Sir Peter. Cities in Civilization. Pantheon Books: New York. 1998.
Hinojosa-Ojeda, Raul. “A Crowded Field Could Put a Latino in City Hall”, Los
Angeles Times. 10 September 1999. B13.
Johnston, David Clay. “Gap between Rich and Poor Found Substantially Wider”, New
York Times. 5 September 1999, A14.
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Kayden, Dr. Xandra. “A Chance for a Return to Working Democracy”, Los Angeles
Times. 9 January 2000. B17.
LA 2000 Committee. LA 2000 - a city for the future. LA 2000 Committee: Los
Angeles. 1988.
McCarthy, Kevin, Erie. Steven, and Reichardt, Robert. Meeting the Challenge of
Charter Reform. RAND: Santa Monic, CA. 1998.
McGreevy, Patrick, “Political Briefing”, Los Angeles Times. 9 September 1999, B1
and B4.
McWilliams, Carey. Southern California Country: An Island on the Land. Duell,
Sloan & Pierce: New York. 1946.
Newton, Jim. “LA’s Growing Pay Gap Looms as Political Issue”, Los Angeles Times.
7 September 1999. pp. Al & A24.
Pitt, Leonard and Pitt, Dale. Los Angeles A to Z: An Encyclopedia o f the City and
County. University of California Press: Los Angeles. 1997.
Rubenstein, Richard, and Roth, John. Approaches to A uschwitz: The Holocaust and
its Legacy. John Knox Press: Atlanta, Georgia. 1987.
Russell, Bertrand. Authority and the Individual. Beacon Press: Boston. 1968.
Schockman, H. Eric. “Is Los Angeles Governable”, from Rethinking Los Angeles,
Eds. Dear, Michael, H. Eric Schockman, and Hise, Greg. Sage Publications:
Thousand Oaks, CA. 1996. 57-75.
Starr, Kevin. Material Dreams: Southern California through the 1920's. Oxford
University Press: New York. 1990.
Terry, Don. “US Child Poverty Rate Fell as Economy Grew, But is Above 1979
Level”, New York Times, 11 August 2000. A10.
Wolfe, Alan. "The Moral Sense in Estate Tax Repeal”, New York Times. 24 July
2000. A23.
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CHAPTER S - THEME I - CRISIS MANAGEMENT A M ) RATIONALIZATION
A charter must be an all encompassing document. This breathe of scope,
combined with the fact that LA’s charter reform activities were spread over at least
three fall years (6/96 - 6/99), presents a challenge to any would be researcher in
presenting this data in a manageable and insightful manner. To this end, I will attempt
not to present a chronological description of events, although a calendar o f said
events is given; rather, I will try to frame the reform activities around themes that
provide, I feel, the deepest insights into these events and their ethical dimensions.
Further, it is impossible to neatly disengage the individual issues from each other in
the type of holistic document that a charter must be. Discussions were often multi
sided and involved the balancing and trading off of concerns, as American politics
always has; and, this complexity does not lend itself to a time sequenced description.
So, borrowing from a tradition of systems analysis, we will begin by looking at the
case of LA’s charter reform activities of the late 1990's as a study in Crisis
Management, or CM, in so doing, the first two critical themes o f the reform activities
will emerge. They are: crisis and rationalization.
CM AND THE CHARTER
The concepts and specifics of CM, crisis management, are clearly laid out in
the seminal, The Essential Guide to Managing Corporate Crises: a Step-by-Step
Handbook fo r Surviving Major Catastrophes by Mitroff, Pearson, and Harrington.
From this model, we can identity the themes that emerge from the charter reform
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activities. The first theme which becomes obvious is the centrality o f the type of crisis
management employed by the LA public corporation. CM is a newly established
business discipline which endeavors to assist managers of corporations to more
successfully weather crises. It assumes, “that in today’s world, it is not a question of if
or whether an organization will experience a crisis; it is a matter o f what type o f crisis
will occur, what form it will take, and how and when it will happen” (MitrofFet al 5).
Certainly, this is true of governments, be they local or national. CM adopts a systems
approach to the analysis because, “In a crisis, poor performance in one area is not
compensated by exceptional performance in another” (MitrofF et al 20). Nowhere is
this more true than in governing a state where an exceptionally preforming economy
as we have had in the 1990's has not compensated or eliminated poverty, racial
tensions, crime, educational shortfalls, income disparity, or political conflict. The
ideas of systems thinking have been employed by social thinkers from Plato in The
Republic to Hobbes in The Leviathan to Habermas in Toward a Rational Society, the
most obvious example is the allegory o f the state as a person as indicated by the term,
the body politic or the famous quote o f Louis XIV, “L ’ etat, c ’ est m or.
“In order to be effective, CM must be rooted firmly in systems thinking. CM
is systematic because crises not only affect a system as a whole but also result from
the breakdown of systems as a whole” (MitrofFet al 117). This approach helps reveal
some of the chronic problems of poor corporate management, especially the more
organic or relational ones. In a charter, not only the parts but the relationships o f the
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parts, are o f great significance. The handbook takes us through CM in a flow chart
manner with 59 separate steps that illustrates what decisions need to be made and at
what times. It is based on extensive professional research in cases ranging from the
Tylenol tampering case to the space shuttle disaster . The major emphasis of the
handbook is on the preparation of corporate management and their organizational
systems for crises and the decisions that will be needed at the next crisis and what
must be in place to permit the decisions to be effective ones. The systems orientation
o f CM is obvious in the definition of the book’s foundational concept of analysis, the
crisis. Crisis is defined as, “an event that can destroy or affect an entire organization”
(Mitroff et al 7). The organic nature o f this thinking is further revealed in the next
paragraph when it is stated:
A crisis can affect the very existence o f an organization, a major
product line, a business unit, or the like. A crisis can damage, perhaps
severely, an organization’s financial performance. A crisis can also
harm the health and well-being of consumers, employees, the
surrounding community, and the environment itself. Finally, a crisis
can destroy the public’s trust or belief in an organization, its
reputation, and its image. (Mitroff et al 8)
The handbook then attempts to articulate in specific detail the steps to be taken by
persons responsible for these organizations in light of the threats, claims, and actions
of other stakeholders.
These detailed steps can be grouped into three phases. The first phase o f CM
is the initial information and action phase; here the source and import of the
information of a crisis is evaluated. At this point, the corporation must decide if it
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will be proactive about the crisis and whether or not it will assume responsibility for
the crisis; this decision must be tempered by the organization’s ability to handle the
responsibility. The second phase of CM is the diagnosing o f the crisis. What type of
crisis is it? How prepared is the organization to respond to this type of crisis? Phase
three is treating the crisis. Here strategies for containment and/or treatment are
brought on line. The final aspect of this phase is the preparation for future crises
based on the performance of the organization during the evaluated crisis. This is a
major focus of the book since the authors have discovered, “there are no secrets in
CM ... your ability to respond will become the grounds on which your organization
will be judged” (Mitroff e ta l 21). The decisions o f managers and their values and
principles as revealed by their actions will thus be made apparent to all other
stakeholders and laid open to their scrutiny.
Another way to describe this flow chart is by isolating the eight major
decisions that need to be made in CM. They are:
1. Finding out how a crisis comes to an organization’s attention
2. Whether an organization is prepared for CM
3. Whether an organization is prepared to assume responsibility for a crisis
4. Determining the seriousness of a crisis and the organization’s responsibility
for it
5. Making the initial information gathering and action decisions
6. Determining the type of crisis
7. Deciding on an organization’s CM preparation and response
8. Deciding on containment and treatment (Mitroff et al 27-55)
These questions are an integral part of CM and help to communicate the thrust of the
model. We will present the charter activities in terms of these 8 decisions after a brief
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explanation of the second theme of the charter activities, rationalization, for these
themes serve to highlight and compliment each other significantly. But before leaving
the CM model for this conceptual background, it might be helpful to briefly delineate
how CM would view the charter process in broad terms by speaking of both the crisis
before the crisis of our case study and the case study itself.
To set the background for our study, the charter reform actions of the city and
the commissions should be viewed by CM as the second wave o f response to the
crisis of the LA city government created by the civil unrest o f April 1992; this first
public safety or criminal attacks crisis lead to a reputational, perceptual, or legitimacy
crisis. As such, charter reform can be an exercise in CM (this is exactly what Mitroff
et al’s, book covers - it even has a case study in it chapter 6), and CM can be utilized
as a framework for ethical analysis. To begin, if we follow CM, we realized that the
first reaction to the crisis of the unrest was more naturally physical and immediate.
We do not require anything more than a cursory description o f these activities of the
unrest. But, those activities had a residual outcome which was to ask a nagging
question about the legitimacy of LA city government at its very foundation which
soon took the form of its own crisis. The California Employment Development
Department’s Analys is o f the 1992 Los Angeles Civil Unrest summed it up succinctly
when it opened the executive summary of its report by declaring: “The uprising that
began in South-Central Los Angeles on April 29, 1992, was rooted in long-festering
resentments, economic deprivation, poor police/community relations, and triggered by
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a crowning act” (1). These root causes were not going to be corrected merely by a
security crisis reaction; they could only be resolved by addressing what was obviously
a much deeper crisis. This deeper crisis was one of legitimacy, and it is the focus o f
our study.
The first phase of CM is the initial information and action phase; here the
sources and significance of the information of a crisis are evaluated. This phase
consists o f decisions 1 -5. Information abounded in the wake of the 1992 turmoil.
There were federal reports, state task forces, local task forces, Rebuild LA, media
analyses, and academic assessments as well. All of this was filtered to the city’s
elected officials, and they began to draw their own conclusions. The city then had to
decide if it wished to be proactive about the now emerging legitimacy crisis and
whether or not it could assume responsibility for the crisis; this decision needed to be
tempered by the LA corporate organization’s ability to handle the responsibility. This
was the point at which the Council and Mayor began to diverge and advocate
different responses. The disintegration of the consensus on the city government’s
ability to handle the crisis highlighted the fact that the city managers were not able to
find a single answer, a unified management plan, to these questions. Some wanted to
assume responsibility while others did not. The newly elected Mayor obviously did
not think that the city government had the ability to handle the responsibility of
restoring legitimacy and advocated outside help. The City Council disagreed and split
into a number of factions which claimed anything from there was no crisis to there
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was one but it couid be handled by the Council itself to yes there was a crisis. So it
came to pass that the city government/management came up with two different
management teams to access the crisis and to create plans for containment and
treatment. They were the ACC appointed by the Council, and the ECC elected by
some of the people.
The responsibility for the second phase o f CM, the diagnosing of the crisis,
was left to the CM teams (CMT) which were the commissions. Phase two is
comprised of decisions 6 and 7. These questions are: what type of crisis is it, and how
prepared is the organization to respond to this type of crisis? The answers were left
to the commissions. The answer to the first question was predominately assumed: the
charter problem was a legal crisis which if solved would alleviate the political,
administrative, and perceptual aspects o f the crisis. A good example of this method
of approach is the parallel way the question o f the inclusion o f the 1/3 of LA adult
residents that could not vote was handled. They were assumed illegal and therefore
beyond the scope of the proceedings. CM identifies eleven types of crises: criminal
attacks, economic attacks, loss of proprietary information, industrial disasters, natural
disasters, breaks in equipment and plants, legal, reputational/perceptual, human
resources/occupational, health, and regulatory (Mitroffe ta l 73-4). But, the legal
crisis conclusion may have been a short sighted position as the charter obviously had
impact on most, if not all. of the other types o f crises; and, laws are never neutral.
Laws are products of value and philosophy systems. The approaches assumed, despite
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the wording of the ACC mission statement, that if there was a sufficient consensus
and legal precedents in an area (such as with the unions on human resources and
occupational issues) that they did not need to explore it too deeply. This was a
product o f a legalistic approach adopted for an assumed legal crisis. The second
question o f this phase about organizational response was the subject of most of the
charter disagreement. But, if the first question overly narrowed the scope of the
inquiry, we should expect that the second question’s answer would be overly
narrowed as well. In fact, it was.
Related to these two questions and another important factor in this phase of
the analysis is dealing with the warning signs of crises and their detection and
blockage. Just as there were warnings about the O-rings before the shuttle disaster,
there were warning of the crisis that faced LA. The LAPD scandals and the
Christopher Commission are obvious examples; the cost o f ignoring these warning
signals were later brought home to us painfully by the continuing Rampart disclosures
and its local and federal responses. The previous quote from the EDD Report
acknowledged that there were chronic problems all of which left warning signs. Yet,
they were blocked or discounted by the managers of our civic corporation. In CM,
“Organizations that are crisis prepared make a point o f constantly probing and
scrutinizing their operations and management structure for warnings of potential
crises. In other words, they do not leave detection up to chance” (Mitroff et al 78).
How does this standard compare to the actions o f the ACC and the ECC? Since the
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real currency of the commissions was informational, their signal assessment
mechanisms are of great importance.
Phase three of CM is treating the crisis; it is delineated as decision 8. Here,
strategies for containment and/or treatment are brought on line. Both commissions
spent the majority of their time and effort on this stage of CM. In this section, their
containment actions will be used to construct an evaluation of the commissions’
success. The final aspect of this phase is the preparation for future crises based on the
performance of the organization during the crisis. This preparation is the charter
document itself as it stands as a ‘corrected system’ that should be more prepared for
crises. We shall evaluate how prepared the LA of the future, as shaped by this
document, will be.
However, we need to note that in this section we will encounter a serious
philosophical incongruity between the values of the LA and American political culture
and values of CM/social ethics we are employing. This ethical value embraced by CM
is that of no fault learning. It is arguable that this value of CM makes it incompatible
with political analysis; this may be true. However, this is an ethical analysis;
therefore, it is not incompatible with such an analysis. This, o f course, brings up a
larger issue about whether ethical analysis might not be incompatible with political
decision making, but this issue raises larger questions at which we will only be able to
speculate based on the findings of this single case. The usefulness o f CM and ethics
to political debate will then be left up to the reader. However, the impact that the CM
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suggestions (if carried out) have on preventing a recurrence of crises or managing
them better in the future should stand regardless of the verdict on its political efficacy
and should provide an ethical alternative for corporate public action.
RATIONALIZATION AND CORPORATE CULTURE
The second theme of this case study which is brought to our immediate
attention by CM is that of rationalization; it is tied to CM through the idea and
importance of the corporate culture. By approaching this case from the type of
systems perspective CM offers, we are able to more fully understand some of the
thinking and activities of the corporation o f LA. In his seminal work, The Essence o f
Decision, Harvard’s Graham Allison expanded the political analysis o f the 1970's
when he presented the events o f the Cuban Missile Crisis from not just a conventional
Rational Actor Model, but from an Organizational Process Model as well as from a
Governmental Politics Model - all with equal validity. Allison’s analysis integrated the
thinking of sociologists such as Max Weber, particularly his work on bureaucracy,
into the field of political science. Weber described institutions as being of either the
charismatic, rational/law, or traditional bureaucratic types. The actions of each of
these types of organizations were dictated by different rationales or corporate cultures
to update the nomenclature. In a charismatic organization, things are decided by the
dictates of a leader or her or his dicta. In a rational/law institution, the rule of law, as
defined by other laws, is the seal of approval. Finally, in a traditional system, the way
of established action from the past is considered the best assurance o f success in the
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future. However, regardless of the type of system, Weber suggests that the
organization, like a person, attempts to protect its way of thinking as this thought
system is an outgrowth of what that organization values - be it a leader, law, or
tradition. He called this the process of rationalization where, “every aspect of human
action becomes subject to calculation, measurement, and control;” (Abercromie e ta l
347) and, this network of calculation and control is that of the organization or system,
not the individual. As such, it separates the individual from consequences of his or
her actions and from other people.
These ideas were applied to corporate business organizations by Robert
Jackall in his now classic 1988 work, M oral Mazes: The World o f Corporate
Managers. In it, Jackall brings together the ideas of systems, rationalization, and
personal action into an understanding o f corporate culture; and, this culture is
presented as being of the utmost importance. This culture is: “ ‘What is right in the
corporation is what the guy above you wants from you”' (sic Jackall 109). Jackall
cites an example: “Brady refused to recognize, in the view of the managers that I
interviewed, that ‘truth’ is social [corporately] defined, not absolute, and that
therefore compromise, about anything and everything, is not moral defeat, as Brady
seemed to feel, but simply an inevitable fact of organizational life” (Jackall 111). We
can see the separation of the individual from the outputs of the company or from the
ability of external forces to moderate personal behavior. As a result of this
disconnection of rationalization, internal norms and rules become determinate not
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only o f one’s advancement and one’s future but also one’s security in one’s present.
But, this need not have anything to do with the norms of society outside of the
corporation. “In this way, because moral choices are inextricably tied to personal
fates, bureaucracy erodes internal and even external standards o f morality not only in
matters of individual success and failure but in all the issues that managers face in
their daily work. Bureaucracy makes its own internal rules and social context the
principal gauges for action” (Jackall 192). “In short, bureaucracy creates for
managers a Calvinistic world without a Calvinist God, a world marked with the same
profound anxiety that characterizes the old Protestant ethic but stripped of that
ideology’s comforting illusions” (Jackall 193). With this, Jackall is updating Weber’s
classic interpretation of capitalism and the Protestant work ethic but without divine
moral intercession, balancing, or retribution. This results in corporate systems and
goals that are separable from that of even those that manage these systems and
unregulated by any concern larger than the bottom line or corporate advancement.
But, few people in the ‘Victory of the Global Market’ 1990's acknowledge
that the philosophy and practice of corporate direction is so unrestrained. “The moral
dilemmas posed by bureaucratic work are, in fact, pervasive, taken for granted, and at
the same time, regularly denied. ... Essentially, managers try to gauge whether they
feel comfortable with proposed resolutions to specific problems, a task that always
involves an assessment of others’ organizational morality and a reckoning of the
practical organizational and market exigencies at hand” (Jackall 13). Managers go
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along to get along; so it should come as no surprise to us that the LA City Council is
regularly criticized because most of its proposals pass with a unanimous vote and
each councilmember is the ruler of his or her fiefdom as long as she or he respects
everyone else’s right to rule his or her fiefdom. From this corporate culture comes
insider thinking and, if threatened, a line of demarcation for who is with us and who is
the “other” - thereby creating an oligarchy. “Finally, the most crucial feature of
managerial circles of affiliation is precisely their establishment o f informal criteria for
admission, criteria that are, it is true, ambiguous to define and subject to constant,
often arbitrary, revision. Nonetheless, they are the criteria that the managers must
master” (Jackall 39). So, there is a mindset or club for the successful in any
organization. This mindset and its pursuit and demonstration creates a culture. This
culture is created to project and protect that mindset or core set o f values fostered by
the organization, and the primary of these values is the preservation o f the
organization for it is the goose that lays all other eggs. We are employing CM for this
case because it is in moments of crisis that these rationalizations o f the corporate
culture are exposed allowing their stories of denial to be evaluated.
The projection and protection of values for which the corporate culture is
created is an organic phenomena. CM looks at corporate rationalizations, for they are
the most obvious indicators of corporate blind spots, in an attempt to understand the
weaknesses of those systems in hopes of strengthening same. But, it does not stop
there; “This understanding [CM] alone is of little use unless organizations learn how
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to confront and overcome patterns of denial that are generally present in a crisis, and
such denial is the enemy of both handling the many details of CM and considering
unthinkable actions ... an unthinkable response may be the only effective counter”
(Mitroff et al 189-190). Here we see mention of the psychological defense
mechanism denial. Together, rationalizations and defense mechanisms point to
weaknesses in the organization’s ability to deal with what is commonly referred to as
reality. “CM is not solely a matter of better technical policies, procedures, and
manuals. It depends critically on humans and organizations that are dedicated to
facing reality” (Mitroff et al 190).
To connect this point to the charter debate, as mentioned previously one point
that was made by MALDEF (Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund),
and repeated often in the early stages of the ACC’s inquires, was that 1/3 o f the
residents of LA were not eligible to vote, mainly but not exclusively because of
citizenship requirements. The ACC, and later the ECC for the same reasons, chose to
accept the protection of the local political culture’s idea of citizenship as stated by the
City Attorney’s Office in a memo and to extend (rationalize) the position despite the
realities that: 1. non-citizens can vote in certain elections (as property owners or
residents); and, 2. that if only 2/3 of Angelenos could vote then only half of that or
1/3 elect (in the unlikely case of full turn out) then the claim of majority rule by local
officials is mathematically impossible. These two realities are certainly in conflict with
the ideas/values of equality and majority rule. But, the commissions denied that they
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could do anything despite the fact that in personal conversations with a legal advisor
to one of the commission he flatly stated to me that he felt a sufficiently strong case
could be made for inclusion o f these residents based on established legal precedents
and home rule allowing control of local elections for charter cities despite the memo
issued by the City Attorney's Office that supported and formed the basis of the
Commission’s position. Recently, there has been a national move by wealthy persons
owning a second or third home to be permitted to vote in the area where they own
property without living there as a primary residence; this is the same idea except that
it originates from a class of people who have the means to support their position and
so it is getting national attention and respect as cutting edge. In our instance,
permitting non-citizens to vote was removed from the charter debate because it was
unthinkable; such unthinkable thoughts point the way toward patterns of denial
according to CM.
So, we can see how the constraints on what is thinkable are a function more o f
the culture o f the corporate organization than the realities o f the situations or crises
involved. This is Jackall’s point with which CM agrees; and, CM would call, based on
its research, such corporations crisis prone. An important extension of this point is
that the unthinkable is general acknowledged, if not argued for, by someone within
the corporation; however, it is the corporate culture that determines whether these
messages are received by the managers of corporations or whether they are blocked.
The O-rings case of the Challenger disaster is the most well known example of this
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phenomena, but it is hardly the only one. There are almost always signals; the
tobacco companies had years of signals and the Rampart LAPD scandal was not
without decades of signals. “One of the most important findings in CM is that with
very few exceptions, crises send out a trail of early warning signals before their actual
occurrence ... it is likely that the fact that early warning signals were blocked will be
revealed, and so become part of the crisis itself’ (Mitroff et al 47). “CM [attempts
to] establish accountability and rewards for crisis management in general and signal
detection in particular. That is, they reward the behaviors they want to encourage,
tying such rewards and recognition directly to signal detection preparation”(Mitroff et
al 182). So, we can see that the warning signs of system breakdown are generally
there, but too often do not reach managers. Why? “By themselves, the various
alarms/alerts/ signals/calls in [CM] are insufficient to attract attention unless the
organization also has mechanisms to receive and act on them”(Mitroff et al 172).
These mechanisms are a part of the corporate culture. The corporate culture acts as
the software that filters the information to the managers or from manager to manager.
Without an understanding of it, the chances of affecting a system are slim.
A recent, deadly example of precisely this phenomena was the findings o f the
special commission on the 1999 bonfire disaster at Texas A&M that killed 12
students; “in assessing responsibility, the commission pointed not to current students
and administrators but to an insular university culture that resisted change and outside
criticism” (Yardley A14). The report continues, “there were warning signs: the tower
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collapse in 1957 and in 1990, though no one was injured. Injuries related to the
bonfire had risen to 59 in 1998 from 32 in 1996. Yet, she [Veronica Callaghen,
commission member] said university officials had ‘tunnel vision, ’ failing to recognize
that such accidents could indicate structural and cultural problems” (Yardley A14).
This is a textbook example of the claims of the CM handbook; we could change the
locale to LA in 1992 and we would have the findings o f the many reports issued in the
wake of the 1992, civil unrest. They all point out that there were a plethora of signals
of civic unrest in South Central before April of 1992; however, they went unnoticed
or unappreciated by the city powers that were. Texas A&M and LA are two cases of
traditional organizations being more interested in protecting their ideas and values and
explaining away the earlier warning signs than dealing with reality; they were utilizing
thinking processes that were Psychology 101 level examples o f denial; and, as that
class would tell us, they lasted only until reality jumped up and ‘bit them on the
backside’. In both cases, the bites claimed innocent lives. Signal detection is
inextricably connected with the corporate culture. This means, for the purposes of
our study, that we need to ask some different questions. One example is: what is the
meaning of the signal created by the fact that in excess of 80% o f registered (to say
nothing of the 1/3 that could not register) Angelenos did not chose to vote on the
1999 LA charter? Is this a question the LA government asked itself? The corporate
culture of political science has competing explanations. One established school of
thought holds that such voters are satisfied and/or unconcerned that the difference
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between the candidates wili have a serious impact on government. “No news is good
news” is the thinking. Is this denial? What values are being protected by this
explanation? How well does it match up with reality? This being said, we are ready to
turn our attention to the events of charter reform through the lens of CM.
EVENTS THROUGH A CM LENS
1. Finding out how a crisis comes to an organization’s attention
As previously stated, there are always warning signs before a crisis; charter
reform was no exception. The collapse o f the national and Southland economies in
the late 1980's was a warning sign. Highlighted in this recession was the number of
California savings and loans, more than any other state, that collapsed. The
synergistic effect this had on real estate and home building was obvious and ominous.
This extenuated into taxing shortfalls o f such extreme natures that one of the world’s
richest areas, Orange County, filed for bankruptcy. The growth machine that was
LA was roaring to a halt, and discord was growing. Racial tension increased; and, the
police were so distrusted that a special commission, the Christopher Commission was
empaneled to propose reforms for the LAPD. A black motorist, Rodney King, had
been beaten by a number of officers, and it had been caught on video tape. Then,
after a trial in Simi Valley which is on the northwestern border of the San Fernando
Valley, these officers were acquitted; and, the civil unrest was unleashed. These
‘riots’ came to the attention of the entire world; they moved LA into an unflattering
international spotlight. The immediate police response was to lay back as they felt
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they were overmatched by the severity of activities in some areas. So, the violence
continued for 72 hours before the police were able to effectively restore peace and
order. This forced into the consciousness o f the managers o f the LA corporate
enterprise that a serious situation existed. However, the extent and focus of the crisis
was still undefined.
It is not difficult to figure out how this security crisis came to the attention of
LA’s corporate managers; one of the two most significant events in LA’s history in
the 1990's was certainly the civil unrest o f April 1992 (with the Northridge quake
being the other); it could hardly go unnoticed. It redefined the way people viewed
LA, and had no small impact on the 1993 mayoral race that brought Richard Riordan
to power. This security breach is not the crisis on which this study focuses because it
was not the situation that came closest to destroying or affecting the entire corporate
organization. That situation was LA’s questioning of the legitimacy of its municipal
government, and it followed from the civil unrest o f April 1992.
In the CM model, the legitimation crisis which was subsequent to the unrest
crisis should be viewed as a part of the final phase (containment and treatment) o f the
response to the crisis of the 1992 civil unrest. In treating the unrest crisis, the
legitimation crisis was discovered and was Step 58 of CM for the unrest crisis analysis
which takes us to step 59. Step 59 of the unrest crisis was also step 1 of the
legitimation crisis. CM’s utility is in its,
identifying the specific nature of a crisis and its causes [for this] is
necessary in order to understand the organization’s vulnerability to
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that general type of crisis. The contributing factors are equally
important because they provide clues to structural weaknesses that
may make an organization susceptible. Analyzing an organization’s
response is also a good way to identify the systems and stakeholders at
risk from a particular type of crisis. (Mitroff et al 70)
In this case, the analysis of the unrest crisis leads to the identification of a structural
weakness (the 1925 charter) which triggers the need for a CM analysis of that
structural weakness which is a different crisis. There is little common sense
disagreement that the 1992 riots were a crisis for the city o f LA. It shook the
foundations o f the city, and the bedrock of that foundation was the 1925 charter. The
corporation that is LA certainly had responses to the unrest. The public disaster
response was first, and it was of limited success. But, the real examination of the
systemic causes o f this outburst was, as it had been in the 1960's-70's after the Watts
riots, to question the foundation of the corporate enterprise. This was charter reform,
the subject o f our case study.
LA’s last attempt at charter reform was in the late 60's in the aftermath of the
Watts riots and the defeat of long time mayor Sam Yorty. Those charter reforms
were defeated in 1970 and 1971 primarily by the opposition o f the local unions and an
optimism inspired by the new African American Mayor Tom Bradley with his newly
established westside-south central coalition and its defeat o f the remnants of the
downtown Committee of 25 challenging their traditional hold on the city’s power.
But, after 20 years, this Bradley coalition came apart as the economic strains
produced by the effects of Proposition 13 and the recession o f the late 1980's took
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their toll. When Bradley left office in 1993, we witnessed a renewed push for charter
reform supported by that same mayor whose election had helped quell the last
attempt. This unraveling of the Bradley coalition, who had become the insiders of LA
politics, reached unmanageable proportions when these insiders could not secure the
election of their consensus mayoral successor, Councilmember Michael Woo. 1993
saw the election of an “outsider mayor” for the first time in 24 years when Riordan
was elected. But, it had been the uprising a year earlier that signaled how out of
touch with the realities o f ‘average voters’ the Bradley insiders had gotten and shifted
political support to the outsiders just as the Watts riots had done to Yorty decades
earlier.
Riordan was elected primarily to fix a city that most residents now felt was
broken. The EDD Report that had studied the riots opened the executive summary to
its report on the matter by averring, “The uprising that began in South-Central Los
Angeles on April 29, 1992, was rooted in long-festering resentments, economic
deprivation, poor police/community relations, and triggered by a crowning act” (1).
These root causes were not going to be corrected merely by police action; they could
only be addressed by managing what was obviously a much deeper crisis. This deeper
crisis was one of legitimacy. Riordan, like Reagan before him, convinced a majority
of Angelenos that government was a part of the problem, not the cure. His attempts
to reshape local government were hamstrung, he claimed, by a lack o f power. City
Council, the entrenched power, was too powerful and that was because the charter
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ceded the running of the city to it, not the mayor as LA was widely known to function
under a “weak mayor system”. The only way to change this, was to change the
charter. Riordan’s crisis was that the inmates had taken over the asylum and could
not be overruled under the current charter or trusted to reform themselves. But,
despite the Mayor’s claims, this was just the institutional track of a convergence o f
interests and pressures that went far beyond his one-sided analysis. In the midst o f
the worst recession in the voters’ of LA’s lifetimes, with memories o f local rioting,
recurring police abuse, and fueled by talk of secession in the Valley, the Harbor, and
Venice, there was general agreement that the most systemic of the city’s problems
stemmed from its 1925 charter even if they did not take a systematic approach to the
analysis. The in-fighting at city hall that had thrust the city into incompetence was
viewed as a function of a charter that was unclear and duplicitous. All roads seemed
to lead to the charter. So, in the summer of 1996, the Council and the Mayor began
work on the creation o f a commission to review the charter spurred by the then
truncated moves in the state government to ease secession laws as requested by San
Fernando Assemblywoman Paula Boland.
2. Whether an organization is prepared for CM
This question needs to be addressed on two levels. First, there is the matter of
the crisis of the unrest itself with which we need to deal. As LA is a city that
routinely experiences major events, its public service capacity for such stresses,
disruptions, and emergencies is quite high. After everything from the Northridge
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quake to the Olympic Games to our periodic fires and floods, the city employees are
familiar with extreme mobilizations; and, they have exhibited praiseworthy levels of
service and professionalism at such critical moments. This is a precise testimonial to
one of the central claims of CM, that preparation for crises empowers organizations
for the next crisis. Still, since the police were the focus o f the unrest crisis, it is
understandable why they had such difficulty in preforming their duties. The police
were not well prepared to deal with the unrest fueled by disrespect for civic law
enforcement mechanisms, but they did manage to rally their resources and effect
control after three days. The police were prepared to deal with most emergencies;
they were not ready to deal with this one because o f the nature o f the crisis. What
made this crisis different is that it contained a dimension of authority and enforcement
questioning. The police could not feel secure based on the authority of their office or
badge which was the lingua franca of law enforcement (and even more heavily relied
upon here in LA); they needed force of arms to assure control. It took three days to
marshal and deploy this force. If anything, they did not merely lack authority but
were even singling themselves out as targets for anger and retribution because o f their
position rendering them ineffective, except in highly fortified situations such as USC.
This question of the authority of the police leads to the second level we are to
examine in this section on organizational preparation. That level is the questioning of
the legitimacy o f the local government. The police powers are at the heart o f any
municipal claims to sovereignty. When they are challenged, the legitimacy and
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viability of the municipal union itself is questioned as LA is discovering with it current
struggle against federal oversight of the LAPD. Was LA prepared for this
questioning of authority? It was not. To make matters worse, this was occurring just
before the beginning of an election cycle. It was May of 1992 and half the council
and the mayor were up for election in less than a year. The long time mayor had
already let it be known that he was not going to run again. This created a huge
political and leadership vacuum at the top; a situation that had not occurred in LA
since the early 1950's, long before LA had become the mega-city it is today or before
the tenure of any of our practicing politicians including Marvin Braude who served on
the Council for 30 years. As a result, many different people reacted in many different
ways, but no one represented an accepted view of Los Angeles as a whole. Task
forces were set up on the state, local, and federal levels to examine the crisis before
anyone was prepared to take any responsibility for the situation. A high profile
organization, Rebuild LA, was established to assist the area in its recovery; and,
emergency money poured in to help. Politicians presented different stories of the ills
and cures of the crisis and everyone waited for the election to see who would have
the story that garnered the greatest political support.
We can thus conclude that LA may have be ready for the physical effects o f
the unrest crisis, but it was not prepared to deal with the social and political fall out of
the crisis. This, in effect, became a new crisis with which LA’s civic managers choose
to deal by means of an election of a new mayor in the spring of 1993.
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3. Whether an organization is prepared to assume responsibility for a crisis
The election of Richard Riordan was an indication that, among other things in
1993, a majority of Angelenos voting in LA believed that there was a crisis in the
government and that strong management and economic growth were the keys to
recovery. Was this assuming responsibility? Yes, in a “throw the bums out” way.
Angelenos were willing to take responsibility for the fact that the current government,
the remnants or second generation of the Bradley coalition, no longer worked. A new
management group was brought in on the mayoral level, but not on the council level.
The question then shifts to how was this management team going to handle the crisis.
Or should the mayor’s people be looked at more appropriately as a CMT, crisis
management team? This raises an interesting question o f separation of power and
governmental function. The separation of powers was one of the focuses of the
charter reform discussions and will be discussed more in the third theme on
‘government as machine’. In short, what we see here is that the shareholders, at least
those voting in 1993, were willing to take some degree o f responsibility for the crisis
of unrest by installing new top management. This new management was not ready to
take responsibility for the crisis because it was unsure o f the nature, location, and/or
scope of the crisis and unsure to what degree and by what methods it could affect the
crisis. The Council was undecided.
4. Determining the seriousness of a crisis and the organization’s responsibility for it
Despite the repons on the unrest, the writings of local academics, and actions
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and calls from civic leaders, it took a while for most o f the LA corporation’s
management group to determine that the situation was serious. Although this
growing literature made it obvious that the unrest was the manifestation of a deeper
sense o f social anger, from mid-1993 to mid-1996 the Mayor and Council adopted an
ad hoc approach that did not directly address the crisis. This resulted in the
simmering civic anger in the Harbor over its discontent about the uncorrected by
Proposition 5 as promised abuses to the local communities created by the city and
harbor to boil. The anger in south central was over disproportionate unemployment
and a lack of city services; but, it was the San Fernando Valley and its claim of ‘not
getting its fair share of the services’ that was the most powerful. When a Valley
Assemblywoman secured passage of the “Boland Bill’ in the State Assembly in mid-
1996, city managers were no longer able to ignore the crisis o f legitimacy that had
become apparent in LA.
The Boland Bill sought to make it easier for the Valley to secede from the city
by changing the voting requirements for secession from passage by a majority of the
entire city to passage by a majority of the area wishing to secede only. After passing
in the Assembly, it was narrowly defeated in the Senate in August of 1996 but only
after a lobbying effort by LA officials funded by public money. Still, its impact stands
as a testament to the depth of Valley distrust for the LA city government, and it was
beyond ignoring as the Council’s lobbying effort admitted. So, the city government
sought to respond but creating a panel to examine the city government from its core
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which was the 1925 city charter. In typical LA fashion, a commission was to be
appointed by the Mayor and Council to do the job.
After a few weeks o f arguing over a fair plan for appointment, a deal was
struck in which one branch would supply candidates and the other would choose from
that list or ask for new candidates for selection until the commission was appointed.
But, when on Tuesday September 10, 1996, this was brought to the floor o f the
Council by Councilmembers Chick, Ridley-Thomas, and Wadis in the belief that it
would be adopted, opposition was immediately voiced. While multi-sided, the
opposition centered around the idea that the proposal pre-supposed that the charter
was fundamentally flawed and needed changing which had yet to be accepted by the
Council. Councilmember Goldberg claimed that LA, “was the cleanest large city in
America”, and that we should not risk losing such a public benefit which she claimed
was a direct outgrowth of the 1925 charter. This initiated a predictable call for
caution and ‘rallying around the LA flag’ so that there was no longer a consensus in
the Council on the issue. Still, politically speaking, what was at the heart o f the
council’s objection was that the 1925 charter clearly made the City Council the
governing body of the city, not the Mayor. The Council did not wish to begin the
debate by giving up its primacy o f authority without the chance for a fight;
Councilmember Hernandez deplored the proposal because he felt that, “by appointing
these members, we are almost conceding as a Council that we are not doing our job”.
The more cynical members claimed that is was all a power grab by the Mayor and that
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was precisely why the 1925 charter had been written the way is was to provide
protections against such abuses; so, it was all the more imperative that the Council
use its full authority as protectors of the people to stop the tyranny. Councilmember
Holden simply called it, “blackmail” by the Mayor. The less cynical members merely
felt that it could not hurt to start from a position o f defining the problem before
people decided how to address it. Regardless, the Council fractured and after two
hours of debate and the threat of missing lunch and other time commitments,
Councilmember Galanter reminded the Council that it had passed a resolution with an
accompanying study group report on charter reform back in 1990 (council file number
90-0707), but it had yet to act upon because o f its $1-2 million price tag. So, the
Council directed itself in a 10-3 vote (with Braude, Feuer, and Wachs dissenting) to
act upon it. It was to establish a 21 member commission with 15 appointments by
Council (one each) and the rest by other city officials (CAO, Legislative Analysis, and
City Clerk one each) and 3 by the Mayor.
This was not the plan previously worked out with the Mayor, and one that
gave him control of only 3 of 21 members would hardly be seen as an equal power
arrangement; more importantly to the Mayor, the ACC would be advisory to the
Council, as the 1969 commission had been, permitting the Council to alter the
document as it pleased before placing it on any ballot for public vote. This was not
acceptable to the Mayor; as a result, he declined to appoint anyone to the commission
and the Council President, Ferraro, filled those three seats. But, meanwhile during
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the entirety o f these negotiations with the Council, Riordan had been pursuing his
own, external course of action. After the failure of the Boland Bill, Riordan had
bankrolled a group of valley leaders in a petition drive to authorize the creation of an
independent panel to draft a charter for the voters which the Council would be unable
to alter as was done in thel920's to create that charter. Using it as leverage in the
negotiation, he had been willing to drop the effort if a compromise could be
established. But, once the compromise fell through, Riordan’s support for the elected
commission intensified. So, on October 30, 1996, a petition for authorizing a charter
commission election was submitted with over 300,000 signatures to the City Clerk’s
office. After many legal obstacles and political maneuvers, the petition was signed and
certified. It created the Elected Charter Commission. The timing of this certification
was very important as the Mayor wanted the election for the commission to be on the
same ballot on which he was running for reelection in the spring of 1997. Meanwhile,
the council was preceding to appoint its members; and on November 21, 1996, the
ACC had its first meeting in room 300 o f City Hall East attended by approximately 50
people including commissioners.
So, it was that three years after Riordan’s election in which the voters choose
to take some level of responsibility for the crisis o f control in LA, the corporation’s
managers were finally putting a team in place to ascertain the seriousness of the crisis
and the corporation’s responsibility for it. In reality, it was on the road to creating
two different teams by two different methods because of a fundamental conflict on the
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location of civic authority. The City Council saw the crisis as being within the scope
of the current corporate managers; the Mayor saw it as being beyond the scope of
these managers. Both the Council and Mayor argued that their election gave them a
stronger mandate as they were closer to the people; but in most ways, it turned out
that both claims were true. This relationship of each to the other and to the people
was the heart o f the problem, not the details. Both sides were willing to
acknowledge this, but they placed the blame for the duplication on the other party’s
inability to acknowledge their truth. But, the citizens did not care about blame; they
cared about fixing the problem. Ultimately, these voters rejected this false dichotomy
by creating a single document from the two commissions; the citizens’ concern with
utility over partisanship became evident when the Mayor’s proposal won an
overwhelming majority in the April 1997 election, but his slate o f supported
candidates was defeated just as soundly. Labor, a Riordan foe, appeared to be the big
winner in the election of ECC members. Angelenos wanted the problems addressed,
not the Mayor vindicated - except to the degree that he represented their desire to fix
things.
5. Making the initial information gathering and action decisions
The gathering of information by the ECC lagged behind that o f the ACC for
several important reasons. First, the ECC saw about half o f its members elected in
April of 1997, but there were several runoffs. These were not decided until June of
1997, and the Brown Act prevented the other members from having even informal
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conversations on matters that could be before the commission. Then, at the first few
ECC meetings two organizational issues dominated the agenda to the exclusion of
information gathering. These were the issues of creating a support infrastructure,
particularly the hiring of an executive director, and securing finances. Despite efforts
to streamline both processes, they hit major snags and were not sufficiently resolved
to put a substantive plan and staff in place until the fall. The Executive Director quit
early on creating another setback as a replacement had to be found to do the business
of commission; the position was split into an Administrative Director and a Policy
Director. So, by the time the ECC was really starting into the material, the ACC had
almost a year’s head start. The ECC then borrowed much of the information already
generated by the ACC staff in an effort to make up time. They did, however, use the
information to different purposes and to support different positions.
This meant that the methodology of the ACC was highly influential in shaping
the charter research material. This shaping was in turn a product o f the corporate
culture of the ACC; because, as CM tells us, the corporate culture filters the signals
that arise to the managers. The corporate culture of the ACC was solidified by the
selection of its Executive Director. As a member of the old Bradley coalition, Dr.
Raphael Sonenshein, was chosen to work with a commission directed by Bradley-
schooled politicos to achieve a consensus based on the direction o f the commission as
articulated by the Chair George Kieffer. Here, the commission was setting up an
elaborate system of filters; first, information had to come to the attention o f a board
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member, then the Chair had to deem it worth of looking into, then the Executive
Director had to look into it and find some merit, then the merit had to be Convincing
enough to the Chair to warrant larger discussion, then the information had to be
framed for presentation to the board, then the board had to find it worthy of
consideration. Then, after all of these thresholds had been met, it could be voted on.
There were a large number of chances for unfavorable ideas to be summarily
dismissed or left to fall away by lack o f attention. The informal network here was
much more significant to the outcome of the commission’s actions than the formal
network. Unwanted signals had to be allowed to come up, had to be able to have the
public mention them; but, there was no formal mechanism to force the commission to
act on them or to look into them. So, we can only guess at how many good ideas
were never explored.
The corporate culture was to keep control in informal hands that were
charged with shifting through the information as they pleased and ignoring it as they
pleased. The ECC adopted a very similar culture, but with the commissioners more
accessible to outside forces due to their relationships created by their need to be
elected. But in the final analysis, both groups were top down organizations that
talked at the people and not with them. In the name of preventing overload, the
corporate filters of both groups were considerable and informally controlled. This
was the case for the one or two years of the information gathering stage. Information
was for use by officials, but not for them to have to listen to. For example, at one
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Valley public hearing on the draft charter, before the hiring and firing issue was
decided by the ACC, they floated the two ideas, the Mayor’s and the Council’s, to
the public in order to measure voters’ sentiments. They were not interested in
listening to the how and why of the public’s choice; they wanted to know which view
was more publically correct. This is only the most limited way o f appreciating public
signals; it is prepackaging the public’s response for them. This is not going and
actively listening for signals as CM states crisis prepared organizations do. But, it
was the way the commissions gathered information from the stakeholders of lesser
importance.
6. Determining the type of crisis
This was not done in any substantive way; everyone had her or his own crisis.
The claims o f crisis were wide spread ranging from prevention o f riots, the Boland
Bill, the Mayor and Council’s feud, to there being no crisis, having multiple
documents, curing a dysfunctional government, creating a vision for the future of LA
to mitigate secession threats, the economic recession, and the City Council’s claims
that there was no crisis except one being created to cover the Mayor’s grab for
power. Even though the commissions never formally settled on an interpretation of
the type o f crisis they had been empaneled to alleviate, it was generally assumed to be
an inter-govemmental crisis, a crisis created by an growing awareness that the civic
corporation was not running efficiently. However, this was not the reality of the
situation according to the Rand report or most others. The Rand report contended,
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“the current round of reform efforts is less a by-product o f an emerging consensus on
the need for reform than a reaction to pressures for secession from the San Fernando
Valley” (McCarthy 3). This was a crisis of identity and self-protection; the legal
aspect was the formal manifestation and articulation o f the values and goals of the
civic organization. But, the commissions seemed to get trapped on this surface level
of analysis.
CM identifies eleven types of crises: criminal attacks, economic attacks, loss
o f proprietary information, industrial disasters, natural disasters, breaks in equipment
and plants, legal, reputational/perceptual, human resources/occupational, health, and
regulatory (Mitroff et al 73-4). But, the issue of the type o f crisis is more than a
beauty in the eye o f the beholder point. Within the eleven CM crisis types, most of
the commissioners viewed the crisis as a legal one. This was primarily true of the
lawyers and politicians on the commissions; attorneys constituted the largest single
profession represented on both commissions far out o f proportion with national or LA
percentages. The ACC consisted of 8 lawyers, an ex-executive assistant to the
Mayor, an ex-Councilmember, and an ex-Assemblyperson for a total of 11 out of 21
or 52%. The ECC had 4 lawyers, 2 Council staffers, 2 ex-Assemblypersons, and an
LAPD officer for a total of 9/15 or 60%. Both commissions’ chairs were lawyers -
one from USC and one from UCLA. These numbers are terribly abhorrent from those
of the general population o f LA. But, considering these composition, it is logical
enough that these majorities of the commissions would view the charter primarily as a
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legal document that dictates other legal happenings. However, to the public, the
charter debate was a reputational/legitimacy crisis, to which the Rand report’s
conclusion testifies. A legal crisis calls for a legal solution that would be o f concern to
only a very narrow audience of the legal profession; a reputational/legitimacy crisis
calls for a public-sentiment driven solution addressing a much larger audience of the
entire citizenry. By assuming they were dealing with a legal crisis rather than a
perceptual one, the commissioners overly narrowed their concerns, and ultimately
their conclusions, beyond a scope capable of addressing the reputational breach that
had occurred.
The conclusions, as embodied in the 1999 Charter, resembled the “only thing
we have to fear, is fear itself’ mentality expressed by Councilmember Goldberg. The
decisions on details, such as the hiring and firing issue, were made from an imbedded
position without resolved understandings of the larger and deeper concerns o f most
Angelenos. So, like the bill of rights discussed in the next chapter, things were voted
up or down rather than establishing whether or not a public need existed for such a
bill. Because of this perspective, the type of crisis was never properly determined as
the approach was always how to make things work better without substantive
discussion of what better really meant and to whom. For example, most
commissioners seemed to believe that their new hiring and firing relationship seemed
more balanced than the pervious one; but, why balance was important or how balance
served public interest was not discussed. So, the idea was to put band-aids on areas
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where blood was showing rather than discussing the health of the patient. This is
exactly how the 1925 charter had been treated for years by patching it with
amendment after amendment until it got out o f control. Now, to switch analogies, the
branches were being pruned but the trunk and roots were remaining unexamined.
The crisis, according to the commissioners, was not how corporate LA does
its business; the crisis was that some people, mainly the Mayor and alarmists in the
Valley, the harbor, and south central and the like, felt the system was unsound; the
problem was not of perception but of misperception. The commissions and officials
had it right, and the people had it wrong. The LA way of doing government merely
needed a tune up and an addition ofNBCs (Neighborhood Councils), and it would be
good for another 75 years. This is not the conclusion of the 1992 rioters, or the
voters in 1997, or likely the 80% of non-voters in 1999. The 1999 Charter was
primarily a document to streamline existing practices with two notable exceptions: the
Mayor was given more power to hire and fire general managers and neighborhood
councils were mandated, but without specifics. This is a clear case of corporate
rationalization; the LA corporate culture was not willing to accept signals from the
people. It preferred its own interpretation o f the facts and decided they merely had to
‘educate the people’. This is corporate denial; the corporation was saying there was
not a problem when the majority of people and stockholders could see one.
Perceptions did not match up, and both the Council and commissions saw that as a
problem of the people rather than of itself. The LA corporate culture was not
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allowing the public’s warning signs to be translated into meaningful directives as
discussed in the last section. As a result, it is inevitable that further crisis of greater
intensity will occur. The Rampart scandals are an example that has already occurred.
The next will probably be the secession of the Valley followed by the Harbor. If this
is the case, it will be a direct result of LA’s not taking advantage of its last great
opportunity for treatment of its civic reputation because it chose to hold on to a way
of acting rather than seeing the realities of a situation.
7. Deciding on an organization’s CM preparation and response
This was another ignored issue. The commissions did not ask themselves if
they were prepared to deal with this crisis. How well LA was prepared to deal with
sim ilar crises was not asked either as that type of crisis was not a center of debate.
The commissions focused on creating a working plan for the future for all city
matters, not on responding to a particular time-specific pressure. In other words, the
idea was to create a city structure that, to the greatest degree possible, did not have
crises rather than attempting to anticipate expectable crises. In the creation of a new
system, system change is an inherent part of that process. So, in most ways, the
preparation for next time was the response to this crisis; but, no direct triage on the
crisis preparation of the then current system was preformed.
The response to the crisis had been taken for granted since the beginning; it
would be the new charter. The content of the 1999 Charter would speak to what
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future preparation would be required by LA, and what responses it would have to
future crises.
8. Deciding on containment and treatment
Since, neither commission was ready to forward anything substantive to the
public until mid to late 1998, it was well past the time for containment of actions
directly relating to the civil unrest; likewise, the local economy had turned around on
its own so no containment action was viewed as necessary in that area either. The
Valley secession crisis had been temporarily negated with the defeat o f the Boland Bill
and was preceding down a track that would take several years. So, the external
energies around the legitimation crisis had been contained by external factors with the
residue aspects capable o f being channeled into this reform process. In this case, the
talking^ the seeking of consensus, was the containment action; and, more overt or
tangible actions were merely placed on hold. But, that is a form o f containment.
From late 1997 to late 1998, the two commissions worked, studied, and
debated. They created a committee to act as a joint liaison between themselves to
explore the possibility of drafting an unified charter. Again, after many ups and
downs, it was agreed that a joint draft document be adopted and forwarded to the
voters. It was; and, in June of 1999, that charter was passed overwhelmingly by what
can only be described as a small minority of LA voters. The new LA Charter passed
with only 136,147 ‘Yes’ votes. This may have been 60% o f those voting on the issue,
but considering that there were 1,385,663 registered voters in the city of LA, that is
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only 9.8% of the registered voters favoring the measure. This, in a city with an
estimated population in excess o f 3.5 million, means that only 3.9% of the residents
voted for the measure. However, this did put an end to the charter reform activities as
‘one king was dead so long live the new king”. Treatment had been rendered with
the passage of the new document and its process of creation. The treatment for the
legitimation crisis was the document itself and the changes it would require or
facilitate. The question of its effectiveness is another matter. Is LA better poised for
crisis now than it was before the reform activities? If not, then it falls short o f the
threshold of good crisis management and ethical social action.
WORKS CITED
Abercrombie, Nicholas, Hill, Stephen, and Turner, Bryan. The Penguin Dictionary of
Sociology. Third edition. Penguin Books: New York. 1994.
Employment Development Department. Analysis o f the 1992 Los Angeles Civil
Unrest. EDD Labor Market Information Division, Area Information Section:
Los Angeles. 2/93.
Jackall, Robert. Moral Mazes: The World o f Corporate Managers. Oxford University
Press: New York. 1988.
McCarthy, Kevin, Erie. Steven, and Reichardt, Robert. Meeting the Challenge o f
Charter Reform. RAND: Santa Monica, CA. 1998.
Mitroff, Ian, Pearson, Christine, and Harrington, Katharine. The Essential Guide to
Managing Crisis: A Step-by-Step Handbook for Surviving Major
Catastrophes. Oxford University Press: NY. 1996.
Yardley, Jim. '‘ Errors and Poor Supervision Cited in Bonfire Collapse”. New York
Times. 3 May 2000. A14.
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CHAPTER 4 - THEME II- CON SEN SUS (“Can’t we all just get along”)
The second major theme which emerges from the LA charter activities of
1996-99 is that o f consensus. This theme springs forth from some important issues;
they are: consensus itself, scope of participants, single document idea, council size,
secession, and the bill of rights. Taken together, these issues help us see how the LA
corporate managers, especially the commissioners, made some the assumptions that
lead to the creation of the 1999 LA Charter. But, to what degree were these
assumptions accurate, realistic, or useful; or more to the point, to whom were they
useful? We will begin by examining the most telling example of this pattern, the bill
of rights.
THE BILL OF RIGHTS
Although the ACC toyed early on with the idea of a bill of rights, it was
informally agreed that such an exercise was unnecessary for two principle reasons.
First, the federal Constitution had such a bill, and it could in no way be effected by a
local charter; and second, a charter was a limitation on governmental action so all
rights possible were left to the people unless strictly ceded to the government by that
charter. As such, an enumeration of rights was not only unnecessary but
inappropriate. However, since before there was an ECC, the claims of the candidates
in the election process were more focused on empowering people and encapsulating
in writing the ideals of our civic enterprise. To this end, many ECC members
emulated the US Constitution and sought to use it as a model for their actions; for no
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one was this more true than for the Chairman o f the ECC, Erwin Chemerinsky who is
a nationally acclaimed constitutional scholar who teaches the subject at the USC Law
School.
In the May 11,1998 LA Times, he put his thoughts into words in an citywide
editorial that summarizes the debate succinctly. He began by pointing out that, “The
people, in ratifying a charter or constitution limited by a bill of rights, are empowering
their government but denying it authority to violate basic liberties” (B11). He pointed
out the objection of others: “Opponents of the bill o f rights argue that it is
unnecessary and does not belong in the charter” (B ll). Who was right? In reality,
both sides were right; and, Chemerinsky acknowledged this fact in his rebuttal o f this
point. “Under law, a city can provide more rights for its citizens than federal or state
law accords. A bill of rights in the charter can protect citizens against government
abuses in areas where federal law and state law are inadequate”(B ll). He then cites
the cases of discrimination based on sexual orientation and free expression of religion
as examples of where federal and state law are unclear. Despite his begging the
question of what “adequate” means, his point is essentially correct from his
perspective. In other words, if one sees no reason to go beyond the current
Constitutional guarantees, then a bill of rights would be redundant and unnecessary.
However, if one wished to have the local government take (or share) responsibility
for the protection of basic human rights, then a bill of rights becomes necessary.
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Understanding this distinction tells us a great deal about the thinking about the
purpose of local government for both those that supported a bill of rights and those
that opposed it. And, a few other interesting points about peoples’ thinking emerge
from this article. First, in defending the need for a bill of rights, Chemerinsky goes on
to support his position by claiming that, “When the US Constitution was drafted 211
years ago, the same argument was made: that the bill o f rights was unnecessary
because other sources of law adequately protected liberties. Those ratifying the
Constitution rejected this view and insisted on a bill of rights” (B ll). Here, we see
that even respected scholars are occasionally overly general. The ratifiers of the US
Constitution did not insist on a bill of rights. In actuality, the Bill o f Rights was
stricken from the document during the Constitutional Convention and passed without
it; it was ratified by the required 9 states without it; it was not a part o f the
Constitution until it was passed in the first session of the First Congress and came into
force on December 15, 1791 - despite the fact that it was not passed in
Massachusetts, Georgia, and Connecticut until 1939. The Constitution had been in
force since March 4, 1789 meaning that the Bill of Rights could more accurately be
seen as a correction to the document - amendments as they are properly described -
rather than a part of the original document without which passage would not have
occurred as Chemerinsky portrays it in his rebuttal. So, yes, the same redundancy
argument was made in the drafting of our Constitution, but it carried the day during
the creation of our state.
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To be fain Chemerinsky is right that it was changed and that the ultimate
victory did go to the Bill of Rights, but the key point is that the redundancy argument
did work. The Bill of Rights was passed later based on additional arguments and
additional support primarily from John Adams and Thomas Jefferson who had been
abroad serving as ambassadors in England and France respectively during the
Constitutional debates and from the “holdout colonies” of the ratification process.
But, as in those times, for the supporters of the Bill of Rights, future events
demonstrated the wisdom of their claims. So too, this is the case for Chemerinsky.
Recently, the Supreme Court dismissed cases that permitted victims o f rape, domestic
violence, and other ‘motivated by gender’ crimes from federal consideration because
they were not viewed as being under federal jurisdiction. The case, US vs. Morrison,
was prosecuted on two grounds, interstate commerce and equal protection; but, these
grounds demonstrated the length to which the Constitution had to be stretched to
make an argument against rape. Chemerinsky’s point that an anti-rape protection in
the city charter would have served the public interest as current events have made
obvious, the Supreme Court can and will limit the applicability o f the Constitution’s
protections of rights to the state and local jurisdictions; the wisdom o f the so-called
redundancy is shown to be its insurance factor.
Chemerinsky’s article deals with several other points which indicate some
interesting contradictions of thinking. A second argument against a bill of rights as a
political liability is addressed. “Opponents argue that a bill of rights might doom the
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charter. There is an easy answer to this objection: The bill of rights can be voted on in
a separate initiative” (B ll). Here, we see echos of what actually happened with the
US Constitution 200 plus years ago. We also raise a second interesting point, one o f
separability. This approach foreshadows what would happen with the council size
argument where two different larger size city councils were ballot options; however,
it seems to contradict the charter mantra that the more choices offered voters the
more likely they are to reject them all. In one case, options for voters is a good idea;
in another, it is poison. What accounts for this difference of opinion? A third
interesting point raised by the editorial is that in this case Chemerinsky argues for a
bill o f rights in an attempt to protect and expand rights beyond federal and state
restrictions presumably in the service of public good; yet, on the issue of the single
most fundamental of our rights, the right to vote, he and the commissions were
summarily accepting of the City Attorney’s Office’s position that non-citizens could
not vote. Again, we see an apparent contradiction. How can we explain this?
I have had private conversations with Chemerinsky and know him to be a
supporter of the expansion of personal rights and a man of high integrity. However,
he is a scholar and not a politician; and, this distinction was brought out nowhere
more obviously than on this issue. If we trace the political realities of what happened,
we can learn, as Chemerinsky did, a lesson in politics courtesy of Paula Boland.
Paula Boland was a commissioner from District 12 in the San Fernando Valley, and
she was the Boland for whom the Boland Bill was named as she bad been the State
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Assemblywoman from the same area who introduced the bill but had been term
limited out of office. She was also a board member o f Valley VOTE the organization
spearheading the Valley secession movement. A political conservative, she was dead
set against the idea o f a bill of rights. At a luncheon at USC in early April of 1998,
Chemerinsky assured me that he had more that enough votes to secure passage of the
bill of rights which was soon to be voted upon in the ECC; I pressed him as I felt it
was a noble, but losing cause. We polled a list o f commissioners, and by his reckoning
he did in fact have more than enough votes for passage, so I skeptically commended
him A few weeks later when the vote was taken, the bill o f rights was narrowly
defeated. What happened?
Quite simply, Boland was able to tie up the call for a vote until a specific
favorable meeting. The vote on the bill of rights occurred at a meeting being held on
July 6, 1998, ironically the 222nd anniversary of the signing o f the Declaration of
Independence (it was written on the 4t h and signed on the 6th), in the San Fernando
Valley in District 2 adjacent to District 12 and after a public hearing session in which
Boland had marshaled local anti-bill of rights organizations to bombard the
commission with negative comments ranging from claims of unnecessary action to
threat of doing everything possible to sink the charter if this bill was attached. The
vast majority of the objection was centered around a woman’s right to choose which
had been included as a part of the bill; after the bill had been released to the public in
April The Daily News, the Valley’s local newspaper, had run,a front page article in
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the Sunday edition entitled, “Charter Reform goes ‘Crazy’”. So, Boland was easily
able to find vocal, effective, and virulent opposition to the bill on several points; and
because it was her home field, she had no problem mobilizing it.
During this parade of negativity, one speaker said, “I can’t think of a better
marketing department [for secession] than you people;” all o f this virulent citizen
opposition had the desired effect of turning two undecideds, Glushon and Castaneda,
into negative votes. This would not, in itself, have sunk the bill; but since the meeting
was in the Valley, three of the stronger pro-bill of rights commissioners from the
south and east sides, Archie-Hudson, Dupont-Walker, and Romero, did not make the
meeting; additionally, a weaker supporter, Weinberger from Hollywood, also did not
make it. As a result, Chairman Chemerinsky came up just short of his required votes
on the issue; the vote was 7-4 in favor of the bill of rights; but, as a majority of the
entire commission, 8 people were required to pass resolutions, the resolution was
defeated when Zine and Boland joined the no voters. What these four no voters had
in common was that they all represented Districts entirely in the Valley. Glushon’s
District 11 actually straddles the mountains and in addition to Van Nuys, North
Sherman Oaks, Encino, and Tarzana in the valley, the district includes Brentwood and
Pacific Palisades.
A politically savvy chair would have postponed the vote until he had present
the numbers necessary to carry the day or would have at least gotten things off
Boland’s home field of angry fans before voting, but as the vote had been postponed
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and dragged out, Chemerinsky was under pressure to move on. All o f this resulted in
a Custer-like defeat for Chemerinsky. A defeat, not because he was wrong; history by
means of the recent US vs. Morrison case have proven the wisdom o f his position.
But, a political loss to a seasoned politician was the outcome of this chosen
methodology. This makes a very important point for our analysis. That point is that
our political system, in general, and the one used by the commissions, in particular,
were not neutral. They worked more in the favor of those that know how to
manipulate appearance and situation as opposed to those that generate the stronger
argument. From most ethical perspectives, the higher principals should direct our
actions; this did not happen in this case. This is a large part of the reason why many
feel that politics is incapable of producing ethical results.
The moral of this story is that the bill of rights was defeated by the appearance
o f a lack of a consensus, but it was a lack o f a specific consensus at a specific point in
time. In reality, a majority of the ECC member favored a bill of rights. Who is at the
table to agree or disagree with the matter at hand is of paramount importance. Since
this can be manipulated, what is the value of consensus? What about the consensus of
the citizens at large? Consensus and home rule are complimentary ideals but neither
is inherently ethical. Consensus does not require ethics. A co-dependant relationship
is a consensus one, but it is healthy for neither partner. Consensus is often driven by
what is desired by people without a tempering of what is realistic or beneficial.
What, if any, role does this leave for public reason or ethics to play in social
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consensus? To what degree is the consensus of a small group of 15 or 21, valid for a
larger group?
The practical issue is: to what degree should a commission consensus be
generalized. This is an important point which is a subject of study in the field of
statistics. Merely because one has a sample does not mean the results of that sample
should be generalized. The sample must be large enough and unbiased enough to be
of statistical usage. As Dr: Schockman points out in his essay on, “Boards and
Commissions; The Shadow Government,” in LA County, these requirements are not
the reality o f LA’s commission and boards.
A ‘shadow government’ has been created under the Los Angeles
[1925] city charter, defusing power on the surface yet centralizing
power to the detriment of the average citizen ... First and foremost, it
should be stressed that commissioners are political appointees and not
just some sectoral or random slice of the general local public ...Mayor
Riordan has assembled what I term a neo-rainbow coalition, based on
class, not race in his selection o f city commissioners ... By and large
these individuals come from relatively affluent income areas and
probably bring with them in their public decision-making roles inherent
class bias and prejudice as they determine public policies that affect all
Angelenos.” (sic, 67-71)
Certainly this is true of the ACC commissioners even if they were not appointed by
the Mayor; a review of the ECC members quickly verifies these claims as valid for
them as well. According to the rules of validity in statistics, the commissions should
not be considered significant (useful) samples; they are too small and not
representative nor random enough.
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But. their conclusions were generalized. This trend parallels one of the
principle claims Habermas makes about contemporary society in Toward a Rational
Society. He observes, “generations o f students were educated in a politically effective
manner. This process reproduced the mentality o f a university trained-professional
stratum for which society still intended a relatively uniform status. Transcending
differences of faculty and profession, this mentality assured the homogeneity of the
university trained elite” (3). This university trained, class bias elite is exactly who is
directing all of LA including the charter commissions. This is a description of an
oligarchy, not a validation of claims of democratic representation. So, the question o f
a consensus of whom is exposed as more critical than first imagined. It is a narrow
consensus of like-minded, class-biased individuals; in the case o f the bill of rights for
the LA charter, a consensus of four Valley representatives, four no shows, and a
hostile crowd was enough to sink important rights legislation for all Angelenos.
So, faced with these realities, what are the ethical consequences and
ramifications? What are the ethical next steps? We shall explore some options in
Chapter 8. For now, we will continue looking at the theme of consensus with another
somewhat parallel issue of council size.
COUNCIL SIZE
The issue of council size was in most ways the opposite of the issue of the bill
of rights. The bill of rights was a part of the early debate; it was controversial; it was
settled in a vote at a public hearing by the ECC; and it was isolated. The issue o f
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council size was pervasive, not definitively decided by the commissions, a focus late in
the debate, and handled with relatively little acrimony. The ideal size for a council
was first brought up in early sessions of all three of the ACC’s subcommittees on
Institutions, Participation, and Management before the ECC vote had even taken
place. Due to its interwoven nature, with so many other issues from size of
bureaucracy to neighborhood councils, it never really either went away or became a
singular focus. This is why it was left to the end of the debate for resolution as it was
generally felt that once the other issues were decided the requirements of the Council
would become obvious as the role of the Council in relationships to its new role and
duties would determine its proper size. For the most part, this is what happened.
Since the role of the Council was only slightly altered; in the end, very few
commissioners felt a need to alter its size. So, in the document as drafted the size was
kept constant at 15.
However, this is not the end o f the story. The June 1999 ballot also contained
two provisions as separate measures that the council size be increased. Amendment 3
to increase the council to 21 members was defeated 135,063 (63%) to 77,752 (37%),
and Amendment 4 to make the council 25 members was defeated 140,799 (65%) to
74,686 (35%). This constituted a solid message from an obvious minority of the
population; the 2 to 1 defeat was hailed as affirming the commissions’ conclusion that
15 was the preferred council size. This conclusion itself is not as interesting as the
mode of decision making it employed. With the exception of Amendment 2 which
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had to be placed on the ballot because of jurisdictional differences between the LA
School District and the city limits, this was the only issue that was deemed as meriting
being placed separately on the ballot. Beyond that, not one but two options were
placed on the ballot. This is odd considering the constant refrain that began before
either commission was seated that more than one charter option would sink all
options. Despite a limited call for placing a bill of rights on a separate ballot measure,
the idea of singularity, or consensus, was sacrosanct. Yet, toward the end o f
deliberations on an issue of surprising little overall significance, the unity value was
abandoned. What did this say?
Separability was unacceptable for the document but okay for this issue? Was
this issue that special? Not really; it was not a subject of great passion. To be sure,
there was great disagreement, but the disagreement was more a function of an
inability to ground this part of the argument in any theory. Those not wishing to
change the size had a rationale that most people were satisfied with their
Councilperson and the role of the Council was not really changing, so why change the
size. With the burden of proof in the court of those wishing to change the size, the
general feeling that districts were too big as we saw documented previously in the
comparison of governance systems section was not specific enough. Where were
they getting the too big idea? They were unable to tie this claim to an acceptable
theory especially in light of the inclusion of neighborhood councils. Critics pointed to
the numbers and agreed that in absolute terms and in average council size terms that
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the numbers were high (see table); but, they were not high by other relative scales:
TABLE 4-1 - DISTRICT SIZE IN CALIFORNIA AND LOS ANGELES
LEGISLATIVE DISTRICT Approximate Size
LA County Supervisorial District 1,800,000
CA Senate District 744,000
LA Board of Education District 600,000
Congressional District (CA-32) 572,595
CA Assembly District 372,000
LA City Council District 232,360
Average Urban CA Council District 65,720
(Charter Commission Staff Research. Meeting handout, July 16, 1997)
So, though they could not be moved or faulted for wanting to lower the ratio of
people to representative, they could not settle on a defendable plan. Since there were
no solid arguments against reduction either it was decided to leave it up to the people
as it was a judgement call; but, it was more than that, it was a judgement call with
very little substantive difference. 15, 21, or 25 was just rearranging the deck chairs in
council chambers; it would have little substantive impact on the new city government.
In the end, the people saw no reason to change council size as their job was not
changing all that much and people tended to like their councilpersons.
Here arises a stark contrast to the story o f the bill of rights. Since that was an
extremely substantive decision, it was not to be left up to the people; a cosmetic one
could be. The charter itself was not to be left up to the people to choose from
amongst contrasting options; the commissions had to decide on one document lest the
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public be confused; What does this thinking tell us? Obviously, the commissioners
did not have much faith in the intellect of the people. But, were they right on this
score? This is a subject of long standing debate and not the focus o f this work; my
intent is to point out the contrast in the activities of the commissions and reality.
How can we account for them? What do we have to believe to accept these claims?
The voters o f LA showed they could chose between alternatives by doing so on the
size issue, the insurance propositions on the spring 2000 ballot, and most importantly
between sections of the charter back in 1925 when that was on the ballot. Why were
the commissions reluctant to have a continuum of voices or choices on key issues?
Would this represent that they could not come to a consensus on the issue? Would
this make the commissions look amateurish and incompetent? Was protecting their
effort and judgement more important to the commissioners than risking alternative
conclusions? The answers to these questions form the type of corporate cultural
activity we spoke of in the CM section.
There were signals from the public on the council size issue. Although it was a
source of confusion and controversy especially between the two commissions - the ECC
favored expansion and the ACC did not, much of the confusion was due to the
speculative nature of the subject. For instance, while minority groups argued that
expansion would hurt them (see O’Connor, LA Times 8/30/98 article) a study by a
respected voting rights expert concluded that an expanded council would expand
minority representation (see Newton LA Times 10/16/98 article). Despite the claims o f
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leaders and experts, an August 25, 1998 poll by political scientist Arnold Steinberg,
“concluded that 53.5% of likely voters would support expanding the council from 15 to
35 members, if they were assured that the larger council would not cost more” (Bl).
But, the number 35 was not placed on the ballots. The conservative-LA Times even
came out on May16, 1999 and, “To make representation mean something in LA again,
we strongly endorse[d] Amendment 4, which would increase the council to 25
members” (M4). “Districts would shrink from 230,000 people to a much more
manageable 136,000, closer to the norm in other major cities” (M4). Although why the
norm of other major cities is a magic bullet is not justified, we see here another message.
But, these messages were reduced in impact by the culture of the commissions. The size
of the Council would not alter its relationship with the Mayor or with the new
neighborhood councils or the departments of the city. As a result, the issue seemed to
be merely about more expense for more politicians. The LA Times point was valid but
not enough to sell the idea. Moving to 35 members would have changed the dynamics
of the council and made the representation ratio less than 99,000 people to each
councilmember. But, this was apparently unthinkable for the commissions even if it was
supportable by 54% of the people. This is because these signals were blocked or
transformed on their way from their source to the commissions and back to the voters.
SINGULAR DOCUMENT
If there was a constant refrain and/or crisis o f these reform activities, it was the
mantra that there could only be one charter document or the conflict between the two
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would tear them both apart. On September 11, 1996, the day after the Council moved
on the Galanter motion to create the ACC, the LA Times quoted local experts who
began the chant.
UCLA political scientist Xandra Kayden predicted that without unity
among city leaders, there is little chance that any meaningful reform will
be implemented. “I think we have killed charter reform for another
generation.” she said. “This was the best shot at it.” Sherry Bebitch Jeffe,
a senior associate at Claremont Graduate School, agreed, saying, “When
voters are confronted with a variety of options on the ballot, they tend to
vote no.” (A18)
Public division was seen as vulnerable to exploitation by the Mayor and the Council, or
a further manifestation of dysfunction; neither of these were believed to be the type of
model behavior from the commission that would earn it the authority to claim a better
way for LA. History supported this analysis.
The genesis of this need for unity claim was the charter activities o f the late
1960's. In the wake of the turbulent 1960's, long time mayor Sam Yorty responded to a
call for reform of the charter; he appointed a commission to critique the 1925 charter.
In 1969, this Reining Commission issued a streamlining and decentralizing draft charter
to the Council. Over the next 9 months, the Council held hearings and eventually
stripped the document of many of its reforms that moved power away from the Council
while simultaneously graphing some o f its own reform ideas into the document. Some
of these reforms expanded the Council’s powers over the proprietary departments
including some pension and salary decisions. In the November of 1970 election, the
DWP and other city employees spearheaded the opposition to the new charter, and it
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was narrowly defeated. The Council again placed this charter on the ballot in 1971; it
was then soundly rejected, and there was not to be another charter offered to the voters
for the next 28 years.
The conflict between that commission and that Council and the differences
between the draft and the actual document were seen as a parallel to the dysfunctional
nature of LA government Taking this dysfunction as the defining characteristic o f the
charter that needed to be addressed, it is logical to believe that generating alternative or
competing charters could be viewed as demonstrating that the charters were unable to
address and resolve the key problem they were charged with resolving. It could be
understood as a de facto admission that consensus was not possible amongst the
corporate managers as Councilmember Hernandez’s earlier comment admits. So, if they
could not do it in creating the document, why would or should anyone believe that these
people knew how to write up a plan to achieve it? This had the effect of sensitizing the
members o f the commissions to the central role that their own consensus played in the
claims of competence of the document they were creating.
Another residual effect of the ‘70 and ‘71 charter defeats was the belief that if
you wished to have the charter adopted that you could not fight the unions. They were
pointed to as the group that had defeated the last charter, and they were a major force in
turning out voters to local elections which were criminally devoid of voters. Riordan
had established that he could rally enough public support to beat the Council with his
creation of the ECC; but even he, by means o f his slate of commissioners, was defeated
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in that election by the slate of union commissioners. They were in a majority position on
the ECC after the elections and not the Mayor. This was a contemporary re-affirmation
of the mythos that the unions were the single most powerful stakeholder in local politics.
Therefore, any thought of creating a consensus document needed to start with the
unions. Along these lines, any significant alterations to the pension or civil service
sections of the charter were deemed as unthinkable. They were in the informal driver’s
seat in the discussions; but, it was understood that they were savvy enough not to
attempt to over dictate the terms of the document. They would concentrate their efforts
and concerns on matters of union importance and take merely advisory or lobbying
positions on peripheral matters. Still, they became something of the 400 lb. gorilla in
the room.
The widely accepted call for a single document was tied directly to the idea of
consensus. Immediately after the ECC was empaneled, they voted to create a liaison
committee with the ACC to explore the opportunity o f creating a joint document. The
ACC had been the product of a failed joint effort at governmental consensus in 1996;
but, the ECC shared this ignoble pedigree as well. The City Council’s ‘go along to get
along’ method of voting was a consensus model. Who was going to argue with the idea
that everyone should be on board before we go ahead with a project? Supporters of
reform believed that the best physical manifestation of such a consensus would be a
single document. They feared that if they could not find agreement then they would be
unable to sell the plan to a hostile Valley audience or an apathetic eastside constituency.
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But, was this true? What were the ramifications of such thinking? Was this idea that the
best and the brightest could find an agreement that was workable for all of LA, the most
economically, ethnically, religiously, and ideologically diverse big city in the world,
realistic thinking? Or was it arbitrary application of power to protect the status quo?
This need to legitimize themselves explains this seeming illogical approach to
ballots options. The issue ofNBCs was deeply important and devise to the commissions
(and they are the subject o f Chapter 6); from the beginning o f the debate right up until
the very end, there was a move to place on the ballot options for NBCs to be elected
and to have some level o f power. However, at the very same time the council ballot
alternatives were being written, a fierce battle was being waged to exclude any ballot
options on NBCs because a single document was argued to be necessary. That
argument carried the day for NBCs but not council size. It was clearly not because the
council size was more important, just the opposite. This tells us that the commissions
were more interested in deciding the key issues for the people than structuring the
alternatives, presenting them to the people, and then letting the people decide. This
exposes their valuation of control of packaging and structuring in the hands of “the right
people” - which obviously was not the people.
CONSENSUS
On the surface, consensus seems like an unimpeachable idea. It has certainly
become the shibboleth of ethical social action in pluralistic America. It has its roots in
the very determinates of our American identity. The Protestants, north and south, who
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formed this country preferred the use o f public reason to that of an institutional truth as
was represented by a Pope or a King. Town halls ofNew Hampshire, friends’ meeting
in Pennsylvania, or separation of powers in Virginia government represent a
fundamental distrust of judgement being left up to a single individual; the Supreme
Court has 9 judges on it and Congress over 500 deliberative members. The President
can do very little beyond the administrative without the consent of Congress; remember
that the US was formed with the legislative branch primarily and supremely and the
executive and judicial were developed later. Here, the marketplace o f competing ideas is
revered, not the genius of the singular leader. WWII renewed this devotion to group
thinking in our condemnation of fascism, and the cold war reminded us right up to the
1990's o f the dangers of monolithic decision making. We believe in bringing everyone
to the table and seeking a consensus to direct our public actions. Nowhere is this value
more enshrined than in LA. The most multi-cultural major city in the world is also run
by groups o f debaters: the City Council, commissions, and civil service, all in a weak
mayor municipal government. But, we seem to forget that where there are decision
making, implementing, and controlling groups, there are bureaucracies.
This returns us to M oral Mazes by Jackall. In it, he quotes a manager about how
decisions are really made in corporate organizations. ‘“The basic principles o f decision
making in this organization and probably any other organization are: (1) avoid making
any decision if at all possible; (2) if a decision has to be made; involve as many people as
you can so that, if things go south, you’re able to point in as many directions as
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possible”’ (78). In this insight, we can find a darker rationale for bringing everyone to
the table: spreading the blame. If everyone can input into the charter debate, then
everyone can be blamed if it is a failure. But, the truth is that some input is clearly more
important than others. While public input was available at all commission meetings,
because it was a requirement of the Brown Act o f state law, the stakeholders and public
officers were allowed to give presentations at length while the public was relegated two
or three minutes each and the commissioners were regularly talking or even leaving the
room during these comments. The point is that the public input was not designed to be
able to impact the commissions’ work; their position would be that they required
safeguards to prevent a member of the public from derailing their work efforts or
highjacking a meeting, and there is certainly a level o f truth to this claim. Still, we must
ask ourselves if the commission had more to fear from an individual or did individuals
have more to fear from the commission? On whom should the burden of proof be
placed? Simply put, the public input was structured for the commissions, not the public;
the story of Boland’s use of the public against the bill of rights is a perfect example. If
this is true, what purpose was being served? It was neither representative or significant;
the largest of the public hearings turned out 200 people in areas that had over 10,000
within walking distance of the meeting site. The commissioners and staffs were
politically experienced enough to know this; or if they began as neophytes, they quickly
came to understand it, which explains their disregarding and analgesic structuring o f the
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process. Still, the process allowed them to be dismissive of the public yet make them a
party to the responsibility for the final document.
So, they maximized discretion without responsibility. Responsibility would be
meted out only at election time. That would be several months after the commissions
had concluded their work and by then the commissioners would have moved on to other
issues. Many of the commissions’ members did not wait that long (see the leadership
and personnel section). This phenomena is not new; Jackall pointed it out in his text.
“Most [managers] see safeguards against suffering the consequences of their own errors.
Most important, one can ‘outrun their mistakes’ so that when blame time arrives, the
burden will fall on someone else ... outrunning mistakes is the real meaning o f ‘being on
the fast track,’ the real key to managerial success” (90). By combining outrunning
mistakes and spreading the blame, we can see that the idea of consensus which has
admirable roots in the virtue of public reason over individual thinking has been coopted
by the political corporate managers to serve their purposes. Politically speaking, we
have gone further by creating incentives for this type of behavior, we have
institutionalized it by the creation of term limits. Elected official are now required to
move on before the majority of their actions can ‘come home to roost’. IfRiordan is
really to blame or get credit for charter reform, he will not be in office to deal with it.
But, the public will not be moving on when the mistake comes looking for a place to
roost. Or will they? The affluent can, and very often do, move on; the Valley may
move on despite charter reform. But, the affluent are the ‘fast trackers’ who move
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farther out into the suburbs to outdistance the problems, and the inner city public that
had not really had input into the decisions are left to pay as they were with the savings
and loans bailout.
So, how can we ascertain if this is a case of employing the thinking of many or
the scapegoating of managerial risk aversion that is key to the professional success of
the corporate officers? We must look to assumptions employed in this search for
consensus. If the framing assumption is that we must create a single document or we
fail, there is an assumption that singularity is of primary value. What does this imply for
a pluralistic community? Does it not also imply that these managers believe that a
consensus exists? This leads to behavior of seeking, as opposed to creating a
consensus. In a pluralistic city like LA, why is it reasonable to believe that a majority
view exists? It is a function of a yes/no, binary system thinking more than an acceptance
of the local reality; and, it entices those that do not accept this binary to be left out.
This is quite a reasonable interpretation of the motivation o f the 80% of Angelenos that
did not vote and why, “A new [LA] Times poll conducted last week [4/1/99], found that
nine out of 10 city voters say they do not know enough about the proposed charter
reform, which will appear on the June ballot, to voice an opinion” (Newton A l). It
echos the concerns of those that rioted in 1992 feeling that they had no way to express
their anger within the system; the voting rights fight cited earlier is another example.
Finally, this approach to consensus was most obvious in the selection o f the ACC’s
Executive Director (as outlined in the leadership and personnel section ahead). In this
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case, the assumption that there was a working Bradley coalition that needed to be
rediscovered or revitalized framed the activities of the commission. But, such an
approach ignores the larger processes; this is a fatal flaw which is exposed by our
analysis. As CM directs in dealing with crises, it is critically important that managers
question corporate assumption rather than accept them. In the case o f consensus, a
procedural assumption was being made that was not realistic for LA in the 21st century.
All of this brings us to an important final point about consensus: is it a good
decision making mechanism? A consensus of whom was being sought? Was there a
Rawlsian set of values and social relations that would work for all people regardless of
race, gender, or creed? Or was consensus building about figuring out who was strong
enough and passionate enough to require buy off and who could be ignored and
scapegoated? Mitroff and Linstone draw this conclusion?1 # -tight agreement or
consensus is required before we can act on important social issues, then we seem
doomed to perpetual inaction or widespread dissatisfaction no matter which course is
taken, a condition in which we have found ourselves too readily in recent yeard' (sic
29). They see dedication to what they term ‘the agreement way o f knowing’ as limited
and counterproductive to our national purpose. Specifically, they posit:
There is a strong sense in which the use of Inductive-Consensual IS’s
[inquiry systems] is undemocratic. The purpose of democracy is not to
reduce important issues to polling or popularity contests nor is it to
secure faster and more accurate polls of public opinion. The fundamental
purpose is to have open-ended discussion of key issues, or even better,
intense arguments and debates by those on opposing sides. Democracy
becomes perverted when it is not only confused with consensus but
reduced to numbers. (36)
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Our court system runs on this adversarial dynamic. Who gains from limiting the debate
as much as those that get to do the limiting? Mitroff and Linstone end with this decree,
“the most general conclusion is 'seek agreement or consensus but do not trust them
fully’. Agreement and consensus are important in reaching conclusions and in achieving
the necessary support to carry our complex, important policies. However, as with all
things human, they cannot be followed blindly. Nor are they the ultimate consideration
for deciding all important questions” (37). The commissions did in fact make it their
ultimate consideration; in so doing, they protected the power of the decision makers
more than fashioning a system to seek and utilize the inputs o f the customers o f the LA
corporate organization.
SCOPE OF PARTICIPANTS
America has contrasting positions on participation. On one hand, “All men are
created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights”; but, on the other
hand, men did not mean women, slaves, or even non-landowners. Further, the main
author of the Constitution and our fourth President, James Madison, is famous for the
line, “people are the source of power, but they should not exercise it”. Clearly our
history points to some people being more equal than others; we already began this
discussion in the final part of the bill o f rights section when we spoke of a culture of
university trained elites; now, we can refine this thinking more clearly.
Despite the surge of initiative-generated legislation in the past 30 years, the
overwhelming majority of the laws in this country are created by legislatures presided
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over by representatives. Representative democracy was the compromise of the
Constitutional Convention in 1788 between the positions o f the Radical Republicans,
such as Patrick Henry and George Mason, who wanted the people themselves to decide
issues and the Federalist, such as Alexander Hamilton and Gouvemeur Morris, who
wanted a strong central government issuing forth from a sovereign. Representatives
came to be viewed by these delegates as a necessary check on the unruliness of the mob,
the danger of which had just been underscored by Shay’s Rebellion in Massachusetts.
However, through the years, this new governmental system managed to portray itself as
a democracy rather than what is the most accurate literal description of this type of
government. Most precisely defined, the American system is an oligarchy. Although
people have at times attempted to assert that the US is a meritocracy, this claim is no
longer averred save in the most nationalistic of contexts or organizations. Additionally,
the term “Republic” is merely descriptive of a constitutional government that is not a
monarchy. From the Latin res meaning thing and publica meaning public, the word tells
us nothing of what the government is, only something of what it is not.
The American Heritage Dictionary defines an oligarchy as, “Government by the
few, especially by a small fraction of persons or families” (916). In a year where the son
of a former president ran against the son of a former US Senator for president, it is hard
not to see the accuracy of such a definition. The most extreme illustration of this
difference and its importance is that Hitler came to power in a representative democracy
with just over 30% of the vote in 1932; but, he succeeded in ruling the country by
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creating and controlling an oligarchy. In LA, in the 1950's and 60's the Committee of 25
and in the 1970's and ‘SO 's the 15 members of the City Council clearly constituted a
governing few. There is no doubt that the Council is formally and literally the ruling
body of the city: "The Council, except as otherwise in this Charter provided, is the
governing body of the City” (1925 Charter Art. Ill, Sec. 22). Even the more restricted
wording of the new charter, “Except as otherwise specifically provided in the Charter,
the Council shall have full power to pass ordinances upon any subject of municipal
concern” (1999 Art. II, Sec. 240) specifically locates the seat o f power in the Council’s
chambers; the demos can only act politically through these chosen few. In essence,
democracy may have won the rhetorical battle over governmental description; but, the
reality of American politics is that the rules are made by a minuscule minority o f the 281
million of us. All we get to do is to pick amongst the preselected, well-financed players,
not to play.
Beyond politics, in 1983, 26.9% of the total wealth of the country had become
concentrated in the hands of the top % of 1 % of the population achieving the highest
percentage of concentration o f wealth at the top since 1939 and the days o f the robber
barons; and, the situation has not improved. Nationally, The New York Times reported
in January of 2000 on an Economic Policy Institute report showing that incomes of the
bottom 20% of the income scale fell 5 % between the late 1970's and late 1990's while
the income amongst the top 20% of families rose 33%” (Stevenson WIG). A
September 5, 1999 NY Times article presaged this conclusion when it reported
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economic figures that showed the bottom 3/5 or 60% of the population were worse off
than they were in the 1970's (Johnston A14).
Globally, Le Monde reported that, ‘The total wealth o f the world’s three richest
individuals is greater than the combined gross domestic product of the 48 poorest
countries - a quarter of all the world’s states” (Ramonet 47), It continues by quoting a
UN Development Program’s report that inequality o f nations has increased between the
top 20% and the bottom 20% from 30 times greater in 1960 to 82 times greater in 1995.
It goes on to illustrate this disparity in terms of hunger by stating that: “The United
Nations calculates that the whole of the world’s population’s basic needs for food,
drinking water, education, and medical care could be covered by a levy of less than 4%
on the accumulated wealth of the 225 largest fortunes” (47). Locally, the LA Times
reported in January of 2000 that the California Budget Project’s results showed similar
numbers for California: “From 1993 to 1997 ... The average income of the top 1% -
845,000 - shot up 57% in that period ... By contrast the average income o f middle fifth
of California taxpayers - 24,177 - grew by only 1.8. For the state’s poorest working
families, the average income of 1997 - 13,000 - reflects a 13 % drop since 1989" (Arax
et al A l, A16.A17). It states further that specifically here, “In Los Angeles County, a
recent United Way study discovered a shrinking middle class: nearly half the households
in 1998 had a net worth of less than $25,000, while 34% of the households boasted a
net worth of SI00,000 and above” (A16). In a county with a median single family
residence price of $202,000 for April of 2000 sales and a median condo price of
$150,000 ( LAT 5/28/00 Kl), a net worth of $100,000+ should not be difficult to obtain
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for most people owning houses. Perhaps this is why the LA Times claims that in the year
2000, only 36% of the families in the county can afford a median priced home and 1.9
million people are living in poverty (Rainey A18); and, it later reported that “More than
40% of county residents spend 1/3 of their income on rent” (Texeira B13).
What is it about these numbers that is significant to the discussion of the scope
of consensus for the LA charter reform debates? They are presented to test the assertion
that David Halberstam makes in his book, The Next Century, about oligarchy. In it, he
states:
Lester Thurow, a prominent economist, a Newsweek columnist, and
head of the Sloan School at MIT [answered] ... Does America have an
establishment or an oligarchy? ... “Japan [is described] as having an
establishment - that is, Japan has a group of people at the very top who
may, in fact, be quite as selfish as any other ruling elite of powerful
capitalists. But the members of the Japanese establishment know that
they and their children cannot succeed ... unless most of the society
succeeds as well. So the members of this establishment are willing to
sacrifice some of their own personal privilege and power and riches in
order to make sure that the larger society works and is regenerative
...Latin American countries [have leaders described with] the word
‘oligarchy’. They are describing a very small handful of immensely
privileged people who have it very good and who plan to continue to
have it very good and don’t care at all about the fact that the rest of the
country is doing poorly. In effect, an oligarchy believes it can be
successful even if the rest of the country is unsuccessful. Which is why
those nations remain so unsuccessful. And that is the system we’re
moving toward.” (124-125)
In this discussion, he suggests a threshold of significance. “An establishment knows it
isn’t good enough for just its own children to do well, to get on an elite track, because if
their own children are running a country where 60 percent of the children cannot make
it, something terrible is going to happen” (125). 60% equates with all but the top two
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fifth. It is lower than the amount (100%-34%=: : 66%) of Angelenos that are worth
$100,000 in LA or can buy a median house (100% - 36% = 64%); it is exactly equal to
the NY Times figure of the percentage that are worse off since the 1970's; and it is
certainly below the UN global figures. So, if an establishment is not a justifiable claim
for the US, a democracy is hardly a reality. However, oligarchy seems to be an accurate
description o f both the practice and the theory o f American corporate management.
And, LA prides itself on being ahead o f national curves, deadman’s curve in this
case; this case is no exception. If we substitute LA for the nation in Thurow’s quote, we
have an all too accurate picture o f LA’s political realities. The Progressives o f the
1920's were an oligarchy, and they structured LA civic organizations as oligarchies to
protect against the corruption of the politics o f the masses and party machines on one
hand and corruption of business bosses on the other. Their answer was entrusting
society to an elite group of progressive men. This was the same compromise Madison
and Hamilton had sold to the American people in the 1780's; they created the US Senate
as a bastion for elite, trustworthy men elected by legislatures not people which it is to
this day as evidenced by its nickname, “The most exclusive club in the world”. But, in
those early days, this idea of oligarchy was offset by ideals of social responsibility as
guaranteed by a combination of the idea of civic duty as a residual of noblesse oblige,
the social dimension of Reformed Protestantism, and the tying of economic interest
between the individuals and the state as seen in Federalists 10 and 51; but, these
offsetting forces soon waned. The Progressives updated them with a sense o f civic duty
based on belief in progress as demonstrated by public works, faith in progress if an
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unbiased social environment could be created, and a belief in the ability of humans.
While remnants of these ideals and socialization to this sense of civic duty remain, they
have hardly been able to counter the force o f greed, power, and fame that politics can
provide. This is for at least two reasons.
The first was deduced by Bertrand Russell three-quarters of a century ago. He
told us that, “love of power, as a motive, is limited by timidity, which also limits the
desire for self-direction” (24). In other words, the skills needed to check our “will to
power,” as Nietzsche put it, principally serve to check our desire to exercise our power
thereby rendering those of us seeking to restrain power as self-restrained; but, those
amongst us with only a desire for power are unfettered in the least and more successful
in its pursuit as those that might have checked us are spending that restraining energy
checking themselves thereby making them less dynamic in their pursuit of us. So, the
power hungry get more powerful and the controlled merely learn to control themselves
more thus creating symbiotic but dysfunctional relationships; two words often employed
to describe the LA municipal government. Those with no values have no direction; those
with timidity as a value limit themselves; those not valuing timidity but valuing power
tend to take over in an unrestrained manner.
Second, neither the colonists’ nor the Progressives’ ideals of right and socially
beneficial were as objective or neutral as they believed them to be. With due respect to
the work of John Rawls, there is no such thing as an “original position;” and, its value is
questionable in anything but the most abstract and theoretical of contexts. The colonials
were acting to save the religious and economic expression for which they had spent
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months on the ocean in cramped ships fleeing Europe; many owned slaves and treated
women as chattel. They sought to protect their hegemony as much as any other group
of haves of their day and maybe more so; this is the principal reason why the colonies
were defined as they were - Rhode Island for fleeing Catholics and others,
Massachusetts for Puritans, Pennsylvania for Quakers, etc.. Their situation allowed them
something of a clean slate on which to organize their “Cities on a Hill”, and they
concluded that what was good from them was good for everyone. This is a fault
American social thinker Reinhold Niebuhr identifies in, Children o f Light and Children
o f Darkness, “The social and historical optimism o f democratic life, for instance,
represents the typical illusion of an advancing class which mistook its own progress for
the progress of the world”(2). I am sure the slaves, American natives, and persecuted
religious types, i.e. the Catholics and Jews, of that day would not have described early
America as a beacon for the world.
Roughly 100 years later, the Progressives had their idea o f progress based this
time on a scientific meta-view of the world which they took to be equally universal, but
which subsumed the religious model. They were a part of a Protestant great awakening
seeking to renew society’s order against the threat represented by a huge Catholic
immigration from southern Europe and Ireland at the turn of the century and the social
institutions created to support this influx; but they sought to do this through progress
based on mechanical and scientific models. The Progressive too believed that their
values were good for all; the fruits of progress, such as the LA Aqueduct and the
airplane, were evidence of their being saved, proof o f the value of group agreement over
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individual direction, and reason for proselytizing this divinely progressive plan. It was
hardly an original position; insiders are not original positioners, although Rawls can be
used as a support for such insider organizations; they are oligarchical structures. So, the
Progressives and through them the present LA corporate structure, embraced the
oligarchy; and, it survives stripped of its purpose or ability to balance the mob and the
sovereign. It has become at once both. The very use and success o f commissions to
write the charter is an illustration of this point.
However, it is to be noted that although there was strong dissent between the
Council and the Mayor and the secessionists and those trying to hold things together
and other political groups, there was no opposition to the method o f using a
commission. In fact, this was a point on which the Mayor and Council agreed; it was
the make up and control of the commission that was the argument. In other words, no
one questioned that the elites should rule; it was just a question o f which elites. What
LA charter reform was at its core was a contest between groups o f elites. A business
elite as represented by Mayor Riordan who acted in the legacy o f the Committee of 25
and the Southern Pacific Railroad vied against a political elite represented by the
Council and the Bradley coalition that was acting in the legacy o f Progressive idealism.
The history of LA’s management can be viewed as a shift from one to the other. Still,
both understand that the city will work, for them and therefore for everyone in their
minds, better to the degree that they can find a unity of purpose and action. After 20
years of the control o f the political elites under Bradley, the business elites reasserted
themselves with Riordan’s election. However, the political elites have not accepted
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much o f the business agenda in non-business areas except when the courts have forced
them to do so. The two commissions were selected as representatives of these elite
factions. The ACC certainly represented the political elite; the ECC represented a
counter-elite coalition of labor, business, and populous anti-Council politicians. In the
end, these two groups were able to find a governmental balance for the executive
(business) branch of LA government and the legislative (political) branch; there was
more firing power for the Mayor and streamlining of the document for the business
minded elites and NBCs and a retaining o f the primacy of the Council for the politically
minded elites. So, a less contentious way was forged by these groups; they presented a
compromise to end the intramural warfare o f the city leaders.
This was the triumph of the 1999 Charter, and why it was able to garner such
strong support amongst civic leaders and certain segments of the general population.
The elites wanted to bring this unproductive war of control to an end. But, the Charter
was not acceptable on the southside because the people there realized that the balance
was still between elite groups and that it excluded them, the disempowered. In fact, the
balance could be more accurately described as a collusion. The elites’ hold on the city
was strengthened in the light o f the challenge highlighted by the civil unrest and given a
new seal of public approval. It also locked out the average person’s ability to affect the
system for the foreseeable future. This is not an ethical approach to democratic
government. But, since we have seen that American and Progressive government were
never meant to be democratic, the realignment of the elites offered by the 1999 Charter
is in perfect step with this tradition o f oligarchy passing itself of as democracy. The two
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warring factions are being forced by the 1999 LA Charter to become one larger
oligarchy in the belief that it would be in the public’s interest.
But, the last part of that claim, that it is in the public’s interest, was never
established, justified, or accepted. It was assumed as a part of the elite corporate
culture; it is not a realistic assumption according to Thurow, Habermas, Jackall, Russell,
Schockman, Halberstam, Phillips, Niebuhr, Jefferson, Mitroff, and a host of others. It
could be an elite of race or class; but, it is still an elite. An elite o f talent, a meritocracy,
may be ethically justifiable; but, a system run by the winners of games set up by those
winners to favor those like them to become winners is an oligarchy, not merit based
system any more than it would be if the Super Bowl Champions were allowed to set the
rules for the next football season. A real life example is how George W. Bush killed a
GOP overhaul of the primary season that had taken years to work out. “Mr. Bush’s
intervention on the primary proposal bluntly brushed aside several months’ work o f
party leadership,” because Bush was concerned, “he’d be handicapped in a 2004 re-
election bid” (Clymer Al). This is the rationale behind the current push for campaign
finance reform, and why it is achieving no success. Together, this all serves to
demonstrate the importance of the question o f the scope of participation. The
composition of the commissions themselves will be considered in the next section; but
before that, we will briefly consider the groups and stakeholders not of the formal
corporate management. Not surprisingly, some o f these were much more equal than
others, those who were members of one elite group or another; likewise, groups were
given more sway than individuals. LA’s Progressivist political culture valued
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committees over individuals, interest groups over citizens, and neighborhood
empowerment over empowering people. People with positions which were seen as
representing groups were more worthy of attention than individuals speaking on their
own behalf - regardless of the strength of the argument given. Numbers trumped quality
o f content; this was an LA corporate assumption that is a political reality but not a social
or ethical reality.
Due to the ever-present crisis of secession that more than any other single thing
drove the process of charter reform, the groups claiming to represent the unhappy
masses of the Valley were very highly considered stakeholders. These groups, Valley
VOTE and VICA (Valley Industry and Commerce Association), were peopled, not
coincidentally, by members of the economic upper 40% identified as constituting the
oligarchy and obviously members of the business mindset. Likewise, the plethora of
interest groups that received hearings before the commissions were members of this
same oligarchical pool and members of the politically thinking group. The 1/3 of LA
citizens that could not vote and their MALDEF spokespeople were summarily dismissed
with the stroke of a memo from the City Attorney’s Office, and they were not-
coincidentally members of a different mindset group and not part of the 40% of
economically privileged. If one traces the defection o f commission members (as in the
next section), one sees a concentration of the scope of the participants. The idea of a
corporate oligarchy is not to reject people or groups outright, but to provide
disincentives to facilitate their opting out thereby leaving a small group that can be
marginalized, divided, and conquered, and then scapegoated for any failures that arise
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(as we discussed in the consensus section). Having meetings downtown in the DWP
building that began at inconvenient times for a 9-5 worker, having parking problems at
sites, use ofjargon and insider talk, lack o f interaction at the meetings, holding
concurrent meetings, discussions o f multi-page reports that were just passed out so that
the public could not possibly digest and/or consider the information in time to make
comment, 2-3 minute time limits on input, and a host of other obstacles were created to
the process so as to make following the proceedings a chore. That is unless you knew
the game, the people, and had access to the materials and/or had complete freedom of
schedule. But, if you had all of these things, you would almost certainly be an elite and
therefore not really need them. It is a Catch-22 but a constructed one. Constructed in
the name of standard operating procedure for the corporation, LA in this case. Should
we then be surprised at the low participation levels? They served the purpose o f the
commissions, even if they may not have served the purpose of each and every
commissioners.
Insiders would have us believe that it is that way, has always been that way,
and they can do nothing about it. That is true to the extent that this is the way it has
been and is done. But, this is because it was set up this way; so, this is a circular
argument which is a logical fallacy. Further, considering that the purpose o f the charter
reform activities was to change things because they were believed by most to be broken
or being done the wrong way, doing things the same old way was not justifiable. But,
this is what happened. The call for and hope in NBCs as an answer stems from this
desire and understanding that things need to be done differently if there is going to be
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any change. But, unless they do change things radically, and there is no reason to
believe they will, this will not happen. Marc Haefele agrees that this is unlikely:
“Because in the end, for the new charter to succeed, we’ll need new leaders who can
fashion a better city government around it. As with so many things, the charter’s
success depends on the people who use it” (M6). If we had such leaders, then the old
system - or any system really - could be made to work. This is a de facto admission that
the charter w ill make no real difference. The Brooking Institutes study in The Rebirth
o f Urban Democracy attests that even doubling the current participation levels, NBCs
will not produce enough participation to surpass the 40% threshold. Using the widest
barometer of participation, voting, the numbers are not close. If the number o f voters in
the Mayor/Charter election is doubled, from 17% to 34% (remember that this number is
of the two-thirds of the Angelenos that can register, so the real number is closer to from
11.5% to 23%), this is a far cry from the 40% threshold. NBCs will be discussed in
greater depth in a following section.
The results of the commissions’ efforts were, according to the LA Times as
stated earlier, that 8 weeks before the election 9 out of 10 people knew next to nothing
about the Charter despite three years of effort, millions of taxpayers dollars, a process
that was supposed to exemplify the best practices o f public input and its solicitation
from the entire city, and an ACC mission statement declaring, “We will endeavor to
engage all constituencies that have a stake in the outcome,” and an ECC mission
statement claiming input from, “citizens, constituent groups, labor, business, public
officials, scholars and others who have a stake in reforming and improving city
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government". So, the commissions were either ineffective or designed to produce just
such results or both. Being governed by the input of merely 10% of a community would
certainly qualify as an oligarchy, and a small one by Thurow’s standard. The
commissions' final stage was to employ a series of education campaigns such as the one
sponsored by the League of Women Voters. But, this too is a telling activity. This final
solicitation of public involvement, the most major o f the entire reform effort, was
structured as a talking at the voters and convincing them o f what the group had already
decided for them for it was too late to change the document rather than a talking with
them about the needs of the city. Such a design is a top down approach that is
indicative o f an oligarchy group of civic corporate managers attempting to sell their
version of the insider culture to people rather than a group of managers committed to
ascertaining the realities of their corporate system and thereby better prepare it for
future crises.
The commissions did not want to question the assumptions of their political
culture, to be critical, or to expand the debate; so, they did not; and, they produced a
document that was merely a streamlined version of the status quo with small changes,
namely hiring and firing and neighborhood councils, to appease the majority of voters
who had sought change by their ballot support and to re-balance the competing elite
groups. They attempted to compensate for ills in one area (the disempowered o f the
people who rioted) by strengthening another (the business elite) without understanding
the underlaying cause (questioning of the legitimacy of the LA oligarchy) which created
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the crisis that had occurred because they assumed the nature o f the crisis as legal (intra
elite) rather than reputational (with the public at large).
Halberstam gave us an interesting benchmark in his quote: 60% of the people
must be served or public good is in jeopardy. How does this compare to the LA
realities? In a very telling way. If the voting population is only 2/3 o f the citizens and
thus 33% elect, that is certainly less than 60%. The charter did not have 20% of the
eligible voters voting on it; this is less than 60%. The numbers generated by our society
tell us that in our current society regulated by these corporate officers, 60% are worse
off then 20 years ago. This makes it clear that LA was an oligarchy regardless of which
subgroup - business or political - was running the show under the old charter and would
remain so under the new one. Politics won out by making us believe that the debate had
to be limited to political realities, not because the political realities were, in fact, social
realities. We have a minimal governmental system because that is all we believe in
having. Our assumptions frame what we see as real, we must have other eyes if we are
going to improve our systems; in this case, that means systems based on assumptions
other than political expediency, group survival, and power collection.
Ethics can offer us alternatives, but the American political culture has no role for
such alternatives. Ethics it was decided by those same Colonials o f which we have
spoken earlier was to be a private affair left to the individual; as such, it must act
through individuals and groups of like-minded individuals. They saved religion at the
price of social ethics. This encourages factions and oligarchies; and, that is what we
have running our society, despite Madison’s good intentions and to his eventual
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admission. It is perfectly logical and ethical, we are reaping what we have sown. CM
and ethics can offer us a wider perspective and better preparation for a future in the real
world. But for now, the incentives are with the status quo. It might be argued, and has
been by many including Mayor Riordan and some of those in the charter debate, that
business offers a preferable model as an alternative. At first glance this seems to be true
as businesses must respond to customers and thereby remain reality based. But Mitroff
and Linstone’s entire opus testifies to how traditional business thinking is equally
myopic; also, the next chapter will deal with many of these ideas. Besides, as we can see
from LA’s history, the question of whose reality is still relevant. Business responses to
the reality of those that can afford to spend money. The previous numbers indicate that
the people with significant disposable incomes is around the 40% mark. So, on one
hand this might be a wider audience than the 20% of the political oligarchy, but it is still
within Thurow’s threshold for social oligarchy. One need not have money or power to
be ethical, and having them is hardly a guarantee of ethics. Education might offer us an
alternative as literacy levels are higher than 60% in many, if not most, nations, and in the
US it stands at 97%. Power and money can be substitutes for each other and both are
overly concentrated; the use of the mind need not be. Unlike money and power,
knowledge and ethics improve as the ethical, knowledgeable state of others increases
and improves; it is a win-win system not a win-lose system as power and money are.
This is why CM advocates no fault learning; it breaks that connection between the zero
sum game and advancement.
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WORKS CITED '
American Heritage Dictionary o f the English Language, The. Ed. William Morris.
Houghton Mifflin Company: Boston. 1979.
Arax, Mark, Curtius, Mary, and Nelson, Soraya. “California Income Gap Grows Amid
Prosperity”, LA Times. 9 January 2000. A l, A16, & A17.
Berry, Jeffery, Portney, Kent, and Thomson, Ken. The Rebirth o f Urban Democracy.
The Brooking Institute: Washington D.C.. 1993.
Charter of the City of Los Angeles, Annotated, Revision 7, 1990 Edition. Ed. Hahn,
James. Brackett Publishing: Los Angeles. 1990.
Proposed Charter o f the City o f Los Angeles. City Clerk, Election Division; Los
Angeles. 1999.
Chemerinsky, Erwin. “Should the City Charter have a Bill o f Rights? ”, LA Times. 11
May 1998. Bll.
Clymer. Adam. “A G.O.P. Overhaul of Primary Season is Killed by Bush”, NY Times.
29 July 2000. Al & A9.
Habermas, Jurgen. Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science, and Politics.
Beacon Press: Boston. 1971.
Haerele, Marc. “The Great Charter Awakening Sneaks Up on City Hall”, Los Angeles
Times. 25 June 2000. M6.
Halberstam, David. The Next Century. William Morrow & Co., Inc.:New York. 1991.
Jackall, Robert. Moral Mazes: The World o f Corporate Managers. Oxford University
Press: New York. 1988.
Johnston, David Clay. "Gap between Rich and Poor Found Substantially Wider”, NY
Times. 5 September 1999, A14.
LA Times. “Yes on 25-Member Council”. 16 May 1999. M4.
— . “Los Angeles County Home Prices”. 28 May 2000. K1 & K8.
Martin, Hugo. “Council Votes to Keep Power to Revise Charter in Its Hands”, LA
Times. 11 September 1996. A l & A18.
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Mitroff, Ian, and Linstone, Harold. The Unbounded Mind. Oxford University Press;
NY. 1993.
Niebuhr, Reinhold. The Children of Light and the Children o f Darkness. Charles
Scribner’s Sons: NY. 1972.
Newton, Jim. "Charter Poll Finds Support for Larger Council”. LA Times. 25 August
1998. B l.
— . “Larger Council would Help Blacks, Latinos, Study Finds”. LA Times. 16 October
1998. B l.
— . “Voters Know Little of Candidates, Charter”, LA Times. 1 April 1999. A l.
O’Connor, Anne-Marie. “Move to Increase City Council Size Deadlocks Panel”, LA
Times. 30 August 1998. Bl.
Rainey, James. “LA 2000:A Remade Metropolis”, LA Times. 12 August 2000. A l &
A18.
Ramonet, Ignacio. “The Politics of Hunger”, La Monde Diplomatique. Nov. 1998. As
re-printed in World Press Review. February 1999. 47.
Russell, Bertrand. Power: A New Social Anlaysis. W.W. Norton & Co.: New York.
1938.
Schockman. H Eric. “Boards and Commissions: The Shadow Government,” from
Rethinking Los Angeles, Eds. Dear, Michael, H. Eric Schockman, and Hise,
Greg. Sage Publications: Thousand Oaks, CA. 1996. 66-73.
Stevenson, Richard. “In a Time of Plenty, The Poor are Still Poor”, NY Times. 23
January' 2000. WK3.
Texeira, Erin. "Study Finds Widening Gap Between Rich and Poor”, LA Times. 20
October 2000. B13.
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CHAPTER 5 - THEME III - GOVERNMENT AS MACHINE
MAYOR’S HIRING AND FIRING OF GENERAL MANAGERS
Much of the charter debate centered on one key matter. This matter was the
relationship between the Mayor and the City Council. The 1925 Charter, as stated
earlier, empowered the Council to run the city with the Mayor basically implementing
decisions. Riordan argued that the Council’s running o f the city was inefficient
micro-management by politicians rather than professionals and the source of his
inability to make the city administration run with accountability and efficiency. He
averred that the Mayor needed more control over the departments and their
personnel in order to assure that his directions would not be trumped by 15 area
potentates with conflicting agendas. The most telling and heated manifestation of this
power struggle in the charter debate was the issue of the hiring and firing of general
managers. At one very late point in the process, January of 1999 in fact, it looked as
if this issue o f whether the Mayor should have the right to hire and fire general
managers of the various city departments had sunk the compromise charter. But, an
isolated Richard Riordan finally compromised in late January and gave up his demand
i
that the Mayor be able to fire general managers without first appealing to the City
Council in exchange for the formal ability to fire all commissioners, except Ethics and
Police, and the power to fire general managers subject to Council appeal and two-
thirds veto. The hiring and firing of department heads are powers that most city
mayors possess, but not all.
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In order to understand the issue in context, we need to have a working
knowledge of the three widely accepted models of municipal governance employed in
the US. First, there is the strong mayor system. This is a system, like those
employed in New York City and Chicago, that allows the mayor a wide range of
unchecked powers. Second, there is the weak mayor system, such as the one we use
here in LA. Finally, there is a City Manager system employed in many medium size
cities and a few large ones such as Phoenix. Here, the city manager has such hiring
and firing powers, but not the Mayor. Aside from these cases, there are the models of
the federal and state governments. All o f these traditions combine in creating what
we have today.
The Council’s position in the debate was rooted in the idea of separation of
powers or checks and balances. They cited the Constitution’s enjoining the Congress
to advice and consent on the actions of the President in matters dealing with the
appointment of key governmental officials, such as Supreme Court Justice nominees
or secretaries of the federal departments; Madison had lifted the idea from the
writings of Montesquieu. The analogy between the two is a strong one; but not one
that was deeply examined. It must be understood that both the US and LA are
structured to be ruled by legislative bodies. The US Congress was first established
under The Articles of Confederation and without an executive branch. This body of
citizens was to run the country; however, this soon proved difficult without the power
of the purse or a standing army; so. the Constitution was written to strengthen the
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federal government. The Presidency was left mainly unformed as it was more o f a
senior statesmen position. Dr. Jack Rakove in his Pulitzer Prize winning book,
Original Meanings, put it this way: “'The objection [of the anti-federalists] against
the powers of the President is not that they are too many or too great,’ [Pennsylvania
delegate James] Wilson remarked at the Pennsylvania convention, but rather that
‘they are so trifling that the President is nothing more than the tool of the Senate’”
(279). This is a description that would aptly summerize Riordan’s view o f his own
executive situation. Madison and the colonials were searching for a way to control
the sovereign in a world where Hobbesian ideals of the state and the divine right o f
kings predominated.
The LA Progressives of 1925, lead by John Randolph Haynes, were
attempting to curb a series of corrupt city governments as well. In their case, it was
the Southern Pacific Railroad that ran LA’s political institutions to its own benefit.
However, LA was still a town developing through migration, principally from the east
and Midwest; in 1924, LA had one million residents and 45,000 of them were real
estate agents (Seidenbaum and Malmin 224). Like the pilgrims before them, they
were leaving increasing troubled areas to start anew, this time in LA. This
combination of the disillusioned and the idealistic characterizes LA to this very day.
So, the Progressives found themselves leery o f historically corrupt forces on two sides
as the Colonialist had. And, like the US founding fathers, they sought a middle road
between a strong centralized government which the railroad had used and abused and
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the populous type government that was taking hold in New York and Boston run by
political machines fueled by large numbers o f immigrants. The Progressives settled
on a commission style government where, rather than an individual, groups of people
ran governmental departments, and the committee of the whole was the City Council
that ran all other committees. The mayor was merely a holistic check on the Council.
So, we see that the separation of powers is an American tradition; but, we
now understand that it has never been an equal separation of powers. It has been a
hierarchy. The 1999 LA City Council was arguing for a confirmation of the traditional
imbalanced-balance with the legislative body as primary; Riordan was arguing for a
more ‘true’ balance in which the branches had equal power. As Riordan was coming
from a business and legal background rather than a political one, his ideal o f balance
was influenced by business thinking that is built around a strong CEO or executive.
In Max Weber’s terms, the political is a traditional bureaucracy and the executive is a
charismatic one; in Graham Allison’s terms, the political is the governmental politics
model and the business is the rational actor model. The legal branch of the
government is Weber’s legalistic bureaucracy and Allison’s organizational politics
model. On a systems level, the Mayor and Council were fighting over the balance
between these two subsystems of government not their integration. The Mayor felt
that the traditional imbalanced-balance of political systems was counterproductive to
good management; the Council disagreed. Should we be surprised that each held a
view that supported and empowered their subsystem? So, while the argument could
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be and was accurately described as being about checks, it is not so accurate to say
that it was about balance though it was regularly described in that manner. This was
the core power struggle of the charter. The Mayor was seeking balanced control;
and, he did not get it even though he did get steps in that direction.
Things are now more balanced, but they are not even. The Mayor got greater
leverage in controlling those that control the departments as the burden for their
retaining their job is now in the Council’s court. And, if Riordan has a motto to his
terms as Mayor it is: “It is easier to ask forgiveness than permission;” so, this fits his
management style well. Previously, the Council had decided when to fire or not to
fire, now the Mayor can fire and the Council has to, in effect, override the action en
mass. The Council must check the Mayor, but he can act; this is obviously a more
powerful position than before. So, the Mayor did win the battle of firing but lost the
war of balance. But, while this skirmish on hiring and firing was raging, a more
important issue was not being discussed.
There is a more insidious dimension to the checks and balances idea; this dark
secret is the collusion or oligarchy aspect. LA’s political cultural as institutionalized
by the 1925 Charter, was established to be a monopoly for the Progressive/scientific/
absolutist view of good/correct/ progress/efficiency. The local founding fathers
believed in advancement through a socially accepted notion of progress. The clearest
example of this is the insistence in the 1925 Charter on having non-partisan elections.
They wished their local politicians to be above partisanship, dedicated to progress for
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the people. This echos Madison’s claims in Federalist 10 and 51 calling for a
government without factions. But, in Madison’s own lifetime, the utopian nature and
practical inefficiency of this ideal was revealed. Just saying people should be above
partisanship cannot make it happen. More to be point, to be above partisanship
would mean having no values thereby eliminating the idea of progress as moving
closer to a valued goal. For we all have beliefs which become values because we
value them, while others have beliefs which are biased since they believe in them and
they prevent others from seeing our truth. To remind us of the words of Bertrand
Russell from his book, Power, “Thus love of power, as a motive, is limited by
timidity, which also limits the desire for self-direction” (24). But, this recurring
inability to deal with the reality of having values is a re-enforcing belief in ideals over
reality; a major flaw according to CM.
The Progressives re-attempted to institute this Constitutional thinking but to
get it right this time. In the later half of the 20t h century, it resurfaced yet again in the
work of John Rawls and his positing of the “original position” where people were
value free; this is not real life justifiable because observation and reflection show us
that there are other defendable social paths and definitions for what is valuable and
that we are not disinterested types nor is it socially beneficial if we are - although it
might be individually beneficial as the Stoics and Buddhists aver. In short, scientific
precision is not neutral. Mitroff and Linstone put it this way:
If we have to have precise definitions of complex problems before we
can proceed, and if in order to obtain such precise definitions we need
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to base them on the adoption of a single scientific discipline or
profession, then precision utio clarity may lead us deeper into
deception and not rescue us ft om it. By selecting a single scientific
discipline or profession, we cut off innumerable other pathways that
we could have chosen to explore the nature o f our problem. In this
sense, precision and clarity are too high a price to pay for reaching
solutions to our problems, (sic 47)
The Progressive’s viewpoint is the same thinking that leads to belief in a melting pot
rather than an acceptance and honoring o f diversity.
The LA Progressives did not seek to embrace diversity; LA o f the 1920's was,
as Kayden is fond of saying, “the most Anglo, middle class, big city in America”.
ECC Policy Director Dr. Schockman, put it this way in, Rethinking Los Angeles,
“because the Progressives sold us the mythology that ‘there is no Republican or
Democratic nor Independent way to fill a pothole,’ we see alliances in the council as
transitory phenomena devoid of long term ideological vision (‘the vision thing’) and
based solely on the flux of individual issues as they appear on the political landscape”
(60). While Schockman is addressing activities within the Council, the point is the
same for the public’s relationships with the Council expect that it is driven more by
personality and interest affiliation than issue deliberation and decision making.
Relationships, like those in businesses described by Jackall, become about being in the
group and being outside of the group.
For most managers, especially for those that are ambitious, the real
meaning of work - the basis of social identity and valued self-image -
becomes keeping one’s eye on the main chance, maintaining and
furthering one’s own position and career. This task requires, of
course, unrelenting attentiveness to the social intricacies of one’s
organization. One gains dominance or fails depending on one’s access
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to key managerial circles where prestige is gauged precisely by the
relationships that one establishes with powerful managers and by the
demonstrated favor such relationships bring. (202)
Either you have relationships with the powerful and are one of the gang or you are
marginalized and ineffective. You go along to get along; you become, first and
foremost, one of the gang. If you do not, you are crushed by the group; John F.
Kennedy’s Pulitzer Prizing winning book, Profiles in Courage, documents eight cases
of precisely this business practice occurring in American politics where prominent
individuals get crushed for doing the non-group thing despite it being the right thing
for the nation. So, individuals become members of the group first.
A jurisdiction being run by a small group is the definition of oligarchy. An
oligarchy can manage a plural society as LA has been for years - one with many
separated and co-dependent groups; but it cannot manage a pluralistic society which
has a higher unity and dynamic interaction. The reason for this is that it does not
value, support, or facilitate multiple perspectives and has no place for such thinking.
The difference is between a city of gated communities and ethnic enclaves that Mike
Davis articulates so well as the reality of present day LA and the city that LA must
become if it is to head off and successfully manage the crises of secession, LAPD, and
a dysfunctional government. But, the balance of power as illustrated by the key
political fight of the 1999 Charter shows that this will not happen.
COMPARTMENT ALIZATION
Another intellectual relationship that was accepted without debate within the
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charter reform was the ideal of compartmentalization. Since, a charter must be an all
encompassing document, it was felt that it needed to broken up into digestible chunks
if any progress was to be made by the commissions. Both groups immediately broke
into task forces to deal with more specific issues. The ACC subdivided into three
study groups on Institutions, Participation, and Management; the ECC were more
creative with the names of their five break out groups which were committees on:
Improving the Structure of City Government, Improving Financial and Managerial
Accountability, Improving Delivery of Services, Responsive City Government with an
Involved Citizenry, and Quality of Life in Los Angeles; and, there was the joint/liaison
committee as well. But, why was this value or breaking the whole into pieces
uncritically accepted? Systems theory would abhor such an assumption. Why could
the commissions not have started from some core issue - such as a bill of right or a
proper relationship between a mayor and a council or even a definition of public good
- and built out from there? What ways of thinking suffered and which benefitted by
breaking the examination up into parts?
By looking at the parts, the relationships between these parts were given
secondary importance. Larger processes and relationships between parts could not be
the focus of such atomized thinking. The largest of these relationships was the
relationship between the government and the people. Compartmentalizing permits
questions to go unanswered by omission, by saying that is not what we are working
on here. This lack of contextualizing favors simple answers, not complex ones.
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Simple, vis-a-vis complex, answers are seen as truer; and, the whole is merely a
combination of parts; therefore, the connections between them need not be
acknowledged or created. Further, if the connections need to be created, there is no
location, capacity, or responsibility for doing so on the part of any o f the specific
compartments. The only way this could not be the case is if all compartments had the
idea that any problem with the system is a problem with them as is the thinking with
systems theory, but this is the antithesis of compartmentalizing. If one had such an
attitude, one would not have begun by looking at the parts rather than the whole.
Such a holistic attitude is shared by CM where any attack on the system is an attack
on all parts and good performance by one part cannot compensate for bad
performance in another part.
Having said all of this, is it more realistic to see government as merely
mechanical parts that are separable and dealt with individually, or is it more realistic
to see governments as organic with interlocking systems and layered responsibilities?
More to our point, is the fact that the LA city government is more like the former in
its actions than the later a product o f how we think about these things or is it how
they really are? The 1999 Charter can only be a function of how the commissions
thought about these issues for it had yet to generate a history. We reap as we sow.
Divide and conquer is good military thinking, good protectionist and defensive
thinking but, not good for generating any other public goods or civic advancement.
Habermas makes this same point in his work, Toward a Rational Society, written in
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the late 1960's in response to student revolts both here and in his native Germany, and
his more popular and systematic work. Legitimation Crisis, of the early 197Q's.
Habermas explains that force can be legitimate only if it serves general interests; if it
does not, a crisis of legitimacy arises. The concept of crisis here is akin to systems
theory and means a breakdown or loss o f homeostasis within a system. Society is
delineated as consisting of three interdependent systems: the political, economic, and
sociocultural. The economic system is concerned with the appropriation of the
external world and its domination, subjugation, and usage for the stuff of life. The
sociocultural system is concerned with humanity’s inner nature of education, art,
interrelationship, and family. The political system’s primary concern is with the
management of society and coercion from within the context of that society. When
these systems lose balance, a crisis emerges; when this crisis concerns the
appropriateness of the uses of force, it is a legitimation crisis which is a political
problem. This harkens back and re-enforces the CM section of our analysis; it is also
an apt description of the Rodney King and civil unrest problems of 1992 that
popularized the charter reform movement.
However, for Habermas when a crisis appears in one area, due to the
interdependent nature of the systems, its cause may be in another area. For instance,
the political crisis of the 1960's was created by a failure in the sociocultural system in
that it was unable to socialize the students and other citizens into accepting the
politically agreed upon uses of force, or the New Deal was a political correction for
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an economic system that had malfunctioned. So, in examining a legitimation crisis,
Habermas cautions that one must be careful to identify the real problem that the
political system is attempting to moderate and understand that good performance in
one system cannot compensate for poor performance in another. Habermas and
Mitroff argue for homeostasis rather than balance; machine and formulas have balance
as there goals; organic entities and dynamic systems do not. Habermas identifies the
same type compartmentalizing, mechanical thinking as technical knowledge, and he
articulates its inherent bias:
Through the unplanned sociocultural consequences of technological
progress, the human species has challenged itself to learn not merely to
affect its social destiny, but to control it. This challenge o f technology
cannot be met with technology alone. It is rather a question of setting
into motion a politically effective discussion that rationally brings the
social potential constituted by technical knowledge and ability into a
defined and controlled relation to our practical knowledge and will.
(61)
Society must understand that technological progress, indeed modem rationality, is its
own ideology which is Habermas’s larger point. Technology is a system of ideas
established to benefit a specific segment of society that is applied to the thinking o f all
segments despite its being poorly suited for this type o f holistic enterprise.
Habermas writes that, “The mediation between technical progress and the
conduct o f life in major industrial societies, a mediation that has previously taken
place without direction, as a mere continuation of natural history,” (60) needs to be
further examined. “The capacity for control made possible by the empirical sciences
is not to be confused with the capacity for enlightened action” (sic, 56), he warns us
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in order to emphasize the need for political, ethical, and reasonable, action. He
combines these admonishments by saying:
The direction of technical progress is still largely determined today by
social interests that arise autochthonously out o f the compulsion of the
reproduction of social life without reflection upon and confrontation
with the declared political self-understanding o f social groups ... New
potentials for expanded power of technical control make obvious the
disproportion between the results of the most organized rationality and
the unreflected goals, rigidified value systems, and obsolete ideologies.
(60)
These conservative sectors mask their political agenda with an ideal of progress of
control. “The substance of domination does not dissolve by the power of technical
control. To the contrary, the former can simply hide behind the latter. The
irrationality of domination, which today has become a collective peril to life, could be
mastered only by the development of political decision-making process tied to the
principle of general discussion free from domination” (61). It is only on the ideal of
discussion without domination, an ideal speech act, or free discourse that Habermas
believes an enlightened society can be founded. The outcomes o f these free
discussions lead to the legitimate use of coercion to achieve the proper balance for
that society.
This is done because reason can now be employed to identify the common
good, or general interest as Habermas calls it, or general will to use Rousseau’s term.
Coercion has thus been limited to instances of reasonable coercion, coercion that only
the aberrant would object to implementing. For instance, GATT is in the interests of
all nations who wish to trade; traffic laws are in the interest of all who wish to travel
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safely; protecting the ozone is in the interest of all wishing not to get cancer; in these
instances Habermas feels, the use o f force to ensure conformity is reasonable. This
contrasts with usages which are solely to the advantage of groups or oligarchies
within society. Apartheid and restrictions on education for minorities or women are
examples of laws that would not stand this test o f debate based on rationality as the
extended interest is not generally acceptable without the control o f the benefitting
group. This reminds us of the establishment versus oligarchy discussion previously.
Habermas’s analysis demands that we ask who is benefitting from a particular policy
and in whose interest is the law written; from these answers we can adjudicate a
policy’s reasonability and legitimacy bearing in mind that the burden o f proof is on
those wishing to be able to coerce. From all of this, it follows that the most
fundamental general interest is freedom o f individuals, and for individuals, to enter
into the discussion. As a prerequisite to reasonable discussion, autonomy is necessary
for all agents to properly adjudicate the generality of interests. Autonomy contradicts
the ideal of the melting pot and the compartmentalization of people because
compartmentalization is a case where the relationships between components are
externally defined which is the opposite of autonomy where decisions are left to the
entity. By the use of human discourse, Habermas seeks to permit the cultural and
historical forces that shape our consciousness to be a part of evaluation rather than to
establish universals for all societies. For him, any contemporary society must be able
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to choose and revise its own goals and rules based on general interests as they are
critically evaluated and debated.
Both commissions allowed others to dictate the relationships between the
parts when they decided to look at the trees before the forest. They never saw the
forest because if they did they would have noticed that LA was not a forest but a
series o f gardens. This approach was not dictated by the Mayor or the Council; it
was dictated by a way of thinking, a rationalist, mechanical approach that all the
members o f the club, university trained elite, or oligarchy shared. Habermas put it
this way: “generations of students were educated in a politically effective maimer.
This process reproduced the mentality of a university trained-professional stratum for
which society still intended a relatively uniform status. Transcending differences o f
faculty and profession, this mentality assured the homogeneity of the university
trained elite” (3). The recent LA manifestations o f this mentality were the Committee
of 25 and the Bradley coalition both of which were based on a progressive belief in
their group as applied through technocratic professionalism. Or as Niebuhr called it,
“the typical illusion of an advancing class which mistook its own progress for the
progress o f the world”(3).
LEADERSHIP AND PERSONNEL
If, as CM has identified and Jackall has documented, the corporate culture is
determinate in ascertaining which messages are received by decision makers, who is
promoted to management, and how decisions are made, we would be remiss if we did
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not take a very serious look at what the corporate culture for LA’s charter reform
was and who were those creating, maintaining, and serving that culture. We have
already seen that the political culture of LA was founded in the Progressive
Movement early in the I900's and embodied in the 1925 Charter. Its strong support
of civil service, non-partisan elections, recall and initiative, and commission
government are the hallmarks of our political/social firmament. These political values
are based on assumptions about human nature. Some o f the more important of these
assumptions are: a well meaning amateur is a better servant than a professional; a
group is safer than a person; progress is nonpartisan; progress is a technical skill; and,
local control is preferable. The first two o f these assumptions are rooted in a mistrust
of political bosses and greedy businessmen and a Protestant belief in original sin and
humanity’s inability to overcome that sin without divine sanction. The next two
assumptions we have already examined; but, we need to remember that a reliance on
experts, in a consultant, mechanical sense rather than as officials or in an integrated
sense, is what these ideals combine to create. The final assumption about local
control will be the focus of the next chapter. But to what degree are these first two
assumptions realistic for post-20th century LA?
Our city managers’ support of the idea that well meaning amateurs are
preferable to professionals is easy to document by the charter reform activities. Both
commissions were peopled by an overwhelming number of amateurs. The two chairs
were amateurs in these areas. They were also lawyers; and as mentioned previously,
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there were more lawyers and those experienced with the law on the two commissions
than any other single profession, by far; the ACC had 11 of 21 and the ECC 9 of 15.
Contrast this with doctors, 2 Ph.D.’s, 1 of whom resigned in fall o f 1997 and the
other in the fall o f 1998 (a third Ph.D. was appointed in 12/97), were on the ACC;
and, 2 Ph.D.’s, both o f whom resigned in the fall of 1998, were on the ECC. A
knowledge o f the law can be viewed in this case as a definition o f well meaning.
Another definition could be experience with slices of the government. With the
exceptions of Anton Calleia and Ed Edelman who hard far reaching experience,
virtually all of the remaining commissioners had served in some limited capacity with
the civil government, for example Dennis Zine had been with the police force for 30
years, Susan Schuster was the Vice President of the Civil Service Commission, Paula
Boland was a former State Assemblywoman but not local office holder, Marcos
Castaneda had served as an aid to a councilman, and so forth. The most obvious
example of this faith in the well meaning amateur was the appointment of a student
who knew nothing of the process nor the system; but, not just any person could be
chosen to represent the under 25 crowd, but someone who could exhibit credentials
of well meaningness by being an intern, researcher, and college student. This whole
idea was taken to perhaps an absurdist level by having a contest amongst high school
students to write the preamble to the document.
The thinking behind this belief was that amateurs are not invested in the
system and can thus rise above partisan and parochial concerns because they have no
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stake in the outcome of the decision. They will not try to feather their own nests
because, at least in these matters, they have no nests. But, such thinking can only
apply to the right type people, well meaning becomes a cover for elite thinking. The
residents of LA that could not vote were certainly amateurs. Yet, since this 1/3 o f the
population was not deemed as being well meaning, in the hegemonic sense, there was
no support for their inclusion in the process or future processes. Only the right
amateurs, the well meaning, are good; and, well meaning is decided by the values and
whims of the powers that be.
If we take this assumption and turn it upside down to test its validity, we raise
some interesting questions. Is it good that the people deciding things are not
concerned about the outcome of their actions? Is being non-partisan, having no
worked-out value network, a good thing? Are high school students the best people to
be articulating the goals of a mature society? Is a charter the type thing that should
be hosting contests to author, or was this merely a thinly veiled public relations
gimmick since the selectors’ opinions would be much more important in determining a
winner than those of the entrants? The Progressives were reacting to the abuses of
their times, corruption and machine politics; but, they did not appreciate their
conclusion as reactions or factor the ebb and flow of history into their thinking. They
thought their answers were right for all people at all times. It is easier and more
realistic for us to look back and see them as reactions and counter movements to
larger movements. It was, “the typical illusion of an advancing class which mistook its
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own progress for the progress of the world”(Niebuhr 2); the Progressives believed
their program was the ideal program for all. Niebuhr states the results of such
illusions on the thinking of these well meaning reformers. “The conflict between the
middle classes and the aristocrats, between the scientist and the priests, was not a
conflict between the children of darkness and children of light. It was a conflict
between pious and less pious children of light, both ofiwhom were unconscious o f the
corruption of self-interest in all ideal achievements and pretensions of human culture”
(15). Niebuhr’s point about the corruption o f ideals and the blind spots or conceits it
creates echos the CM injunctions against not thinking the impossible and Jackall’s
description o f manager’s activities within bureaucracies.
Jackall’s explanation is more detailed. He begins by pointing out that Karl
Mannheim deduced that bureaucracy turns all political issues into matters of
administration long ago (111). Administration is far from the pure scientific, rational
world devoid of partisan squabbles or the whims of personalities that the Progressives
would have had us believe. In Jackall’s researched world, “Managers must think in
the short run because they are evaluated by both their superiors and peers on their
short-term results... Within such a context, managers know that even farsighted
correct decisions can shorten promising careers” (84). In a public corporate system,
these managers are themselves evaluated by a fickle electorate. So, the bottom line o f
administration, including civil administration, is as Jackall concludes: “ ‘What is right
in the corporation is what the guy above you wants from you. ’” (sic, 109). This plays
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out for managers by making the currency of their job perception rather than actual
results; Jackall puts it thus:
The more abstract work becomes, that is, the less one actually does or
oversees concrete tasks, the greater the likelihood that one’s rational
efforts to improve an organization will meet with and even beget
various kinds of irrationality ... For most managers, especially for
those that are ambitious, the real meaning of work - the basis of social
identity and valued self-image - becomes keeping one’s eye on the
main chance, maintaining and furthering one’s own position and
career. This task requires, of course, unrelenting attentiveness to the
social intricacies of one’s organization. One gains dominance or fails
depending on one’s access to key managerial circles where prestige is
gauged precisely by the relationships that one establishes with
powerful managers and by the demonstrated favor such relationships
bring. (202)
The culture of bureaucracy, even public bureaucracy, creates incentives
towards political relationships rather than civic results. In politics, this is known as
patronage. But, with a strong civil service, such as has been institutionalized in LA
since 1925, the patronage is to the system not a person such as the Mayor as is the
case with a political machine. The Mayor’s focus in the charter reform debate was to
change this direction of patronage as was described in the section on hiring and firing.
But, as Jackall points out, there are value consequences o f this culture. “In this way,
because moral choices are inextricably tied to personal fates, bureaucracy erodes
internal and even external standards of morality not only in matters of individual
success and failure but in all the issues that managers face in their daily work.
Bureaucracy makes its own internal rules and social context the principal gauges for
action” (192). In the case of LA this means that the civil service, the unions, and the
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Council conspire to create and maintain a control on the personal fates of the
members of the bureaucracy. They become the Calvinistic god o f which Jackall
speaks when he says, “In short, bureaucracy creates for managers a Calvinistic world
without a Calvinist God, a world marked with the same profound anxiety that
characterizes the old Protestant ethic but stripped of that ideology’s comforting
illusions” (193). And, the Council, unions, and civil service control that anxiety and
through it our political culture. Riordan was arguing the Mayor should play god
instead, but he was unable to completely convince, although he got some concessions
from, either the one commission that had a labor majority or the one that had a
Council majority of his view. So, the charter debate of 1999 confirmed the power of
the political culture and its managers even if it did throw the Mayor a bone by shifting
a small amount of power to his office.
None of this, however, addresses the realities o f those outside of the elitist
political culture. This brings us to the matter of stakeholders within the reform
activities. The key distinction here, as pointed out in the consensus section, is who
was inside the political culture and who was outside of it and thereby vulnerable to
m arginalizing and scapegoating. The battle was over which group of elites, business
or political, would rule not over whether elites should rule. But, the process the
hegemony employed to control the non-elites was not conflictual, rather it relied on
the self selection by those that would challenge the hegemony. In other words, the
insider let the others drop out because of frustration or because the unlikelihood of
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success made other endeavors more attractive for their impacted schedules or made
‘going along’ the most attractive alternative. A good example of this was the
financing of the ECC. During the election campaigns, there were everything from
proclamation to oaths about how the elected commission was independent and would
not be spending taxpayers money. It was pure, and was going to remain free of fiscal
tainting and control by the untrustworthy Council; its reformers were going to
safeguard that purity so as to produce a document that reflect the will of the people
and not city hall. But, after these repeated pledges by almost all of the candidates and
the majority of the winning candidates, the ECC was funded by the Council with
taxpayers’ dollars. This was because they arrived at their first two meetings and
realized that without money they could not hire staff, secure materials, rent office
space, or conduct the business of the commission. The only place to get the amount
of money they required as quickly as they required it, as the grant cycle would take
months at the very least and no one felt they were elected to be a fund raiser, was the
Council. The rhetoric changed from how they were dedicated to not being a burden
on the citizens to the Council is funding the other group so we deserve to be treated
just as well and public funding represented respect on the part of the Council for the
ECC. Was the rationalizing before or after the election? So, with varying degrees of
reluctance and pledges to still seek outside monies which never really materialized,
the ECC solicited and accepted public funding.
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What were the political costs of such a shift? Most citizens did not notice as
few of them even noticed the commissions at all. The insiders realized that this was
the first step, and a major one at that, in making these newly elected persons insiders.
This action and its resulting socialization was the process that would continue for the
ECC members for its duration; they came to lean on many o f the procedures already
establish by the ACC because of time and money constraints. However, the ACC
came to be controlled by the Bradley coalition remnants more by attrition. Outside-
friendly members fell away, and it begin early and continued until the end. The chairs
of the very first committees of the ACC as established in their initial two meetings
were Linda Griego - for the ACC, Ed Edelman - for Administration, and Xandra
Kayden - for the Mission Statement; both Griego and Kayden were not members of
the elitist camp. Edelman was the insider’s insider. But, before the Executive
Director was in place 90 days later in February of 1997 or the ECC had been elected,
both had opted out of active participation. Griego, despite being the interim chair of
the commission, sought not to run for formal chair due to family concerns; Kayden
resigned her seat on the commission and chair of the mission statement committee in
order to seek appointment as Executive Director where she felt she could do more
good and have more control over shaping the process. She was not chosen and her
impact on the process was thus limited to consulting and external actions through the
League of Women Voters which she was chosen to head shortly after her resignation.
These were the first in a pattern of defections, formal and informal, of commission
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members most likely to have questioned the oligarchical orientation o f the
commissions. As a result, George Kieffer and a core of Bradley coalition remnants
took early momentary control of the ACC (this is a year before the ECC would be up
and running); then, they solidified their control by the selection of an intellectually
compatible Executive Director.
In large measure, the oligarchy was able to establish control over the reform
process because the remnants of the Bradley coalition controlled one commission and
the unions and civil service the other; the business coalition lobbied and contributed to
both although they were more receptively received by the ECC. The most telling
victory for the old Bradley coalition was the ACC’s first major decision, the hiring o f
its Executive Director. There were four finalists for the Executive Director’s job.
Three of them came to the interviews with solid plans and years of experience; two,
Dr.’s Xandra Kayden and Steve Erie, were arguably the most expert persons in the
area on charter reform. A third, Henry Kurshwasser, a lawyer and policy consultant,
came with an ambitious typed plan of action including a timetable to the interview.
The fourth person, Dr. Raphael Sonenshein, came with personal experience in LA city
government as a Bradley strategist and speech writer, academic experience of the
region, and an attitude of letting the commission direct actions and serving as a
facilitator to their deliberations. History records that Sonenshein got the position.
Although no official reason was given, conversation in the hall after the interviews
indicated that key commission members felt that all four candidates were well
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qualified but that Sonenshein’s consensus approach, ability to listen, and compatibility
of style with a majority of the commission were the deciding factors. The style being
discussed was the Bradley elite consensus style as the members having the most
telling discussion were two old hands from those same Bradley days. The man whose
job it was to drive the ACC was chosen because he was willing to be driven by the
ACC. “They wanted a follower,” a local political expert told me the following day,
“The old Bradley coalition did Riordan’sjob for him. He’s a completely conventional
thinker chosen because they wanted a salesman and not a leader. The world is run by
Sonensheins”. The other three had shown me plans to move these elites toward the
people and for not permitting them to intellectually cocoon themselves; the one the
ACC hired did not. Also, Kayden and Krushwasser were from New York, and Erie
was from San Diego; Sonenshein had grown up in, worked in, and taught about the
LA way. The political cultural bias against leaders who would reach beyond the elite
and for group decisions had dictated the most important decision made by the ACC.
That decision was to accept the political culture unchallenged and that filtered and
affected all decisions after it.
But this was just the beginning, the following chart documents how the
personnel of the ACC changed and how that shaped the leadership of the group.
TABLE 5-1 - DEFECTIONS FROM THE APPOINTED CHARTER
COMMISSION (Table continues on page 186)
ACC - 7/21 (33%) of the Commission Resigned
PERSON, background\ appointed by, date leaving, replacement, replacement’ s
background
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Dr. XANDRA KAYDEN - UCLA, CD 11, late 1997, Doris Nelson - former LWV
president
PAUL CLARKE - consultant, CD 12, early 1998, Robert Wilkenson - former
Councilmember
TIM McOSKER - attorney, CD 15, mid 1998, Jerry Gaines - teacher/homeowner
MIGUEL CONTRERAS - LA County Federation of Labor, mid 1998, Acting
Mayor, David Trowbridge - union officer
KENNETH THOMAS - LA Sentinel publisher, CD 8, mid 1998, Dr. Charles Wilson
- UCLA and media background
DAVID TROWBRIDGE - union officer, Acting Mayor, early 1998, Charley Mims -
construction inspector
DR. MARGUERITE ARCHIE - HUDSON - CA Assemblywoman, CD 9, 12/98, not
replaced
This left a core of Director Sonenshein, Chair Kieffer, Reyes, Glickman, Boylan,
Calleia, DeSosa, Edelman, Friedman, Griego, Henderson, Kwoh, Mandel, Michel,
Judge Reese, Schuster; of these, 12 had strong city hall ties, almost all dating back to
the Bradley days. Those that fell away were persons with outside power bases,
including an elected official; further, of the four districts that voted against the
Charter, 3 of them lost members at one time. The only Valley district to lose a
representative was 12, and it was in the first few months before things settled; and,
they brought on someone who had served in the Council with Bradley who helped to
solidify the Bradley coalition core of the commission. Despite the fact that often
members were replaced by persons of similar background, i.e., union leader for union
leader, it did impact the working relationships and level of trust and support within
the commission. The ECC had only two defections, but they were important. Both
of the Ph. D.’s quit, and both were from minority districts. Dr. Gloria Romero, an
educator from CD 1 resigned in the fall of 1998 after she was elected to the
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Assembly. She was replaced by lawyer Bichard Macias. Dr. Marguerite Archie -
Hudson a former CA Assemblyman from CD 8 resigned in 12/98 after accepting the
presidency of a southern college. She was replaced by businessman Ken Lombard.
Both of these appointments were by the Mayor and were persons sympathetic to the
Mayor's agenda which could not be said, even in jest, of the resigning doctors. In
addition, the first ECC Executive Director, David Dilkes resigned and his position
was split into two. Elliot Garfield was hired as the Administrative Director, and Dr.
H. Eric Schockman was hired as the Policy Director.
The commissioners with more ties outside the established city powers fell by
the way side allowing those sympathetic to the insider consensus to secure the needed
number of votes to control action. Even the more radical outsiders o f the ECC
became insiders before it was all over by the depth of their involvement. Bennett
Kayser elected in the 13t h District (Silver Lake and Echo Park) is a good example. He
was a community activist who had no previous direct insider experience though he
was active in his community and homeowners’ association. He worked very hard to
secure input from his constituents by having regular public meetings with groups and
individuals. He struggled with many of the decisions before the ECC and tried
desperately to adhere to the principle on which he was elected. However, by the time
the ECC was voting, he had supported almost all of the compromises needed to
secure passage of a single document by both commissions. With all of the best
intentions, he had yielded to the idea that everyone had to compromise if anything
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was going to be accomplished. Now, he is running for City Council from the 13th.
He has become one of the oligarchy even if he did not start out that way. Others on
the ECC were handcuffed by external occurrence during the proceedings. Dennis
Zine was charged with sexual harassment, and Marcos Castaneda was arrested for
lewd conduct. This reduced their influence with and energy spend on the
commission.
ECC Chair Chemerinsky offers another study. As Chair, he put his
responsibilities to the group before his advocacy of his own positions; this resulted in
the loss of a strong anti-elite voice; but more insidious, it provided a veneer o f anti
elite acceptability to compromise o f the commissions. The ECC was more a story of
coalition creation and control or its lack; in this regard, Paula Boland did a masterful
job of virulently attacking the anti-elite positions in order to leave the hegemonic
position as the only alternative capable o f achieving a majority. She did this because
she supported the idea of elite control first; but, make no mistake about it, she did not
support these reform elites. So, by preserving the status quo, which she believed to
be flawed beyond repair, she was assuring the success of her agenda which was the
secession of the Valley and the shifting o f its control to a new group o f elites o f which
she would be a prominent member. She saw absolutely no conflict o f interest between
her concurrent positions as charter commissioner and board member o f Valley VOTE
which was dedicated to and spearheading the secession drive. This was because both
were elite governance agenda; but, each was headed by a different elite group.
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But, these anti-oligarchy voices from the 8th , 9t h , and 1s t Districts that dropped
out were not the only such voices marginalized. There were other, but they too were
excluded by one method or another. Some groups, such as MALDEF and the 8t h
District Empowerment Congress, were merely labeled as partisan - a title o f greatest
derision in a Progressive culture - and substantially ignored. Individuals, such as the
city hall gadflies were ignored because they only spoke for themselves and to get
attention. Even experts with much to bring to the process were politely “shined on” if
they were not in accordance with the group think of this corporate culture; in other
words, the commissions blocked their signals by discrediting their conclusions as not
being well meaning - meaning they did not support the culture culture even if they
were clearly elites. The best example o f this was a speaker with unimpeachable
credentials; despite possessing advance degrees in Urban Planning and Government,
having been Mayor of the 10t h largest city in America which had a burgeoning NBCs
network at the time, and having served as Secretary for Housing and Urban
Development, Henry Cisneros was given only a marginal hearing by the ACC on
November 25, 1997.
Here is a man that clearly was expert in all areas within the commission’s
concern on a number of levels; but, his words fell on deaf ears. He was treated with
respect and some celebrity, but his admission that, “making citizens masters over their
own lives” was his bias in this process was not well received. In fact, his advocation
of elected NBCs with some authority over land use because appointment created a
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credibility problem was written up in the minutes of the meeting as, “Neighborhood
councils can’t be overburdened with land-use and zoning”. Also, the thrust of the
minutes was to cite his comments on appointed NBCs while omitting his supportive
statements of elected NBCs with authority so as to make it appear that he spoke in
favor of appointed NBCs. His minutes section ends with, “The Charter reform has a
chance to make a pioneering breakthrough in municipal government;” and since what
is talked about in the section is his take on appointed NBCs, that is what is implied as
the breakthrough. In reality, Cisneros ended by saying we should create, “political
families instead of political tribes”. Here he was speaking ofNBCs instead of identity
politics; he implored us, “to break ground” by establishing true connection, or re
connection, with the people because this was the great opportunity of charter reform.
His basic thrust was more accurately, “the city needs a way for people to feel closer
to the large entity,” to use his own words and elected NBCs with authority would do
this best in his opinion. This quasi-spiritual call is not in line with the flat and
selective way this expert was portrayed in the minutes. In his appearance before the
ECC on October, 19, 1998, he advocate elected NBCs with authority once again but
that audience was more receptive and accurate in their portrayal o f his ideas. This
misrepresentation is important because 7 of the 21 ACC commissioners were not at
that November meeting so they would only receive input from the notes and those
that research the issue through the written notes will get a subjective view of the
proceedings. Here, an important and considered voice was shaped, edited, and
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sculpted through its recording and preservation to appear to support the agenda of
the ACC’s Bradley consensus of elites core; beyond that, his analysis was ignored.
It is fairly obvious from this, that an intellectual hegemony o f class was
directing the actions o f the commissions. This hegemony was based on certain
assumption about reality, many of which were not realistic even if there may have
been some evidence to support them. The case of the belief, “you can’t fight the
unions,”is a good example. True, the unions had sunk the last charter reform in 1970,
and labor had elected more ECC members than any other interest block; however, the
1970 proposed charter had been altered by the Council by making substantial changes
to the city’s pension and salary systems giving more control over them to the Council.
The 1999 Charter did no such thing, and this was a significant difference. But, the
most damning evidence against this claim is that in the spring o f 1999 the unions did
come out against the proposed charter, and it still passed overwhelmingly. Obviously,
the assumption was wrong. The underlying idea that made this believable to the
commissions was the fear o f angering or upsetting anyone vocal enough to make it
appear that they had failed to achieve holy consensus and had lapsed into the sin of
dysfunctional dynamics of the type for which city government was famous and had
necessitated this reform in the first place. The commissions were trying, to the best of
their ability, to avoid such appearances. Their chief methodology was appeasement,
but appeasement only to those with power - political or economic. This appeasement
was to the elites, the 40%; and, they did it in the name of consensus. This dictated
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that their relations with those not already in the consensus was to marginalize or
convert; this is exactly what they attempted to do.
The charter supporters, especially in the 6 months between completion in
December of 1998 and election in June o f 1999, sought to educate and to make more
insiders, elites, or converts rather than trying to expand the corporate culture; and,
this is rationalizing. An editorial by ECC members Chemerinsky and Dupont-Walker
in the LA Times of Nov. 2 1998, clearly illustrates the conversion versus critical
argument aspect. In it they admit that, “it is clear that there is no consensus on
virtually any important issue concerning how to revise the charter” (B 13); however,
they argue for the new charter because, “our shared interests are greater than our
differences,” and they suggest three basic premises on which we can all agree. One,
we must all compromise if the reform is to succeed; two, we must address the
concerns that motived the reform impulse - “a city government too removed and too
unresponsive to the people”; and, three, “any proposal that helps some of our
residents at the expense of others is unacceptable” (B13). Is this arguing from faith
and belief as is the case with advocacy, or is it arguing to faith based on a realistic
assumption of the situation as is good corporate management?
Premises one is basically a tautology. It begs the question of why success is
good, unless one accepts the idea that success is gaining something which is o f course
a circular argument. The only things identified in the statement as gained are reform
and compromise; thus, it is indicated that compromise itself is the reform. Agreement
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is shown to be the highest value; a transactional approach to management that has no
external anchoring. We have spent much time on the dangers of this value already.
Premises two is a good point, but fails in connection. The dysfunctional nature o f the
government was a driving force, but the charter proposals did nothing formal to
change that in relationship of the government to the people. It did in relation to the
government workings and officials, but not in their relationship with the people. On
the other hand, NBCs were mandated for the people, but their formal connection to
the government was minimal at best. Other than mandated early warning, the NBCs
are advisory meaning not formally integrated except through the system which was
already, “too removed and too unresponsive”. In reality, they may be something
more responsive, but the NBCs of the 1999 Charter would certainly be more
removed; so, there is no gain here.
Finally, point three is the most obvious example of wishful thinking.
Forgetting for a moment that 1/3 of the residents (the word the authors use) cannot
vote and thus are not helped by the Charter at the expense of those that can, the
people were divided on their assessment of the charter’s ability to benefit all. The only
four (of 15) districts that did not pass the charter were districts, 8,9,10, and 15.
These are the three districts represented by African American council members and
the Harbor, basically everything south of downtown; they were the areas were almost
all o f the damage occurred during the civil unrest of 1992 and the Watts riots. In the
middle class valley and on the well-to-do west side, the charter carried big; on the
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heavily Hispanic eastside, it carried as well. When we put this all together we can see
a pattern, the current economic and ethnic elites voted for the charter as did the group
most likely to be the next elites because of their growing demographic plurality: the
Hispanics. The African American and the Harbor-abused San Pedro residents
understood that the battle was between continuing the hegemonic system or not and
voted for not. This was easier for them to see as they were not elites and had little
chance of becoming elites. From this, we can see that Charter arguments of late 1998
and early 1999 did not reflect reality as it was but as people would like it to be. This
vision was spread through solicitation of converts; but, the article’s authors’ own
words offer a more fitting description of the 1999 charter; “No matter how well-
intentioned, such a proposal [where some benefit at the expense of others] is
inconsistent with the vision of a single city committed to all of its residents” (B13).
This charter was a vision of the few, the proud, the oligarchy.
So, we understanding that in the charter debate some stakeholders counted
more than others; we can ask what purpose the less involved really played. Certainly
VICA, Valley VOTE, the unions, elected officials, and departmental representatives
counted quite heavily; they were solicited and given blocks of time to present their
cases. Meanwhile, groups like MALDEF, the 8t h District Empowerment Congress,
the public, and city hall gadflies were forced to speak during public comments periods
under limited time and considerations. This insider-outsider (elite/non-elite) issue
become most contentious when on Wednesday June 10, 1998, ECC Chair,
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Chemerinsky, invited a special group of 20 selected stakeholders to a closed door
session to hammer out a compromise on the issue of land use. While the action was
later apologized for and condemned as inappropriate for a public process, even by
Chemerinsky, it was a physical indication of the mode o f thinking employed by
commission members. Some people were just more important than others. However,
it was absolutely critical that these others be a part of the process.
Jackall reminds us why; it is a part of how bureaucratic managers think. ‘“The
basic principles of decision making in this organization and probably any other
organization are: (1) avoid making any decision if at all possible; (2) if a decision has
to be made; involve as many people as you can so that, if things go south, you’re able
to point in as many directions as possible’” (78). The commissions were safe on the
first point about putting the decision off; that was a part o f their design - decisions
would only come at the end. And, they would only come after the second principle
had been exhausted. If they could get everyone on board, the decision would make
itself. This was their modus operands they wanted to get everyone on board to
spread the responsibility as widely as possible. Then, if they could not get everyone
on board, they had located their fall guys as the Council and naysayers ended up
being. This is in line with Jackall’s management analysis, “As a general rule, when
blame is allocated, it is those who are or become politically vulnerable or expendable,
who become ‘patsies,’ or who get ‘set up’ or ‘hung out to dry’ and become blamable”
(85). What better way to identify such people than through the input procedures.
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Just block their signals, and they become perfect pasties because their critique can be
characterized as anything from lack of support to threatening to insubordination.
Meanwhile, the managers hurry along to their next higher job. Jackall discovered,
“Most [managers] see safeguards against suffering the consequences o f their own
errors. Most important, one can 'outrun their mistakes’ so that when blame time
arrives, the burden will fall on someone else ... outrunning mistakes is the real
meaning of ‘being on the fast track,’ the real key to managerial success” (90).
So, the input procedures were not so much about input as they were about
distinguishing who was in the group and who could be used as blameworthy. LA
corporate managers had done this with race for years and were now attempting to do
it with class as Schockman pointed out earlier. Here we are reminded of Habermas’s
analysis of a society that is run by an elite; “a university trained-professional stratum
for which society still intended a relatively uniform status. Transcending differences
of faculty and profession, this mentality assured the homogeneity of the university
trained elite” (3). This is the Progressive hegemony that has run LA’s political
culture; its most obvious manifestation was the Committee of 25 that ran the city for
20 years before the Bradley days. But the Bradley coalition soon became the next
generation of elites set to direct or neglect our growth machine. In the end, the
Bradley triumph was, as Niebuhr points out, merely a battle within the ‘children of
light’, the elites, rather than a revolution. So, the repetition of violence in South
Central from 1965 to 1992 can be understood as inevitable rather than novel. The
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charter reforms of 1999 did next to nothing to change LA’s political culture, and it
may have been the only thing that could have in this generation.
WORKS CITED
Chemerinsky, Erwin and Dupont-Walker, Jackie. “Accept Compromise of All ofL.A.
Loses”, LA Times 2 November 1998. B13.
Habermas, Jurgen. Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science, and Politics.
Beacon Press: Boston. 1971.
Jackall, Robert. Moral Mazes: 'T he World o f Corporate Managers. Oxford University
Press: New York. 1988.
Mitroff. Ian and Linstone, Harold. The Unbounded Mind. Oxford University Press;
NY. 1993.
Niebuhr, Reinhold. The Children o f Light and the Children o f Darkness. Charles
Scribner’s Sons: NY. 1972.
Rakove, Dr. Jack. Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the
Constitution. Alfred A. Knopf, New York. 1997.
Russell, Bertrand. Power: A New Social Anlaysis. W.W. Norton & Co.: New York.
1938.
Schockman, H. Eric. “Is Los Angeles Governable”, from Rethinking Los Angeles,
Eds. Dear, Michael, H. Eric Schockman, and Hise, Greg. Sage Publications:
Thousand Oaks, CA. 1996. 57-75.
Seidenbaum, Art and Malmin, John. Los Angeles 200: A Bicentennial Celebration.
Harry N. Abrams, Inc.: New York. 1980.
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CHAPTER 6 - THEME IV - NBCs AS REFORM
NBCs AS PANACEA
Most observers agree that the institutionalization of neighborhood councils, or
NBCs, was the most significant and important reform offered by the 1999 Charter.
This feeling is exemplified by the title of one time ACC member and Director o f the
LA chapter o f the League of Women Voters, Dr. Xandra Kayden’s, January 9, 2000
LA Times NBC’s article: “A Chance for a Return to a Working Democracy”. In it,
she states, “As a political institution, the councils offer something that hasn’t existed
since the days o f local party machines: a link that can be sustained between
communities ... By being responsive to the neighborhood councils that, by definition,
include all the stakeholders of the community, these new leaders will relate differently
to the voices that have dominated local government in the past” (B17). NBCs have
received the most positive and optimistic review of all o f the issues within LA’s
charter efforts; further, it is the issue that has generated the least objection. However,
despite a lack of objection, there has been a storm o f controversy. Battle lines have
been drawn over the composition, structure, and purpose ofNBCs. Sides have
argued about whether they should be elected or appointed, advisory or power
wielding, open to all those interested or merely to citizens or residents, and a plethora
of subpoints. But, as Kayden could easily articulate, this is an issue that predates the
current charter reform efforts and has been viewed as the best (and perhaps only)
hope for reforming local government by many ‘in the know’ for over a decade.
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Prior to the creation of the ACC, alternatives were being explored by several
local experts, Councilmembers, and their staffs regarding the creation of NBCs.
Three primary arguments arose championed by Councilmembers Chick, Wachs, and
Ridley-Thomas. Wachs and his chief o f staff, Greg Nelson, had been deeply
interested in and doing research on this issue since the 1980's. They were very
interested in crafting a workable plan based on the insights presented by their
evidence collected from all over the country. They were convinced o f the
fundamental importance o f three issues. One, the NBCs had to be self-defined
geographically. This would create a sense of equity in the NBC and not divide a
neighborhood that thought itself to be unified. Additionally, this would avoid any
problems at redistricting time as any change in council districts would be irrelevant to
the NBC borders. Two, the leaders o f the NBCs must be self selected. This provided
the opportunity for more broad based input, greater inclusion, and the development of
political leadership skills. Three, the system must be citywide if it was to work.
Comprehensiveness was fundamental to avoiding abuse or domination by the more
savvy areas of the city. The NBCs would only be as strong as their base; so to be
sufficiently strong and politically legitimate to compete with a comprehensive city
council and/or mayor, the NBCs needed to span the entire city.
Though he embraced half of Wachs’s three points, the other half was a source
of contention for Ridley-Thomas. He had not spent the same years researching the
issue, but he had actually created a system of NBCs on his own that was hailed by
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many, including Kayden, as a model for the city. The 8th District Empowerment
Congress began in 1992 in the wake of the civil unrest that engulfed this area. It was
the creation of the then recently elected Councilmember, Ridley-Thomas. This semi-
autonomous organization does, in fact, selected its own leaders, issues, and internal
boundaries; it has an annual meeting attended by over 500 people. However, it is not
independent as it is funded by the Councilmember’s office account. The staff
members are council office staffers, and the borders of its jurisdiction are the council
district’s borders. Needless to say, it is not comprehensive or citywide, rather is it
unique and local. But, it is operating and exists. This realpolitik experience supports
Ridley-Thomas’s claims that the NBCs should share boundaries with council districts
and that they need not be city wide. This system, Ridley-Thomas felt, would permit
the NBCs to focus their input on a representative who was a real agent in the political
process and act as a specific check on a specific local councilmember. Although
neighborhoods might be split, this could work to the neighborhoods advantage by
giving it input to and effect on more than one councilmember. Also, NBCs need not
be citywide, as they would exist more as a balance to a councilmember then if the
councilmember did not wish to employ them, she or he did it at her or his peril. But,
most importantly, this model could be employed immediately without council
approval and over the objections o f less enlightened councilpersons. The existence of
the 8th District Empowerment Congress was proof of this; and, years of theory and
planning had yet to produce concrete results.
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Finally, there was a position that here is being attributed to Councilmember
Chick - although this is an overstatement. While Chick does employ this system, so
do or did most other councilmembers in varying forms. Chick was just more desirous
o f being a part of the discussions on formalizing and expanding of the NBC system
than the other councilmembers (except for Marvin Braude, but he left office in 1997)
as illustrated by her attendance of meetings on the subject since the mid 1990's. This
system employed individuals appointed by the councilmember acting as a local
representative body. Often these were members o f community based organizations
which served as an informal conduit both to and from the councilmember to the
neighborhoods. Its informal nature reduced everyone’s participation costs as formal
meetings and other potential nuisances, such as the Brown Act, did not need to be
considered. There is no love in the LA political culture for the formalizing of activity.
This model centers around this virtue. Further, it did not create an institutionalized
layer of politicos between the councilmember and the neighborhood organizations.
Yet, it is vulnerable to ‘stacking’ by the councilmember and exclusion of non-
supportive ideas, organizations, and issues. In many ways, this is a localized version
of the ‘government by commissions’ approach which is the traditional LA ideal.
From 1995 - 1997, these three councilmembers and others were attempting to
move this issue from the Council’s back burner to the front with little success. All
agreed that there was nothing preventing the City Council from creating NBCs save
for a politically acceptable and legally sanctioned plan and, of course, the money.
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However, this was not an issue for which anyone was willing to make a political
charge at the cost of other more pressing or politically lucrative issues. So, action
was stalled in the GE (Governmental Efficiency) Committee despite Wachs’s
chairmanship o f that committee because councilmembers Hernandez and Goldberg
utilized varieties of the more traditional system and saw an NBC structure as more
government, the antithesis of efficiency - the charge o f the committee. But, then in
1997, an opportunity for movement was created.
After the 1997 election, the committee assignments were shuffled by Council
President John Ferraro. He returned Wachs to the committee as Chair, but he added
both Ridley-Thomas and Chick to it. Thus, the stage was set for the committee to
make NBCs a high priority issue and to forward a plan to the Council. But, at this
point, the ideological debate, the attempts to create political coalitions to support one
position or another, and the need to craft a ‘passable’ plan combined with the
likelihood o f a plan being created by one or more of the charter commissions to bog
down and embroil the issue until it was once again delegated to the back burner.
Thus it was, that a golden opportunity was lost by the Council; but, a parallel
opportunity was enhanced for the charter commissions as they could now take the
undisputed lead on this issue. The Councilmembers could choose to and had chosen
to wait out the reform process and use the results to strengthen or modify their
positions rather than risking the public accountability and political capital needed to
champion their version of the issue.
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As a result, the issue of NBCs has been more closely associated with the
commissions, but especially with the ECC. This is because it was a central issue in
almost all of the election campaigns for those commissioners. Strong views that there
must be councils that are elected and that had ‘real power’ were expressed by
candidates such as Janice Hahn and Paula Boland. It was even suggested that the
budget for city services should be divvied up to these NBCs in order to allow them to
decide how much of which service they desired. This was an extreme position, but it
was not as extreme as the system suggested by members o f the public in the Valley
and Harbor that asserted that these councils could be used to make the City Council,
planning department, and other civic offices redundant and thereby unnecessary. In
sum, based on the election rhetoric o f the ECC winning candidates, most favored
elected NBCs with some power and virtually none expressed opposition to such a
system; as early as May 30, 1998, the ECC approved NBCs with decision-making
authority 9-1 with Woody Fleming of District 9 the lone dissenting vote. So, it was
that the ECC began with a strong bias that NBCs were the most important part of
serious reform; in fact, their deep devotion to this issue nearly sabotaged the joint
charter efforts at the end of the reform activities; even in January of 1999, a group of
them lead by Chet Widom and Janice Hahn held out to the bitter end from the
compromise charter on this point asking that NBCs with power be placed on the
ballot as a separate issue. But, as was the case with public financing, the high ideals of
the ECC were abandoned in the face of political realities.
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The ACC was more academic in its approach to the subject. They studied the
issue within sub-committees, as they had done with many other issues. Since these
studies were driven by those already familiar with the issues, the thinking o f the ACC
was in iarge measure a re-statement o f the three way philosophical split o f Wachs,
Ridley-Thomas, and Chick. However, in the end they concluded that elected NBCs
would be more than problematic. If they were to be elected with power that would
automatically exclude some people. It would making meeting subject to regulation
and recording requirements like the Brown Act. It would, in fact, create another level
o f bureaucracy with the associated expenses. Further, no one could agree on exactly
what their powers should be if they were to have powers. In essence, the more
powerful and official the NBCs become, the more legal and formal they had to
become. This contradicted the logic o f informality that made NBCs appealing and
was not advocated by the literature on the subject - most specifically the Rebirth o f
Urban Democracy by the Brooking Institute. So, neither an agreeable plan nor a
convincing rationale for a plan could be crafted. With this predisposition toward
advisory councils of the ACC, a philosophical disagreement emerged between the two
commissions; and, it quickly became obvious to everyone that short of a miracle,
there could be no specific NBC plan in the charter as it was too complex, too
contentious, and too untested to resolve within the 1-2 year time frame o f the
commissions with the other issues which were in need of resolution.
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So. the commissions split the difference. They mandated NBCs in the charter
but left the specifics to a second commission to work out. A Department of
Neighborhood Empowerment (DONE) was created; it was to be directed by a 7
person board and general manager appointed by the Mayor. This board was
authorized to create a plan for a citywide system ofNBCs; the plan had qualification
assigned to it, and the most important o f these was that neighborhood boundaries
should maintain understood boundaries “to the maximum extent feasible”; all areas of
the city had to be given equal chance to create an NBC; and, departmental regulations
“shall not restrict the method by which” NBC councils are chosen (Art. IX, Sec. 904,
62). The Department would be to certify, but not select, NBC officials and structures.
The remainder of the ordinances are administrative in nature with the exception of
Sec. 907; it mandates that NBCs be provided with city information before it is acted
on by city agencies as an early warning device. This outline is an almost complete
victory for the Wachs model. But beyond that, the NBCs are yet to be formed
although a General Manager has been named and workshops are being head around
the city to create the aforementioned plan for 2001.
So, NBCs are the only real hope remaining, the magic bullet, for the 1999
Charter being anything but a streamlining o f the previous document with an
insufficiently small shift of power toward the Mayor. The hope underlying NBCs is a
contemporary resurgence of the American valuation o f local control. It was a part of
our Revolutionary rhetoric - “Taxation without representation is tyranny”; it was a
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part of the Progressives agenda as evidenced by recall, referendum, and initiative; and,
it is a part of the LA “laid back let everyone do her or his own thing” culture. We
believe in home rule, but the use of home rule changed dramatically in the 196Q's and
1970's, Before then, home rule was used to ‘keep the bad elements out’; the most
appalling example of this was the segregation employed by southern states, but local
red lining and deed restrictions had been equally effective for many years here in the
Southland. But, with civil rights legislation, home rule was dealt a serious blow.
These undesirables, be they blacks, women, or Mexican-Americans, could no longer
be kept out. So, individuals could now move freely provided they could afford to
move into the desired area. But, in the late 1970's, a new and very powerful, albeit
unintended, mechanism was handed to local groups wishing to prevent others from
coming into their neighborhoods. This was the CEQA (California Environmental
Quality Act) regulations that required public hearings on the environmental impact of
most new building and all major or public building; and in this case, the environment
impact was very broadly defined to include fiscal and cultural effects. This resulted in
those that had the money, legal and/or political clout, or access to administration to
define the project as negatively affecting would be able to succeed in restricting,
modifying, or eliminating building in their area that they did not like regardless o f its
value to the public at large. This phenomena was so widespread it coined its own
word, NIMBY, the acronym for “Not In My Back Yard”.
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This modern reincarnation of keeping the undesirables out has held up jails,
landfills, powerplants, subways, and a host of other projects. But, it is all dependant
on the idea that local control is preferable. Is this a realistic assertion? Certainly,
slavery, apartheid, segregation, and the ability of a small group to hold up a project,
such as airport expansion, that has widespread support and benefit are evidence that it
may not be. Where was the respect for home rule by the Native Americans at any
point in our history of continental conquest? The NBC system could open the door
to causing the entire city to yield to the values of every local NBC - as is the case in
many current NIMBY situations. Or will fear of this happening create a backlash or
bias so that the neighborhoods’ concerns can be completely disregarded by the city in
making its decisions as was claimed was the standard operating procedure for the LA
City Council?
The founding parents of our nation used the home rule argument against
Britain, but was it a fair one? Not really. The Colonialist already had more rights
than the average Londoner, and the type o f local control they sought was very
unprecedented in Europe. Their major concerns were freedom o f religion and
commerce. No one existed without taxes, and when the colonials first defeated
Britain and attempted to set up a system of only local (i.e. State) taxation, the country
faltered to the brink of destruction. The States would not give up revenue to the
central government, and the nation under the Articles o f Confederation was
collapsing. So dire were circumstances that a new, more centralized government was
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drawn up under the Constitution of 1789, and we date our history as a government
from there as we have all but forgotten the time from 1776-1789 when we were
governed differently and less successfully. Almost without exception, people will tell
you George Washington was our first President; but, in fact, it was John Hanson of
Maryland under the Articles of Confederation some 13 years before Washington.
Regarding freedom to worship which was more important to the vast majority o f the
colonist as it was their primary reason for immigration; freedom from a crown’s
religion was unthinkable in the Europe of the time. Religious wars had ravaged the
continent throughout the 1500's and 1600's. So, when 100 years of such doctrinal
warfare was finally ended in 1648 with the Treaty o f Westphalia, no one was willing
to risk the peace by betraying the logic of that compromise. That comprise was that
the religion of the local ruler would be the religion of the area. As Britain ruled the
colonies, its religion, the Church of England, was to be the religion o f the area. This
was understood in Europe. The demands o f the colonists for individual freedom o f
religion were unreasonable by the “civilized” standards of their times. But, for better
or for worse, this did not stop our forefathers; yet, it does help us to understand the
extremism that is a part of our cultural belief in home rule and some o f the poor use
to which it has been put.
This is not to say that centralized administration has not created an equally
appalling record. One need go no further than the ovens of Auschwitz or Chelmno to
understand this point. Much of the Reagan revolution of the 1980's was fueled by a
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belief that big government had gone too far. Locally, there is the tradition of
Proposition 13, a San Fernando Valley lead tax revolt victory against big government.
However, only now after 20 years do we understand that much of the benefit of
Proposition 13 has been more than offset by the cost to local municipal units. So, in
effect, Proposition 13 was good for people with houses but bad for state and local
governments and those that rely on the services they provide. But, the Nazi horror
still stands as a reminder of the dehumanization possible by a central administration
that overly abstracts the human so as to devalue it. Also, this is woven inextricably
through Jackall’s critique of corporate think.
So, is home rule a good thing? As shown, there needs to be limits on both
sides; but in a country that does not acknowledge groups rights, with the exception o f
American Indian tribes after the fact, I believe the track record demonstrates that calls
for local groups’ rights have usually become, as they must, a mechanism for the
advancement o f the personal rights of certain individuals that qualify to the exclusion
o f others as we have witnessed with slavery, women’s rights, segregation,
NIMBYism, Proposition 208, and a host o f other examples including affirmative
action according to some. So, home rule seems to be a value compatible with and
supportive of an oligarchical social structure. Thus, it comes as no surprise that it is a
part of the 1999 LA Charter; the surprise would come if NBCs could be structured in
such a way as to uproot the entire rest of the social management system. How
realistic is it to expect that to happen?
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REPRESENTATION
Not surprisingly, the issue of representation is the focus of a book by UC
Berkeley’s Dr. Hanna Pitkin entitled, The Concept o f Representation. As it is a
scholarly, in-depth, comprehensive, and seminal work on the subject, it can assist us
in framing the questions on representation in a workable manner and can offer some
insights into the competing answers to these questions. She begins with a common
sense idea o f representation as: “taken generally, means the making present in some
sense of something which is nevertheless not present literally or in fact. Now, to say
that something is simultaneously both present and not present is to utter a paradox,
and thus a fundamental dualism is built into the meaning o f representation” (sic 9).
From this foundation, she moves to the ideas of Thomas Hobbes as he, “is the only
major political theorist who gives a fully developed, systematic account of its
[representation] meaning” (4). So, Hobbes provides solid background and a
particular viewpoint. Pitkin calls his definition formalistic as it examines the formal
arrangements need for acting, the authorization. She then jumps to the other side of
the fence to examine representation as accountability or the formal arrangements that
terminate it. This she concludes as equally formalistic. So, she moves beyond the
idea of ‘acting for’ to the idea of ‘standing for’ in the middle chapters of the book.
This not- human-based examination yields understandings o f descriptive and symbolic
representation. Then, in a final group o f chapters she returns to the ‘acting for’
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human-centered idea as she move to the final chapter on “Political Representation”.
As can be extrapolated, this is a very thorough and conceptual work.
The conclusions in the final chapter are of the most utility to our examination.
In the opening summation to this concluding section, Pitkin states:
representing here means acting in the interest of the represented, in a
manner responsive to them. The representative must act
independently; his actions muist involve discretion and judgement; he
must be the one who acts. The represented must also be (conceived as)
capable of independent action and judgement, not merely being taken
care of. And despite the resulting potential for conflict between
representative and represented about what is to be done, that conflict
must not normally take place. The representative must act in such a
way that there is no conflict, or if it occurs an explanation is called for.
(209)
This is clearly an ideal lacking practical mechanisms, the most important o f which is
the identification of “them” to which we will return; but, it leads us into an important
divergence of thinking which Pitkin discusses next.
On one hand, a body o f theory asserts that the identification o f the needs and
wishes of people is so common and significant that it transcends individual taste and
constitutes an “unattached interest”. As such the wise representative, becomes an
expert in abstract analysis and has little if any need for public input. On the other
hand there is the view that interests can only be, or can best be, self defined; this is
the preferred home rule LA position. In such thinking, the representative needs to be
in very close contact with her or his constituents. This causes Pitkin to conclude that,
“The more a theorist sees political issues as questions of knowledge, to which it is
possible to find correct, objectively valid answers the more inclined he will be to
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regard the representatives an expert and to find the opinion of the constituency
irrelevant... On the other hand, the more a theorist takes political issues to be
arbitrary and irrational choices, matters o f whim or taste, the less sense it makes for a
representative to barge ahead on his own” (211). This exposes that, “At the
extremes, again, representation disappears” (211). She completes the analysis by
declaring:
We have said that the representative must pursue the constituents’
interest, in manner at least potentially responsive to their wishes, and
that conflict between the two must be justifiable in terms o f that
interest. But what becomes of terms like “interest” and “ justifiable” if
there can be lifelong, profound disagreement among men as to what
their interest is - disagreement that remains despite deliberation and
justification and argument? To the extent that this is so, the possibility
o f a substantive acting for others breaks down, and the view o f the
concept becomes irrelevant to politics. To the extent that this happens
in practical political life, we seem then to fall back on descriptive
representation; we choose a representative who shares our values and
commitments and prevents the irresoluble conflict. Failing that, we
retreat to symbolic representation; we can let ourselves be influenced
by emotional ties in spite o f our doubts about whether our interests are
being served. Or, failing even that, we can cling to our formal and
institutional representative arrangements even when they seem devoid
of content. We continue to obey, although we feel abused, or continue
to remove a series of accountable representatives from office, although
none of them serves our interest. (213)
Few among us, and certainly few who were a part of the LA charter debate,
would or could question the accuracy o f Pitkin’s analysis. It provides an useful way of
looking at the concept and practice of representation. At this point in the book and
chapter, Pitkin proceeds to suggest normative conclusions based on this analysis.
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However, her project, “is a conceptual analysis” (1) and her bias toward abstract
understandings must be made explicit is evaluating the utility of her suggestions.
Having said this, she concludes in her final paragraph, “The concept of
representation thus is a continuing tension between ideal and achievement... it should
present a continuing but not hopeless challenge: to construct institutions and train
individuals in such a way that they engage in the pursuit of public interest, the genuine
representation o f the public; and, at the same time, to remain critical of those
institutions and that training, so that they are always open to further interpretation and
reform” (240). This can be achieved by means articulated in the penultimate
paragraph, “Thus it has been argued ‘that representative government is the ideally
best form of government, for the very reason that it will not actually be representative
in its character unless it is properly organized and conditioned. By its essential nature
it is a system of trusteeship ... Institutions claiming to be representative can justify
their character as such only to the extent that they establish and maintain such
trusteeship”' (240). Pitkin is here quoting the great American industrialist Henry
Ford, who is attributing the view to John Stuart Mill. But, obviously Ford and Pitkin
embraced and supported it, but, Ford, also embraced and supported anti-Semitic
actions, the Nazis, strike breaking, and a host o f over activities which he urged the
government to support as well which cast doubt of the meaning of “properly
organized”.
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I do not mean to even suggest that Pitkin would side with Ford on any of
these issues. I included the prior quote in part to mitigate any such thoughts;
however, Pitkin does place herself in the politics as problem solving camp. ‘Trustee
for’ is at its core fostered by the belief that some in our mist are better at dealing with
these issues than others. This becomes more obvious when she goes on to claim on
the penultimate page o f the text, “For this reason, too, we need to retain the ideal of
the substance o f representation in addition to our institutionalization o f it. Without
reference to such an ideal, how could we teach those intended to operate the
institutions what we require of them? How else, indeed, could we remember it
ourselves?” (239). The idea that special or advanced knowledge is required for the
representative is embodied in the use of the term “teach”; they must learn something
that ordinary citizens need not know or to use Pitkin’s language is not required of the
average citizen. She is supporting the idea that there is distance between the
government and the people. In so doing, she is creating the separation necessary for
the dynamic tension she advocates. But, there is not in actually, two camps to her
analysis to generate positive conflict.
It might seem that Pitkin is arguing for two sides, but in actuality she values
and argues for flexibility but from within a single epistemological position. A clear
and telling example can be found on page 212; here Pitkin writes, “Political issues by
and large, are found in the intermediate range, where the idea o f representing as
substantive acting for others does apply.” Note that the language is “does apply” as
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opposed to “can apply”. The former states a condition of being rather than a
possibility or perspective. Likewise in her final paragraph, she described the tension
as being between “ideal and achievement”; both of these are abstract concepts
founded on value systems which are not independent as they are determined, both, by
the evaluation of the arbiter. Achievement is the moving closer to a goal, it lacks any
ability to be critical of that goal; similarly, an ideal is an end by which means are
measured - not goals critically examined. There is no explicit standard required in a
system based on individual voters, only agreement. So, it is that Pitkin is embedded in
a paradigm, rather than being able to fairly move between paradigms and establish a
workable and growthful tension between them as she hopes to do. Her paradigm is
clearly a political paradigm. As such, it values the proper use of power as socially
sanctioned. Pitkin avers, “Political life is not merely the making of arbitrary choices,
nor merely the resultant of bargaining between separate, private wants. It is always a
combination of bargaining and compromise where there are irresolute and conflicting
commitments, and common deliberation about public policy, to which facts and
rational arguments are relevant” (212). This line exposes Pitkin’s rational bias. The
recent Kansas adopting of Creationism or the history o f slavery or a hundred other
cases demonstrate that social agreement need not have any relationship to rationality,
especially if the rationalizing of desires is an alternative. In politics, Hume’s claim of
reason being a slave to the passions finds more than adequate verification.
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This returns us to a key point in Pitkin’s analysis. Who is being represented?
Who is in and who is out? She writes:
if there is sharp, deep-seated cleavage on the important value
commitments in the society ...w e might expect an increasing desire in
such a society for representativeness in its legislators, a desire to pick
them from a particular group as the only safe guarantee o f action in the
interest of that group ... Even if it introduces into the legislature the
irreconcilable antagonisms that pervade the society, they insist on it
because they feel that only a member chosen from the particular group
can act in its interests. And they may sometimes be right. (213-214)
I think this description is an accurate reflection of identity politics and of the political
of reality of civil unrest scarred LA in the 1990's. But, this is the exact tendency it
was hoped that the new charter would alleviate through NBCs. But even Pitkin
concludes, “No institutional system can guarantee the essence, the substance of
representation. Nor should we be too optimistic about the capacity of institutions to
produce the desired conduct; even the best of representative institutions cannot be
expected to produce representation magically, mechanically, without or even in spite
of beliefs, attitudes, and intentions of the people operating the system” (239).
This conclusion is shared by LA Weekly writer Marc Haefele in his analysis of
the 1999 Charter in the LA Times. He concludes, “Both these projected entities
(NBCs and regional planning commission) fall well short of the original popular
demands for directly elected local bodies with full legislative powers. Critics call
them placebo government. To others, it’s a revolution.” (M6). Then, beyond this
neutral description, he culminates, “Because in the end, for the new charter to
succeed, we’ll need new leaders who can fashion a better city government around it.
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As with so many things, the charter’s success depends on the people who use it”
(M6). Like Pitkin, the mechanism depends on the people, it does not constraint,
discipline, train, or control them by design. It does not even provide incentives for
socially beneficial behavior; the rewards are for self-interested and protective behavior
of your group. The verdict here is that the NBC mechanism is irrelevant. But, in
fact, representation is the rationalization and illusion that permits the control of the
oligarchy.
Were these problems understood at the formation o f the country’s and city’s
political institutions and what was, or were, their mechanisms to deal with them? As
Pitkin points out, the roots of representation were, “the calling o f knights and
burgesses to meet with the king’s council [that] seems to have begun as a matter of
royal convenience and need” (3). It was a part of the duty of the nobility. But, while
it was transformed into a right of self government and local advocacy by the time of
the American Revolution, this noble origin had a residue effect. In this case, it was
the idea that the best, most noble, would be called to government service as it was an
aristocrat’s duty, and duty was a principle justification for the privileging o f such
citizens. This yoking of duty and higher status was unquestioned during the
American revolution. In the Federalist Papers, Madison and Hamilton support
representation by the noble as a check on the uneducated masses on one side and the
tyranny of a sovereign on the other; Madison asserted in Federalist #63, “The
difference most relied on between the American and other Republics consists in the
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principle of representation” (387). He argued that these wise counselors would act
for the masses and control the executive as they were lead by their civic duty solely.
This moderate position carried the day in 1787-88 and has been virtually unexamined
since that time. “A few of the members, as happens in all such assemblies, will possess
superior talents; will by frequent re-election become members o f long standing; will
be thoroughly masters of the public business” (#53 335). Madison does not define
“superior talents”, but in the context o f these enlightenment ideals, it is reasonable to
assume he meant a God given, and therefore, deserved talent, a universally
recognizable talent.
In Federalist #57, Madison continues, “The aim of every political constitution
is, or ought to be, first to obtain for rulers men who possess the most wisdom to
discern, and most virtue to pursue, the common good of the society” (350). He
continues, “There is in every breast a sensibility to marks of honor, of favor, of
esteem, and of confidence, which, apart from all considerations of interests, is some
pledge for grateful and benevolent returns” (351-352). In summation, Madison
asserts, “Duty, gratitude, interest, ambition itself, are the cords by which they
[members of the House of Representatives] will be bound to fidelity and sympathy
with the great mass of people. It is possible that these may be insufficient to control
the caprice and wickedness of men. But are they not all that government will admit,
and that human prudence can devise?” (353). Clearly, this is a rhetorical device
known as the appeal to ignorance, but the purpose of the piece was to persuade
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voters to support the drafted constitution. Also, if these traits do bind the
representative to the masses, what contravening forces bind them to the greater public
good? Just as our founding father would have seen "men” as the equal of rulers, so
too they would have understood wisdom and virtue as equally obvious and universal.
Likewise, the Progressives would have seen progress in the same
unquestionable light. The political culture and city charter until 1999 were formed by
these Progressive ideals. Progressives advocated non partisan elections as they
believed strongly that the progressive execution of government was ideologically
neutral. LA has non partisan city elections. These reformers sought to cleanse
politics of the machines of the east by strict adherence to great civic responsibility to
and for the average citizen. But underscoring this faith was the idea that government
would change because the more publicly minded, such as themselves, would be able
to become officials and representatives. Public minded, in this case, meant
Progressives who viewed themselves as good children o f Madison devoid of ideology
because it was right or progress or truth. Only in the post modem world and at great
price can we can see the conceit of such thinking. Pitkin's analysis shares this
ideological blind spot; this means it is in the mainstream of American political
thinking. It is solidly within a political perspective .
Being located within a perspective in no way negates her analysis or renders it
of no value to our enterprise. But, knowing this helps us to appreciate the positive
and negative points of Pitkin’s argument as well as the meaning of positive and
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negative for her evaluation. Pitkin presents us with a strong and sophisticated
political argument in favor of representative democracy. This general position was
advocated by most of the Charter reformers, but not all. Some took a more
efficiency-directed or economic paradigm approach. Still others took a more
sociological approach. These are the other paradigms from within which people
argued about the characteristic of representation. However, Pitkin’s political analysis
does a very good job of appreciating these other paradigms. For instance, an
economical appreciation o f representation would tell us that it is best understood as a
functional concept. The best approach would then be to make it as optimally
functional as possible. But as Pitkin points out, any such purely formalistic
understanding would not permit “proper representation”, as she sees it, because it
would lead to one extreme position or another. This would be a problem solving
approach, in Pitkin’s lexicon. Likewise, if we assume a sociological approach, we
would end up with no concept of right and wrong, only behaviors. Here Pitkin
identifies two problems; the first is the problem of which group is to be represented,
as stated earlier. The second is that, “Some issues are more easily seen as having a
right or a wrong answer; others seem arbitrary, confusing, or a matter of opinion ...
On such issues to such men, politics seems more a matter of will than of right and
wrong” (214). This being the case, a sociological view would also reduce to a
functional view. These have already been discussed.
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The best available research on the concept of representation is from Pitkin’s
book on the subject; so, we can use her typology for understanding this characteristic
without committing to her speculative conclusions By best here we mean that it
accounts for the other paradigms, is systematic, and moves beyond the dichotomies
and conflicts they represent. Therefore, representation is most easily understood from
within the political paradigm; but at the same time, this understanding falls short in
contemporary realistic practice. Real world representation, in the main, is conceived
in and practiced in more functional terms. While Pitkin is correct that there is a
potential for, desire for, and design aspiration for a higher application through a
dynamic synthesis, it is unlikely to be achieved because the opposing forces required
to check the current system are not sufficiently independent to maintain the required
tension. Likewise oligarchies can be more but there are not enough tensions in the
system to provide checks to its agenda because the so called independent forces -
such as the Democrats and Republican - are not really independent.
KLA Times editorial written 1 year after the passage of the 1999 Charter
summed up the NBC situation in these terms:
There’s always been a lot riding on the success of Los Angeles’s grand
experiment with neighborhood councils. Maybe too much ...
Community councils could be a huge step forward for Los Angeles,
drawing the residents to improve their neighborhoods and fostering
connections across the vast anonymous city. Or these councils could
dissolve in apathy or carve up little fiefdoms fighting for neighborhood
perks. The outcome is still very much up in the air. (B13)
What is interesting about this is there is no reason to think, except hope, that the
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former will happen and all the history of the city to believe that the latter will occur.
The pro-LA, pro-Charter LA Tmes is admitting that all they have upon which to base
that hope is theory, not practice. They can see that it is residents against oligarches
and they know who has traditionally won that battle. This is because the NBC system
is not independent, it is advisory only, and it will not be able to check the power o f
the city government. This is true if the entire 1999 Charter as it is set up merely to
serve those in power, the oligarches. It is the Bill o f Rights of the Constitution which
places limits on the actions of those in government and creates some independence
within the system as does the reserved powers clause which gives the states their
power. The 1999 LA Charter has no bill o f rights, as we have seen; and the NBCs are
hardly the equivalent of states. This analysis demonstrates the reform failure o f the
1999 Charter while simultaneously testifying to its re-enshrinement of historical LA
and US political values of compartmentalization, oligarchy, and control. These are
the values and ethics of our public municipal corporation.
WORKS CITED
Haerele, Marc. “The Great Charter Awakening Sneaks Up on City Hall”, LA Times.
25 June 2000. M6.
Hamilton, Alexander, Madison, James, and Jay, John. The Federalist Papers. Mentor
Books: New York. 1961.
Kayden, Dr. Xandra. “A Chance for a Return to a Working Democracy”, LA Times. 9
January 2000. B17.
LA Times. “Neighborhood Birth Pains”. 29 July 2000. B13.
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Pitkin, Dr. Hanna. The Concept of Representation. University of California Press:
Berkeley. 1984.
Proposed Charter o f the City of Los Angeles. City Clerk, Election Division; Los
Angeles. 1999.
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CHAPTER 7 - ANALYSIS AND CONCLUSIONS OF THE CASE
SUMMARY OF FINDINGS
The previous chapters present a case from which we can conclude that the
political system employed by LA from 1925 to 1999 was reaffirmed by the 1996-1999
Charter reform activities. We also saw that this civic system was and is a
quintessentially American system despite claims of uniqueness by many in the process.
Since the pre-existing political system, which we demonstrated to be crisis-inducing,
was not altered substantially, the likelihood of future crises that the public at large had
hoped to prevent by means of this reformed charter and had motivated these reform
actions in the first place, were, in fact, not alleviated. The LA history is a chronicle of
repeated crises o f legitimacy from the foundry strike and LA Times bombing in 1910
to the 1923 strike of the longshoremen (1934 as well) to the Zoot Suit riots o f 1943
to the Watts riots of 1965 and finally to the Rodney King riots o f 1992. This cycle
was not broken by the actions o f the public managers through the charter
commissions in late 1990's; even if, it may have been slowed. To be fair, the 1999
Charter was a small victory for the people; but, a victory for only a segment of the
people.
Which segment gained by the adoption of the 1999 Charter? Our analysis
indicates that the crisis of legitimacy that was the genesis of LA’sl990's Charter
reform had its origin in a call for a more inclusive and responsible governmental
management system; but, that call was not heeded since the methods employed by the
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commissions precluded any such expansion or re-orientation, i.e., the NBCs were left
to be private and advisory and not public and power wielding, meetings were
designed for the ease of commissioners despite the obstacles it created for the public,
etc, and the resulting charter manifested and re-institutionalized this structural
preclusion. Further, our analysis highlighted that the oligarchy’s control mechanisms
are omission and/or exclusion. This is why who is at the table is such a critical
American question. Thus, LA was re-christening an oligarchy. But, this was justified
and accepted by appeals to traditional American values. Because of our 18t h century
Protestant and Enlightenment roots, America was engineered to be an oligarchy; LA,
through its Progressive heritage, particularly embraced this mode o f public ordering
and with it, its particular design flaws. These design flaws were precisely the
weaknesses identified by Angelenos who were seeking reform o f the civic structure;
however, the commissions’ outcomes did nothing to correct this faulty framework.
Still, the greatest hope for better civic management lay in the correction o f these
structural weaknesses.
In hopes of identifying these design flaws, we turned to CM as a lens by which
to analyze charter reform. In so doing, we discovered its utility for understanding the
structural elements of the city’s reform events. CM illustrated how LA’s corporate
management was reactionary in this crisis and how its corporate culture was
determinate in shaping that reaction. It was determinate because the corporate
culture was more dedicated to preserving its values than to reacting to reality and
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learning. These defensive corporate actions were buttressed by stories of denial that
documented both the values of the corporate culture and contrasted them with the
realities of the crisis. Jackall’s book confirmed the insights of CM and provided us
with an established analysis for such rationalized corporate behaviors. It
supplemented CM by enlightening us about the corporate motives and values that
underlay protective corporate action. Jackall helped us to understand how these
corporate values move from being merely ideas desirous of protection to normative
values that are projected by managers to guide the institution through a corporate
culture. This filled out the CM critique of the charter reform activities. In so doing,
we learned that the LA city managers responded to a legal crisis as it fit their
corporate agenda rather than a legitimacy crisis. Further, their treatment of the crisis
was as inadequate as it was misdirected. It was misdirected by omission, as the
important questions, such as representation and public needs, were subsumed by
cosmetic questions such as council size and how to find agreement.
This brought us to our second theme and the fourth chapter on consensus or
who needed to agree. By looking at the proposed bill of rights, we come to
understand that it was rejected for political reasons and by political methods, not
because of majority opinion, bad argumentative support, or its appropriateness for
reducing future legitimation crises. This brought into question the degree to which
the underlying belief that a small group could accurately represent the beliefs o f larger
group was justifiable . Statistics is a discipline that deals with such matters, and it
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requires that samples be both sufficiently large and appropriately random. The four
votes against the bill of rights (all valley votes) were hardly large or diversified; but,
the political and corporate methods employed, formally and informally, allowed this
to be mistaken for good policy formation. Next, the commissions’ methods were
further questioned by examining the issue of council size. Here, the employment of
multiple ballot options, while it was being continually condemned elsewhere,
illustrated that some decisions (minor ones) could be left to the people while others
(major ones) could not. The determination of which issues were which was left solely
to the commissions, and they justified this by their public mandates. The council size
issue demonstrated the confusion and subjectivity of the commissions’ methods. This
muddling of the methods served to prevent the formation o f an acceptable
justification for any new plans which were being offered by leaving no dispassionate
methodological grounding. In turn, this combined to create a strong presumption in
favor of the status quo by shifting the burden of proof to those desiring change rather
than those seeking to prevent change as would be appropriate in a context created by
a call for change.
The next unhelpful assumption employed by the commissions and illuminated
by our examination was that options on the ballot would kill all alternatives. The cry
for the absolute necessity of one ballot option was greatest in the call for a singular
document, but we came to see that this was one of the requirements of the
political/corporate culture not of the public. It was not a justifiable assumption
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according to reality as defined by LA voters’ actions. The real reason for a call for a
single document was the need of the commissions to compensate for their split public
mandates. By manifesting, in action, a consensus modality rather than a dysfunctional
one, the commissions hoped to demonstrate that their goal o f a unified government
was obtainable in practice and they knew how to do it. But in so doing, they laid
their efforts at the altar o f consensus rather than directing them toward the service of
good civic management.
We then dealt directly with the valuation of consensus at the end of the
chapter. This was critical as it was the highest value o f the reform commissions’
activities; unfortunately for them, consensus was not the value-free, holy grail, they
took it to be. As Jackall sagely documents, consensus within an organization comes
at a price; and, Mitroff and Linstone articulated that it is often not a good
management technique for complex problems. The price for LA included oligarchy
and an inherently crisis prone management structure. The results of the commissions’
consensus did not match up with the realities of a city in which less than 35% of the
residents have a total worth of less than V i of the average housing price and where
support of less than 10% o f the eligible voters can be an election landslide. But, this
hegemony was passed off as social consensus through control o f the scope of
participants.
Thurow, of MIT, identified the threshold of significance for an oligarchy at
40% or less of the total population served; and employing this demarcation, we
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quickly saw that politically and economically LA and the US as well were accurately
described as one of Thurow’s oligarchies. This myopic structure was justified for LA
by appealing to the historical roots o f American democracy and the city’ s particular
political identity; both were oligarchies in democracy’s clothing. In addition,
capitalism tends toward a concentration of wealth; so, our economy system further
supported the idea of control by the few.
The civic managers merely needed to control the input and inclusion in the
decision making process to legitimize their hegemony. They did this by direct
appointment in the case o f the ACC and by partisan organizations’ control in the ECC
elections. The commissions themselves then controlled the inclusion of persons and
ideas during the reform process. Those that disagreed with the oligarchical
sensibilities were marginalized, coopted, or frustrated until they self-selected out of
the process. All of this resulted in commissions’ conclusions that served to re-affirm
the oligarchy and its values but did not fit the reality of the citizens o f LA - only those
very, very few who were a part o f the discussions. According to my notes, the few
that were a part of the discussion were in total less than 2000 persons out o f the over
3 million LA residents. This is less than 0.067% of the city’s population, a small
enough number to have been aberrant and certainly a small enough number to fit any
definition of oligarchy.
In chapter five, we examined the third theme of our analysis, government as a
machine. This too was exposed as not being the neutral concept it was marketed as
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being; the struggle between the Mayor and the Council over the hiring and firing of
general managers helped make this point. While billed as a question of the separation
of power between governmental branches, when we contextualized this ideal of
checks and balances in LA and American history, we realized that it simply was not
the reality of our history. The branches have always been imbalanced in their powers.
From this, we were able to conclude that despite some power shifting to the Mayor in
order to create a more balanced system, the branches are far from balanced. The
result of the commissions’ debate was to reaffirm the traditional imbalance; thereby,
they re-established the primacy of the legislative branch which houses an oligarchy not
a sovereign. In values terms, this serves to devalue diversity in favor of hegemony.
The presumption toward hegemony is achieved by de-emphasizing and
subjugating the relational realities of the situation by the concentration of attention on
the parts of the situation. This technique was highlighted by our analysis of
compartmentalization. There, we saw that the process o f looking at parts and results
values them over the relationships between these parts; such an approach serves a
mechanical, problem solving model rather than an organic or systems model.
Mechanical models seek to achieve balance and unchangeability which contrasts with
organic and systems models that have achieving homeostasis or growth as their goals.
Such a bias toward techno-think and control values right answers and top-down
thinking rather than valuing human inputs, growth, and bottom-up thinking. Still, this
mechanical approach was chosen by LA’s managerial stakeholders. We needed to
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understand why. Was it because they were supporting their personal agenda by
protecting the corporate environment in which they were successful, as Jackall and
CM would have speculated? To answer this, we needed to look more directly at those
persons involved.
Were their needs and values being served by protecting the organization’s
corporate culture and how? To find the answer to this question, we specifically
scrutinized the leadership and personnel o f the commissions. We did this, informed
by the thinking o f Jackall about the tendencies of a corporate culture. Jackall’s
explanation o f managers’ behavior was seen to fit the actions o f the commissioners
quite well. They had a set of personal values and a chronicle of stories to defend those
values. In the end, they chose to define good government in the same terms as they
had always been defined in the face of undeniable public condemnation of those
definitions. They justified these values with the same stories of risk aversion and fear
of concentrated power that have been used for over two hundred years. These stories
defended the "LA way of doing business” without examining whether such methods
were inherently problematic to a majority of the citizens of the city.
In short, the values of oligarchy were used and reaffirmed to control LA
rather than to manage it well; the hegemony of the elites (and want-to-be elites) led
the process to re-create and legitimatize a system of oligarchy and to make the others
defect, join in, or become scapegoats. The people involved had a civic system under
their control which they wished to keep under their control for what they believed to
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be the good of all. But, first and foremost, control needed to be maintained; and, that
would mean control by the right people, people like them - the university trained,
Bradley coalition as redefined by Riordan in class rather than identity coalition terms.
But, before ending and to be both complete and fair, our analysis needed to examine
the most anti-hegemonic aspect of the Charter as well, neighborhood councils
(NBCs).
This we did as the fourth theme in chapter six; NBCs were considered in this
work as they were averred, as a panacea. After a survey o f their history in the 1990's
in LA, we looked at their breath of interpretations. That scope was so wide that the
commissions felt unable to narrow it in the time frame o f their mandate. So, the
commissions mandated NBCs in the 1999 Charter but with few specifics and little
structure leaving the real work to the new Department o f Neighborhood
Empowerment. Yet, one point that was established was that the councils would be
advisory and not power-wielding; this meant that they could not formally challenge
the oligarchy or its managerial culture. The NBCs were an outgrowth of a strong
belief in home rule, a California tradition. But, any history o f home rule reveals a
checkered past at best and offers little hope for the high expectation o f those touting
NBCs as the bright promise for LA’s future. It is unlikely that NBCs, as structured,
can uproot the oligarchy and its institutionalized controls despite the new mechanism
that it represents for the city. In brief, there is a difference between being represented
and having a representative, as the discussion of Pitkin’s work demonstrates; but, in
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the long run, this discussion showed that representative democracy (vis^a-vis direct
democracy) is, and LA’s NBCs were mandated to be, a tool o f the oligarchy. The
necessary independence required for NBC’s to be checks in the system is not there;
their independence is a theoretical distinctions not an in-practice or structural
difference.
DESIGNED TO FAIL OR CREATE CRISIS
When we examine the charter reform events and conclusions o f LA’s 1996 -
1999 efforts, we come to one fairly inescapable conclusion. That conclusion is that
ethically and politically speaking, the majority o f Angelenos received only small,
relative gains. The institution ofNBCs, the expanded power o f the Mayor, and the
streamlining of government should make our corporate management only slightly
more accessible and efficient in achieving our civic goals. Things should be better, but
not in any significant way; there will be distinctions such as those listed above
between the LA government of the 1900's and the 2000's, but there will be no
difference: it will be oligarchy as usual. Equally obvious and important is that these
gains fail to surpass the political, ethical, or managerial thresholds on crisis
preparedness as mentioned in chapter 3, inclusiveness as mentioned in chapter 4, self
reflection as mentioned in chapter 5, or structural balance as mentioned in chapter 6.
Thus, the 1999 Charter represents a relative gain but not a gain when we examine the
issue in non-relative terms; but, since politics concerns itself more with matters of
power as defined in relative terms, this is not a politically significant observation, but
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it is significant if we examined the matter in the expanded management terms o f this
study.
From the conclusions above, it follows that the best hope for better
management lays in providing what is structurally excluded or strengthening what is
organizationally weak. First, this missing design element, seems to be this element o f
non-relative evaluative standards. A non-relative evaluative standard might be
considered an equivalent term to social ethics to all but relativist ethicists. This same
point is often made in current political debates such as the one on the meaning o f the
separation of church and state. Is this lack o f a social ethical element in our public
structure is why civic American government is crisis prone? Second, to strengthen
that which is organizationally weak, we must pinpoint the design flaws which threaten
the system. The identification of these elements will assist in the design, re-design, or
repair of these structures. These critical deficiencies of the current system as
identified in the previous chapters can be regrouped into characteristics that facilitate
our re-visioning of social management in a manner more likely to make further
legitimacy crises less likely.
The first of these characteristics is a deficiency of self-examination. As the
discussions of leadership, the government as a machine, and NBCs from the previous
litany of charter activities clearly noted, though not in these terms, there was a lack o f
self-examination. The most stark and elemental manifestation of this failing was the
use o f rationalization. Social rationalization is akin to Marx’s concept of alienation in
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that both imply separation of the individual from others (community, family, church)
and his or her subordination to the legal, political, and economic regulation in the
workplace, school, and state.
But, this is not immediately obvious because the language used to describe the
rationalization process makes the results appear to be a public good; but, such
falsification is what rationalization is, “self-satisfying but incorrect reasons for one’s
behaviors” {American Heritage Dictionary 1083). In an odd instance of cooptive
double-speak, this corporate rationalization process has become synonymous with
empowerment. In many circles, this type of corporate rationalization is used to
describe the process of at once making them, in our case the state et al, the enemy as
it purifies, exercises, empowers and/or decontaminates the individual to attack this
now external problem. This was the commissions’ sense o f increased empowerment
that the 1999 Charter advanced. The problem with this notion o f empowerment is that
it requires one to reify or lose direct touch with the problem in order to have the
ability to effect the problem. Gated communities and ethnic enclaves, of which LA is
rife, are good examples of this trend toward isolating the good with us and the bad
outside our chosen sphere.
However, this type of thinking also requires that we start by separating
ourselves from our civic mechanisms and that such a separation is necessary to effect
any social solution to our problems. The I/we is strengthened, or purified, in the
immediate community at the cost of civic connection or the denial of connection to
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others so that only the management prepackaged, socially anesthetized and socially
acceptable connections can be acknowledged between people as we saw in chapter 5.
Thus, the social structure can be rationalized from the top rather than having citizens
acknowledge the natural, organic relationships formed by unrestricted social action or
goal driven civic activity. The result of such rationalized social activity was sagely
documented by Robert Putnam in his now famous article entitled, “Bowling Alone”
(and confirmed and expanded in his 2000 book, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and
Revival o f American Community). In it, he reported that although there are more
bowlers now than in the past, bowling league membership was down; this meant
people were increasingly bowling alone. This is his metaphor for the decline o f civic
engagement in America. Such conclusions are in lock step with our analysis except
that we can now understand that this phenomena is not an act o f nature or social
evolution. This phenomena is a direct output of a complex system o f externalizing the
negative to purify the self and to allow that self to fit into socially designated and
publicly comfortable roles as dictated by the oligarchy.
What are the effects o f such social rationalizations? Organic connections must
be down-played and/or marginalized so that compartmentalized, government as
machine, thinking can predominate. We lose our ability to question agreements made
in other areas of society because we have no connection to them. Society shatters
into factions which claim turf based on jurisdictions that are sacrosanct because one’s
group’s turf is not seen as connected to any people outside of that group; but rather,
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each jurisdiction is viewed as a part of their identity. Any challenge to the control of
that turf becomes a challenge to the groups as people. We saw in chapter 5 how
these values in decision making inspire monolithic understandings, and insistence that
simple is good and multi-identity is bad/problematic. But, they do not reflect reality in
a useful manner. However, thinking in such a monolithic manner does support control
by the few.
When one dimensionality, simplicity, is preferred, this then requires a belief in
the value of balancing of concerns and not in building bridges or creating pluralistic
responses. Such uni-dimensionality becomes the necessary first step to power as it
restricts the range of legitimate alternatives. Such hierarchical assumptions for
problem solving lead to rationalization responses. For instance, Madison’s remark,
“People are the source of power; but they should not exercise it,” and other American
political truisms might need to be called into question. Is not people exercising power
what empowerment is? Perhaps in the illiterate, uneducated, and parochial days of the
1780's, this claim had more validity than falsehood; but, in LA on the verge o f the
information age and the 21s t century, the situation is significantly different. Forcing
people to exercise their political muscles in order to strengthen and improve that
usage might be exactly what we, as a society, need. But, this should not be done in
the senseless, mob-oriented manner as was done after the Lakers’ 2000 NBA
championship.
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Good public management suggests that we should be attempting to construct
systems that would place the burden o f community and the responsibility for society
on all citizens rather than project it on a few in the service of a system that preserves
its control by distancing citizens from social management. As we saw in chapter 5,
currently public management does this by providing a place unto which we can
project and locate our dissatisfaction in order to be able to bolster and purify our self
image by divorcing ourselves from our social problems. We do this as citizens in
order to make our lives more tolerable by making ourselves blameless through our
detachment by this process. We are severing ourselves, or allowing ourselves to be
severed, from collective power. To the degree we allow this to happen, we are
ethically liable. When enough people opt out or are excluded as Russell suggested in
his quote on timidity, our society loses its conglomerate ability to check the power
seeking members of the oligarchy. This aggregate power is the only proper and
effective check on the true believers of the political, social, and economic oligarchy.
This dynamic of detachment is steeped in our rational, mechanical approach to
problem solving as chapter 5 delineates. It is facilitated by and supportive of
removing the individual from the equation. But, in so doing, it strips the individual
and the system of feedback loops necessary for the improvement of the system. In
organic, conceptual terms, the structural element represented by feedback is the
characteristic of self examination; it is that which permits the system to analyze itself.
Without it, a system may be able to maintain itself, but it cannot grow; this results in
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the system’s adaptation of a defensive, protectionist orientation. This is a fair
description of the activities of the corporate managers in LA as demonstrated through
the charter reform actions of its history.
But, this lack o f self examination was not LA’s only design flaw; another
shortcoming that was made evident by our examination o f charter reform in chapters
3 - 6 is a lack o f holism. As a charter is a holistic instrument, again it may seem
counterintuitive to say it lacks holism; however, we have seen through themes of
compartmentalization, consensus, and NBC’s that this was another case of corporate
rationalization veiled in Orwellian double-speak.
As a charter is the single source of all municipal authority in a California
charter city, holism was assumed as a characteristic of a city charter. This meant, to
the city managers, that there was no need to work it into the document as it was
unavoidable. But, as we have seen in chapter 5 on compartmentalizing, dealing with
the trees is not the same as dealing with the forest; there is a difference between the
overlapping with integrity and dealing with complexity approach and the
compromising or breaching systems into components approach. Systems can grow
and adapt and evolve; principals, as employed by the corporate rationalizers, are
unchanging, unyielding, and binary. Humans are biological/intellectual systems and
complex systems at that. If a society is to successfully manage such people, it must
take into account this complexity rather than attempt to force on this complex
management reality a one size fits all, universalist approach. It does not matter how
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well it is conceived by John Rawls or Plato or anyone else: A city which is widely
regarded as the most diverse large city in the world full of complex persons will not
be amenable to any such universalist model.
A successful system must consist of elements designed to meet the needs of its
constituents, rooted in those people and not in abstract ideas. Otherwise, management
is reduced to a wish list of moralistic and legal principles not a reality-based approach
focusing on practical improvements. Such wish lists are the stock in trade of
oligarchies. An oligarchical system does serve the needs o f the chosen few; LA
certainly works very well for some people. But, the evidence is convincing that the
well performing areas of our society seem not to be compensating for those
performing less well; further, there are too many protections for the few and not
enough accessibility for the many. If this is accurate, then the current LA corporate
system needs to be transformed.
However, in a transaction-based, piece-by-piece system such as LA is, this is
not possible. This brings up our third design flaw, transformation. If the system
cannot permit transformation, it cannot manage transformation. The lack of success
of the charter reform, the discussion ofNBCs, and the analysis o f consensus point to
the absence of this dynamic in the current system. In CM terms, the mechanism for
transformation is no fault learning; in CM, one looks for places where patterns have
become ideologies. Mitroff et a/’s research finds that a crisis prepared organization,
“has always stressed that it is better to learn from mistakes than to point fingers in the
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search for scapegoats” (170). No fault learning is key because it dissolves the
artificial separations created by a rationalization prone system by focusing on
activities in terms dictated by reality not ideology. In so doing, the ability to and need
for projecting bad or inaccurate definitions onto one’s own and other’s actions
disappears as there is there is no longer a need to protect one’s self from punishment
or to seek gain from blaming others because there is no punishment or gain. In other
words, there is no need to be defensive because there is no external threat or gain as
both sides are in it together - integrated.
But, blame is omnipresent and vital to the way the US and LA governmental
systems are constructed because political power has been generally, though not
exclusively, maintained and more easily generated when it was fear-based. Although
there are other more noble motivations, it was fear more than any other motivation
that has fueled our political history: fear of aristocracy, fear of religious persecution,
fear of poverty, fear of slavery, fear o f big business, fear o f immigrants, fear of
ideology, fear of fascism, fear o f communists, and fear of big government to name but
a few. Failure to acknowledge the pervasive role of fear in guiding social action was
precisely what Niebuhr meant when he said that the children o f light were foolish.
Rooted in a solid Christian fear of damnation and belief in original sin, Americans
have constructed a social superego that is based more on curing or saving after the
fact than prevention before the fact, as salvation is not in our control and original sin
is before the fact. This is the case even though we are well aware o f the fact that
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prevention is more efficient and effective. In the US, we do not use positive political
power well or have a place for it. The exceptions to this rule are few; FDR’s New
Deal and JFK’s Space Program standout as counter examples. But, they are once in a
generation events, and they are not as obvious or as plentiful as similar failures, such
as LBJ’s War on Poverty, Carter’s conversion to the metric system, Reagan and
Bush’s War on Drugs, or Clinton’s universal health care plan.
As Putnam points out, this is a triumph of ‘the personal as good’ at the cost o f
‘the social as bad or other’; but, this “personal as good” approach is not the only
model in the industrial world, most of Europe, indeed most of the world, has different
corporate political cultures. It follows from the US’s person-centered valuation that in
America anything that extends the personal extends the good (mentally this is the idea
of rationalizing) so we see the proliferation and power of interest groups and lifestyle
enclaves more than political parties or communities; this is not an accident or design
o f nature. Our candidates appeal to the individual voter by TV ads directly and
through the heart rather than through the head. The US’s split emphasis of on one
hand exalting the individual but on the other hand structuring a society built on
institutions creates a schizophrenia that makes rationalization the only sane
alternative. We rationalize rather than question, as we have done since at least the
Boston Tea Party - hardly the most rational o f responses.
This construction weakness, once identified, can be overcome. To do so, we
need to adopt a dynamic that does not punish after the fact as much as it transforms
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problems and disagreements into creative social engagement. This can be done by the
adoption o f a win-win modality. In their breakthrough bestseller of the 1980's,
Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In, Roger Fisher and William
Ury o f the Harvard Negotiation Project, laid out an approach that can be summed up
as, “Invent first; decide later. Look for shared interests and differing interest to
dovetail. And seek to make their decision easy” (83). Making “their decision easy”
requires that one understand the others’ needs and values. This parallels our analysis,
as CM would also warn that if only one side is winning, then a negative signal is being
created. Beyond that, we must bring all the people to the table if we are to know
where problems exist. In a pluralistic, reality-based world, one way to start would be
by getting just one more group to win, then another, then another, and to expand the
numbers from there. But, we must have a critical social mass first, as opposed to the
current core group only. We could secure this critical mass by creating a system that
wins for the current haves and some of the have nots - the 40% of haves plus the next
20% of have nots. This would move us from Thurow’s oligarchy threshold to his
establishment threshold; and, then, maybe we can push out to a democratic threshold
beyond that. But, this cannot happen as long as our social situation is presented as
win-lose with the object of our interaction being to assure ourselves of safety and
victory rather than working together to ease each others’, and through it our,
situation. We need a civic symphony not a public double elimination tournament to
be won or lost. Not coincidentally, this win-win thinking would make our
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governmental systems less crisis prone by nature of their being more prepared through
the introduction into the systems o f an elemental commitment to transforming
themselves in a positive manner, i.e. better management.
The type o f legitimacy crisis which arose in the late 1990’s in LA could only
be effectively addressed by the incorporation of the missing design elements of our
public corporate structure into that organizational system. However, this was not a
possible outcome as the process designed for reform was a manifestation of the
flawed system and could only serve to be a reaffirmation o f the previous corporate
culture. The American, and by extension and selection LA’s, political culture was
designed to, and does, institutionally exclude considerations o f holism, self-
examination, and transcendence from our civic debate by embracing and protecting
values that result in the subjugation of these ideas to oligarchic ideology and
practices. So, as a civic organization, we lack the success rendering tool of no fault
learning that could lead to transcendence; we lack a holistic appreciation in our
problem solving; and, we lack a self-evaluating mechanism to replace our “criticism of
the other” methodology. Our realities, as a collective and as individuals, contradict
the value of our current approach; it is non-human. We require these missing design
elements to create meaningful human existences. The system must fit those that are
its constituents and its subjects as they really are if it is to be successful; it must be
human We need a wider understanding of our human needs than is assumed by the
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oligarchical thinkers if we hope to satisfy those needs for all of those that have them,
rather than merely those that have the needs and goals of the oligarchy.
A place within the system is needed for these forgotten elements, elements left
out from the beginning of our governmental design. The strong belief that the
individual and his or her personal beliefs need to be radically protected made sense in
a reality where the monarch ruled without bounds, but in the modern era where the
rule o f law predominates, this strong belief has become a design residue that protects
itself more than serves the public good. Only if you share this religion of
individualism can you become one of the club members, and the object of the game
has always been to create a great club for those members so everyone else will do
anything to join, not to manage the affairs of all for the benefit of all. Insurance
companies are a quintessential example of this phenomena as Dr. Aditi Gowri o f the
LBJ School of Public Policy points our in her work, The Irony o f Insurance. These
club rules are the corporate regime that Jackall describes, and it has no place for any
concern beyond one's own situation. It is not holistic, self-reflective, or transcendent.
THE DESIGN FLAWS ARE ONE FOCUS OF ETHICAL INQUIRY
If we accept that holism, self-criticism, and transcendence are indeed missing
elements of the current civic corporate culture, the questions become: can these
elements be integrated into our system, and how? Interestingly enough, if we were
looking for a single area of inquiry that has historically centered on these elements, we
would find that thev are characteristics which could define the field o f social ethics, as
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was mentioned in Chapter 1. Despite holism being a value of social ethics, it is quite
obvious that not everything can be taken into account; it is just too overwhelming. It
is here that the concept of the threshold of significance can be of great value. It
illustrates that relative progress still must achieve some important level of change but
not achieve the impossible - absolute perfection. Thresholds of significance are the
underlaying concept of statistics and employed regularly by engineers and urban
planners who must make conceptual designs work in the real world. For social ethics,
they offer us a mechanism to evaluate and integrate principle in the real world. This
allows us to ground our social system in the needs and realities of the people, rather
than having them reflect heads-in-the-clouds, wishful, but unhelpful, thinking. This
comes together to argue that social ethics is the type o f thinking that needs to be
integrated into our political culture if we wish to manage our civic experience better.
Where should we place social ethics then? It needs, if it is to maintain the
integrity of its claim to holism, to be a social ordering element that encompasses, not
separates from, politics. The terms have strong overlap as Aristotle pointed out over
2000 years ago. In Book 2 of The Nicomachecm Ethics, he attempts to ascertain the
chief good that should be the target of our social interaction. “[The chief good] would
seem to belong to the most authoritative art and that which is most truly the master
art. And politics appears to be of this nature; ... since politics uses the rest o f the
sciences ... though it is worthwhile to attain the end merely for one man, it is finer and
more godlike to attain it for a nation or city-states” (Melden 89). In the context of
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the times of ancient Greece, the days of honor and virtue in action, the term politics as
used here would be more properly updated as justice or social ethics, as demonstrated
by the use of the word godlike. But, it is obvious that the two need to have a strong
nexus if the state is to be well managed. Currently, we ask politics to do too much,
we must become an ethical social organization, then the political can become a tool to
that end. As Hume pointed out, reason is the slave o f the passions; more accurately,
it can be; but, it is always in the service of a value set that epistemologically defines
good and bad. That can be power to right wrongs or power to abuse, but it is an
instrument and must be understood as so and not tied to some disembodied, absolutist
idea of progress if we are to use it well in the real world.
Reason or politics can never be that end in itself; Kant’s discussion of the
antinomies of reason make this point excellently. The end o f politics is power, and
the end of reason is the right answer. The end of society in a social ethics ordering is
the good o f its people. Being more powerful is not empowering if one does not know
how to use that power or to what ends to use it; being stronger or more forceful in
embracing one’s myopicism, ignorance, or co-optation is not empowerment. Social
good is as much about quality as it is quantity; social ethics speaks to the quality
dimension which is missing from our political culture. For most of us, the process
which leads to transcendence is a function o f self-reflection leading to exploration
within a whole life; it is not handed down from on-high based on the customs that
work for only a few. Knowing what not to do, leads us to a position to make some
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educated speculations on the role that politics can serve in the service of social ethics
- as opposed to absolutist, fascist moral ideologies.
Nowhere is this more important than in LA on the verge o f a new millennium.
Nowhere are holism and inclusion more important than “the most ethnically diverse
metropolitan area in the world” (Pitt and Pitt 140). Third world reporter Ryszard
Kapuscinski described LA and this inclusive sentiment beautifully after his first visit
here 1988 with these words:
Los Angeles is a premonition of this new civilization ... Los Angeles
and Southern California will enter the 21s t century as a multi-racial and
multicultural society. This is absolutely new. There is no previous
example of a civilization that is being simultaneously created by so
many races, nationalities and cultures. This new type o f cultural
pluralism is completely unknown in the history o f mankind. (443)
As cities worldwide swell with arrivals from all over the globe, our present is the
threshold of a new era o f intermingling. The world itself is becoming, if it has not
already become, a single economic unit. Holism is a characteristic of our new world
as much as nationalism was 250 years ago. Computers and the fall of the last great
ideological battle between communism and capitalism have caused Francis Fukuyama
to call this age the end o f history. Transformation is a part of our Zeitgeist. We can
either ignore it or we can assemble the tools we have and bring them to bare on it in
order to manage it as best we can.
Finally, all o f this flux and external stimuli forces us to look at ourselves anew.
Self-examination is the crisis of our day; legitimizing our actions to ourselves is self-
examination. Knowing all of this, we can see that nowhere on earth was there a
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better opportunity to forge a new civic matrix than a multi-ethnic city on the Pacific
rim with the highest level of media and technological savvy in existence, the highest
levels of education, and with financial resources that are the envy of the world. It
could have been done here in an intelligent and manageable way that would have
served as a model for areas such as Bosnia, the Middle East, Africa, and India/
Pakistan where they can find no other transitional methodology than the tradition of
violence. Again, Kapuscinski’s words haunt us:
La Raza Cosmica is being bom in Los Angeles, in the cultural sense if
not in the anthropological sense. A vast mosaic o f different races,
cultures, religions and moral habits are working toward one common
aim. From the perspective of a world submerged in religious, ethnic,
and racial conflict, this harmonious cooperation is something
unbelievable. It is truly striking. For the destructive, paralyzed “Third
World” where I have spent most of my life, it is important, simply, that
such a possibility as Los Angeles exists. (444)
We had it all going for us, and we could not midwife a new governmental
management era to match the new social epoch; we chose instead to follow rather
than to lead.
I cannot help but wonder what good could have been done, what pain could
have been avoided, if we had been able to give the world a peaceful, growthful
management model. The irony in it is that as we saw in chapter 2, most of the people
who came to LA before 1980 did so exactly for that reason, to create a model
existence if not a model community for the rest o f the world. As Chapter 2 reminded
us, LA is associated with dreams; be they of the type that State Librarian, Dr. Kevin
Starr, speaks of in his classic tome, Material Dreams, or the canals o f Abbot Kinney
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in his attempt to re-create Venice, or the socialist community o f Llano del Rio, or the
downtown of Mayor Bradley, or the aqueduct and harbor o f the 1920's, or the 1950's
highway system which was more extensive than in any city in history, or the height of
this type of endeavoring: the dream factory that is Hollywood but has come to be
synonymous with LA itself. Yet, when they had the opportunity to achieve this
dream, they balked at the unknown laying bare the truth that for most it was more
about personal gain than becoming a role model or for community advancement. We
have dishonored those early civic founders who indeed had the courage to build a 500
mile aqueduct and build a new type of government and our national founders who
spent months crossing a treacherous ocean to have a chance to create a new society.
They may have been off base on some things, but their hearts were in the right place.
They had not lost their sense of the ethical and of politics role in serving that better
society. It appears we have.
WORKS CITED
American Heritage Dictionary o f the English Language, The. Ed. William Morris.
Houghton Mifflin Company: Boston. 1979.
Fisher, Roger and Ury, William. Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without
Giving In. Penguin Books: NY. 1981.
Kapuscinski, Ryszard. “Second Thoughts about America’s Racial Paradise”, from The
Aims of Argument, ed. Timothy Crusius and Carolyn Channell. Mayfield
Publishing: Mountain View, California. 1995. 442-445.
Melden, A.I.. Ed..Ethical Theories: A Book o f Readings, Second Edition. Prentice-
Hall Inc.:Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. 1967.
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Mitroff, Ian, Pearson, Christine, and Harrington, Katharine. The Essential Guide to
Managing Crisis: A Step-by-Step Handbook for Surviving Major
Catastrophes. Oxford University Press: NY. 1996.
Pitt, Leonard and Pitt, Dale. Los Angeles A to Z: An Encyclopedia o f the City and
County. University of California Press: Los Angeles. 1997.
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CHAPTER 8 - SPECULATIVE AND SCHOLARLY ALTERNATIVES
FRAMING MODELS FOR ALTERNATIVES
With all case studies, we start with reality. The reality o f LA charter reform in
the 1990's is well articulated by ECC Policy Director, Dr. H. Eric Schockman, in his
essay, “Is Los Angeles Governable?”. He deduces what would be an accurate
description o f our own analysis,
This abbreviated historical perspective spells out the amazing resilience
and adaptation of the city charter to inscribe castelike power
configurations to the governing of Los Angeles well into the twilight
of the 20* century. It speaks to the very essence of the rigidity of
incorporation of contemporary inner-city constituencies and to the
peripheralization of non-Anglo, non-middle-class communities who
happen to be the plurality of the city’s residents. It demonstrates in
part the dysfunctional governing coalition that artificially administers
the metropolis and that by mere necessity of this vestige position, has
kept clear o f implementing charter reform and its resultant possibility
of a shift in the balance of municipal power. (61)
This agrees with our analysis. If this is the case, what do we, can we, do?
To move beyond a transactional, oligarchical approach to social management,
it would be helpful to find some models to inform, not dictate, our thinking. The
systems approach helps us understand our need for models based on integrated,
environmental mandates rather than ideological problem-solving assumptions, and the
previous section helps us to understand the need to factor the ethical dimension o f
social activity into the corporate mix. Incorporating the characteristics of holism,
self-criticality, and quality-seeking or transcendence, one o f our first realizations
should be that there is not a single right way o f doing things to which all else must
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conform, and this should be more than a mere critical insight. It should be an element
of our design solution. There exists scholarly work on the subject and reasonable
speculation; we should employ them to inform our thinking and assure us that it is
provides us with the system-wide information that we need to affect our best thinking
on the matter. After that, we will begin the process o f alternative generation by
offering a pair of options that could be presented to our social managers and
stakeholders for their consideration.
Assuring holism, self-criticality, and transcendence is no easy task, but luckily
we are not the first people to attempt such an endeavor. Recently as a product of the
economic restructuring of the 1980's, American businesses have been forced to
consider these organizational characteristics in the most serious o f manners - their
very survival has depended on doing it successfully. The field of Organizational
Development has spent much time on the issue of change o f large scale entities; we
can gain some useful insights from Peter J. Robertson and Sonal J. Seneviratne by
their work, "Outcomes of planned organizational change in the public sector: a meta-
analytical comparison to the private sector” which was something of a literature
review. The first of these insights we discussed in chapter one; it is, “These reviews of
the OD evaluation literature suggest that, relative to the private sector, the efficacy of
OD interventions is not limited by the public nature o f their context” (551). This
reminds us that evidence suggests strongly that despite claims that public
organizations are fundamentally of a different type than private organizations, the OD
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insights can still be used efficiently. A second insight is that, '‘Many public
organizations will require implementation of a broad range of proactive changes
designed to improve organizational functioning ... The field of planned organizational
change, based largely on the knowledge and techniques derived from the
organizational development(OD) movement, provides a potentially useful set of
approaches for implementing requisite changes along these lines” (548). Again, the
beneficial effects of OD insights is stated; but more importantly, a broad range of
changes of a proactive nature are delineated as a key to change. If this is true, we see
another weakness in the 1999 Charter; it attempted to make as few changes as
possible; and, considering its riot and secession origins, it was not proactive.
This advocacy of broad change was echoed by Gerald E. Ledford Jr. and
Susan Alberts Mohrman in their article in the Journal, Human Relations, “Self-design
for high involvement: a larger-scale organizational change”. They aver, “Our
conclusion is that in changing multi-unit, multi-level organizations, it is often better to
attempt change throughout the entire system rather than in limited pilots ... Large-
scale organizational change is a change in the character of an organization that
significantly alters its performance ... It is pervasive change” (143-4). The 1999
Charter was hardly pervasive change. The authors rightly understand, as we have
seen, that the corporate culture must be changed or the structural changes will be of
little, if any, significance. The LAPD and the changes after the Christopher
Commission provide a perfect example. The authors continue:
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Large-scale change is similar to the concept of organizational
transformation defined by Porras and Silvers (1991). They described it
as “paradigmatic change that helps the organization better fit or create
future environments. Its essence is the creation and enactment of a
new vision for the organization that entails radical change in the
behaviors of its members. This is accomplished through the
establishment of a learning organization that is capable of self-direction
and change”. (145)
Another study called it, “corporate renewal [which] occurs to the extent that
individual organizational units are able to revitalize themselves” (Beer, Eisenstat, and
Spector 145). The point is that sweeping changes have their place when the
corporate culture is entrenched. It is entrenched and institutionalized in LA, and the
way NBCs are structured by the 1999 Charter promises an extenuation o f that
inculturation rather than a sweeping change of it. A self-critical element needs to be
introduced system-wide and that requires more than merely adding a suggestion box;
it requires multi-level changes.
Ledford et al, suggest what they term self-design elements. “Self-design is a
learning strategy that provides a model for understanding and guiding change in
complex organizations ... [it] includes: an educational component; clarification of the
values that will guide the design process; and the current state of the organization
using the values as a template” (146). These three pillars, in addition to multi-level
change, can be used to form the foundation of our alternative approaches as they aline
with the ethical values that we presented as lacking in the current system last chapter.
Education has a transcendent dimension to it; clarification of values is an exercise in
self-criticality; and, the use of the those values as merely a starting point requires
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consideration of the holistic nature of a problem or issue. The authors offers some
specifics for these components; “The educational component then consists of
readings, presentations, visits to other companies, and attendance at conferences.
These activities develop theoretical understanding and exposure to concrete examples
that broaden awareness of alternative ways o f organizing” (146). “The clarification
segment may include the initiation of a values or visioning process for the
organization. Alternatively, as in the case o f Consumer Products, there may be an
existing strategy and value statement that can guide the self-design process. These
activities may include interviews, focus groups, survey data, and benchmark
performance data gathered to develop a sense of the gap between the current function
of the organization and its values” (146). The template component is not further
explained as it is fairly straight forward; the idea is that we must start from where the
organization is currently and move in manageable increments if we seek to achieve the
desired change.
Let us take a moment to contrast this four-pronged approach with the
Commissions’ actions. They wrote, or more accurately held a contest for high school
students, a 5 5-word Preamble to the Charter; with the diversity that is LA, this could
only be, and is, the most homogenized of statements. This was a poor substitute for a
value statement such as would have been provided by a bill o f rights and advocated by
OD thinking. A contest had to mean that a particular articulation of a believed-to-be-
existing unitary ideal was sought; this is very different that the solicitation and analysis
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of multiple channels and the declaration of multiple values as is suggested by a focus
group, survey, or interviews. To be fair, the Commissions did employ focus groups,
interviews, and survey, but if they were not employed in the creation of a value
statement. Their value was for use in the packaging of the decisions o f others. Why
was this approach adopted? Simply because it was in line with the corporate cultural
values o f the Commissions which held that a single, technically correct answer
existing somewhere out there, and they merely had to find it.
Mitroff and Linstone explain in their book, The Unbounded Mind, why this is
a faulty conclusion when they discuss the US Census which would seem to be much
more susceptible to this type of technical answer than a preamble.
Most people conceive of counting as a simple act because they have
placed it in a context that is either trivial or for which no important
consequences result... Counting is thus seen as simple because most
people have in their heads an example drawn from childhood where
everything of relevance was directly before them or under their
control. Such examples in no way represent the difficulties o f counting
because all of the true complexity, and hence the real problem itself,
has been eliminated by design. (95)
In other words, the determinate decision has already been made in the designing; so,
the Charter Preamble was designed not to be a value statement of a diverse
community but a uniform code of ‘proper beliefs’ for use in identifying criteria for the
inclusion and exclusion of parties in power wielding decisions.
The Commissions were issuing a statement of oligarchical limits. They were
doing this by designing a so-called empirical, objective foundation to their decision
making. But as Mitroff and Linstone point out, counting is not value free; and,
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counting is the basis of all the sciences and so called objective empirical data. By
controlling that data and its generation and validity, the Commissions, in this case and
oligarchy in the corporate case, demonstrates what it values more. It is the control
itself and the type of control that becomes visible as the highest value. Just as Gatsby
created a world completely under his control by the strength o f his resources, so too
public control has become the highest value in LA, a land of cyclical riots with a
legacy of fear of strangers. Public control of the rioters and the secessionists or the
Mayor and the Council or the government and the people was the well-spring o f the
1999 LA Charter. But public control is not public good or customer satisfaction; one
is the emphasis of the state of the past century and the other is the emphasis that will
be required in the next. Mitroff and Linstone have much more to say about this in
their book; and they say it with great salience.
Coming from a private enterprise background, the authors are quick to move
to the underlying concerns that, as we have previously established, are just as
applicable to public enterprises. They declare that, “the modem factory and business
corporation are Idea Systems”(4) not just manufacturing units.
The Service Factory rejects the idea that factories must have four walls
that are rigidly bounded in time and space. At the heart of this concept
is the notion that a factory is an unbounded, open system. In other
words, a factory must be extremely aware of and sensitive to its
environment so that it can incorporate quickly developing information
on the shifting needs and wants of consumers. As a result, nearly
every one of the key and sacred assumptions that governed design of
business in the past [before 1990] is being rethought and in many cases
overthrown and replaced with fundamentally new assumptions, (sic, 4-
5)
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They point out the characteristics of future successful systems; the 1999 LA Charter
took the opposite approach. It is bad enough, according to the quote, that it “rigidly
bound in time and space” its NBCs because this means that their implementation was
flawed; but beyond that, a more disturbing and foundational conclusion is illuminated
by this quote. That insight is that LA’s corporate managers were not even attempting
to create the service factory of the future but rather a product factory of the past.
That desired product could only have been political power. The city government thus
becomes structured more for the benefit o f those in it than the service of those outside
it which is precisely the claim that began and sustains the secession drive which is
stronger now than it was before the Commissions were empaneled.
In speaking of these outdated business assumptions, Mitroff and Linstone
conclude that, “We confused and took for granted short-term, temporary, conditions
[after World War II] as permanent advantages that existed for all time” (7-8). These
are almost the same words that Reinhold Niebuhr used to describe our cultural
actions after World War II, “The social and historical optimism of democratic life, for
instance, represents the typical illusion o f an advancing class which mistook its own
progress for the progress of the world” (2). This myopicism is true of ever-
prosperous LA to the nth degree. As a result, we have only been moved to make
changes when disasters have made us incapable of returning to the past. This is, not
surprisingly, in line with one of Mitroff and Linstone’s conclusion, “Crisis may be the
best, if not the only, teacher on how to create an economy that is better matched to
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the needs of today’s world” (10). But, LA did not look to the future for new
approaches and prepare itself as a corporate organization for that future; instead, it
looked backwards and returned to old ideas and retread dated methods in the name of
conflict avoidance and the lack of financial, leadership, and personal resources to
educate and re-tool public understanding, as the successful corporations of the late
80's and early 90's had no choice but to do.
So, is there a solution? Mitroff and Linstone reject Agreement and Analysis
(as they define them and consensus and problem-solving as we have used them) as the
appropriate inquiry systems for these problems and offer us Unbounded Systems
Theory, UST. UST begins with an admission of multiple realities and viewpoints.
Rejection o f a singularity of truth necessitates our acceptance of and accounting for
the role of conflict in the process of issue resolution. This contrasts with the idea of
consensus, control, or agreement as highest goal. Here we can see how UST can be
beneficial to public organizations. There is a widespread belief (reinforced by
continual Republican rhetoric) that the public sector can never be as efficient as the
private sector because the private sector has the market to discipline it while the
public sector does not. What is the arbitration of supply and demand if it is not an
inherent conflict resolution mechanism? The centrality of consensus, control, or
agreement to the public enterprise means that it cannot be disciplined by conflict.
UST offers us a way to integrate the disciplining reality of conflict into the public
sector. In the creation of such mechanism(s) to public enterprises within a UST
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inquiry system, the inputs would still be “messy” but the government need not be the
“necessary evil” that many on the right claim it must be.
How can this be done? An example of how UST can integrate public and
private methods to the benefit of both is highly instructive in answering that question.
What if we thought of homelessness as a business problem instead of a
lost cause that could only be treated by the nonprofits? A handful of
new organizations around the country are doing exactly what
successful businesses do - they are asking themselves what their clients
want and are giving it to them ... One such program exists in the center
of Los Angeles’s skid row - the homeless capital o f the nation. It is
called the Weingart Center ... More that 60% o f the nonmentally ill
people who have passed through the doors of the Weingart Center are
permanently off the streets, living testimonials to the idea that even a
social problem as difficult and as complex as homelessness is
susceptible to innovative, entrepreneurial, and market-driven
management approaches ... It is ample testimony to what “new
thinking” applied to old problems can accomplish. (80-1)
Why is this attributable to public sector thinking? “The Weingart Center did not drift
into this business accidentally, any more than Federal Express drifted into the
overnight package delivery business. Its approach came about as the result of
painstaking planning and meticulous implementation on the part of the Center’s
current business-minded management, which took charge in 1985, when it was facing
financial ruin” (80). What is termed “business-minded” here is set in opposition to
bureaucratic-minded; this parallels the opposition of non-profit and for-profit which is
a part of “business-minded”. So, the somewhat obscured dynamic in this example is
what UST labels the Dialectic Inquiry System. Weingart works because these
dialectics channel conflict into a strengthening factor rather than something to be
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avoided or something which will tear the organization apart. “The guarantor of this
system [dialectic] is conflict. It is hoped that as a result of witnessing an intense,
explicit debate between polar opposites that the observer will be in a much stronger
position to know the assumptions of the two adversaries and as a result clarify his or
her own assumptions” (78-9). The dialectic is the precise methodology o f our court
system. It is particularly suited for the public sector because it disciplines the value of
freedom of speech with the need for public order and service as the Weingart example
demonstrates.
But, UST reminds us that, “Agreement, Analysis, Multiple Realities, and
[Dialectic] as Inquiry Systems all have strict limits. We should also realize that the
first three of these systems are more closely associated with the sciences and the
technical professions, while the dialectic is used much more readily in the others”
(90). “In a complex system there is no way of getting completely outside of it to
reach a purely objective [perspective] that will satisfy all parties” (96-7). This flies in
the face of rationalists such as John Rawls. Different tools o f analysis are required for
this type of inquiry. One o f these tools which UST uses is the multiple perspective
method; it is a tripartite inquiry system consisting of: T: The Technical Perspective;
O. The Organizational or Societal Perspective; and P: The Personal or Individual
Perspective (99). These perspectives are brought to bare on all problems; this is
because, “Each perspective reveals insights about a problem that are not obtainable
in principle from the others. In particular, the organizational and personal
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perspectives draw on or sweep in societal and human aspects that pervade all complex
systems” (sic 98).
This method has several key characteristics of which we should be aware:
managers are a fundamental part of the system or problem being analyzed; even if all
complex problems involve all three perspectives, one’s ethical values colors the
choice and emphasis of perspectives; the value of three perspectives lies in their ability
to yield unique insights; any complex problem can be viewed from any perspective; O
and P differ in fundamental, key characteristics from T; one cannot prove that a set o f
perspectives is the “right” set; two perspectives may reinforce, cancel each other, on
interact in a dialectic manner; a perspective may change over time; it is not easy at
times to distinguish between the O and P perspectives; and real life managing of
situation consists of at least three activities - a. analyzing alternatives, b. making
decisions, and c. successfully implementing the chosen alternative - The T perspective
focuses most strongly on a. and least on c. while O and P become more crucial as we
move from a. to c. because of the dependency on human factors (99-102).
Additionally, the multiple perspective method employed by UST employs five
guidelines. They are: 1. Strive for balance among T, O, and P perspectives; 2.Use
“good” judgement on selecting perspectives; 3. In obtaining information, recognize
that O and P require greatly different methods than T; 4. Pay particular attention to
the mutual impact, interdependencies, and integration of perspectives; and 5. Beware
of thinking statically in a dynamic environment (107-8). These tenets of UST extend
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it from its conceptual base to a broad outline on which we can build reality tempered
systems that integrate important missing dimension into the public debate.
“UST extends this [sweeping in] to its most extreme or radical limits - in
principle, UST sweeps in every discipline, profession, way o f knowing so as to give
the broadest possible view of any problem” (sic 109). Sweeping in means UST is
“^^disciplinary” (sz'c 109);
UST does not believe that we can ‘solve’ important problems by
respecting the current structure of the disciplines, professions, or the
modem university. The various sciences and professions are the
product of human organization. In a sense they are artifacts, not
natural entities. As such, in working on every problem, we are also
simultaneously working on how we organize ourselves to solve our
problems. (109)
This alines with our identification of the ethical perspective as Aristotle’s “Master
science” idea which incorporates all the other sciences. UST also parallels the three
criteria of ethics; roughly, the T perspective is the characteristic of transcendence, the
O is holistic, and the P is self critical.
So, we have informed our thinking by research models. Our alternatives need
to utilize multi-level interventions to change the corporate culture. We need to
include a number of perspectives, the T, O, and P to use UST terminology but
understanding these will include the ethical characteristics of holism, transcendence,
and self-criticality that we identified in the last chapter. Three components,
education, values statement, and reality template need to be incorporated into the
alternatives. Finally, to honor the idea of a dialectic, since a single author cannot do
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justice to such a concept, we shall present two different, if not opposing, models for
consideration. The fate o f much rides on our efforts considering that, “Threats to the
individual or the ‘self arise from the existence of a class of organizations that can
only be termed crisis prone ... These organizations play and perpetuate a set of
destructive ‘games’ that Mitroff and Puchant have identified that literally threaten the
physical and mental well being of their workers” (156). When such threatening
organizations are the governments served with the duty to protect us, we are truly left
with nowhere to hide.
ALTERNATIVE WAYS
All of this forms a solid foundation on which we can begin to construct
alternative public management models. We will look briefly at two alternatives, one
speculative and one scholarly, in the hopes of opening the conversation and
broadening our ideas of what is possible or thinkable. This is not meant as an
exhaustive or even comprehensive list of alternatives; rather, they are offered as a
starting point or springboard for public discussion and consideration. They are
alternative in that they incorporate the insights of our analysis and attempt to employ
them for the public good. The scholarly model was chosen because o f its
compatibility with and grounding in social ethics as defined by this study. But again,
the idea here is to solicit, not to dictate, consideration. Paraphrasing John F.
Kennedy, “Asking not what our country can do for us, but rather attempting to ask
what we can do for our country”. Because, as another politician from that state and
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Speaker of the US House, Tip O’Neill understood, “All politics is local”. In sum,
this underscores the insight of UST, feminists, and our analysis that the private and
ethical must be a part o f our public consideration.
RUSSELL MODEL ALTERNATIVE
Bertrand Russell’s tome, Authority and the Individual, is his attempt to
balance the drives, motivations, and gifts of humans with the necessity for order and
the concession required by government. But at heart, his social analysis is an ethical
one; we can see this in the following quote:
Ever since history began, the majority of mankind have lived under a
load of poverty and suffering and cruelty, and have felt themselves
impotent under the sway of hostile or coldly impersonal powers.
These evils are no longer necessary to the existence o f civilization;
they can be removed by the help of modem science and modem
technique, provided these are used in a humane spirit and with an
understanding of the springs of life and happiness. Without such
understanding, we may inadvertently create a new prison, just,
perhaps, since none will be outside it, but dreary and joyless and
spiritually dead. (51)
The transformative focus of his analysis is obvious as is its holistic approach; it, like
our study, attempts to be self-reflective as well by not drawing a conclusion. It is
critical as seen in its firm grounding of the system in the real needs of the people; this
is evidenced by the final line of the work: “In these lectures I have sought for a wider
understanding of human needs than is assumed by most politicians and economists,
for it is only through such an understanding that we can find our way to the
realization of those hopes which, though as yet they are largely frustrated by our folly,
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our skill has placed within our reach” (79) . Such thinking is clearly compatible with
social ethics as we have sketched it out here.
The understanding that Russell offers is based on an understanding o f history,
human nature, and reason. He claims there are two main purposes to social action.
The first is security and justice which is a product of centralized government. The
second is what he calls, “progress” before its post-modern criticism and not as was
employed by the American Progressives as we have discussed them previously. He
means progress as personal initiative to the greatest degree that is still compatible
with social order. This requires a devolution o f power from the centralized state as
well as from large industrial units. Regulation is required only for dealing with
questions of appropriate scale; for instance, the size of railroad tracks requires
uniformity for the industry and country to survive, but the rest o f rail matters should
be left to self-government of the industry - but an industry where workers are full
partners with management. “The general principle should be to leave to smaller
bodies all functions which do not prevent the larger bodies from fulfilling their
purpose” (62). This is identical to the self-design ideals of Ledford and Mohrman.
They wrote, “Applied to multi-level organizations, self-design implies a minimal
specification approach where those at higher levels of the organization should specify
broad design parameters, leaving the more specific designing to be done by the
members of the units that have to do the design work locally” (145). Russell seems to
have had system thinking sensibilities long before they were anointed by the academy.
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Russell felt that matters of opinion should be left to, “genuine competition; as
conceptual matters are the perfect arena for such competitive instincts”. This
perspective is in tune with the UST incorporation of conflict through the dialectic
even to keeping the competition in the realm o f ideas overseen by arbitrators. Still,
diversity is a condition ofRussell’s progress as well, and he posits that cultural
matters should seek to foster such diversity. “Uniformity o f character and uniformity
of culture are to be regretted ... Differences between nations, so long as they do not
lead to hostility are by no means to be deplored” (65). This is a call for a multiple
perspective model. In short, Russell bifurcates the state’s management of human
affairs to match the dual nature he sees as inherent in our composition. Different
sides of our make up require different responses for compatible social management.
He writes:
The general principle which, if I am right, should govern the respective
spheres o f authority and initiative, may be stated broadly in terms of
the different impulses that make up human nature. On the one hand,
we have impulses to hold what we possess, and (too often) to acquire
what others possess. On the other hand, we have creative impulses,
impulses to put something into the world which is not taken away
from anybody else ... Broadly speaking, the regularization of
possessive impulses and their control by the law belong to the
essential functions of government, while the creative impulses, though
government may encourage them, should derive their main influence
from individual or group autonomy, (sic, 65)
We can see that for Russell, government is essentially an integrating act, or a tiering
of functions. But, these functions or perspectives are two sided - to use the AST
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language, T is one and O and 1 are one. In many ways, he is more binary than
multiple but this is understandable for a mathematician.
But his views are not black and white. Russell continues, '‘in regards to
material goods, justice is important, but in regards to mental goods the thing that is
needed is opportunity and an environment that makes hope o f achievement seem
rational” (66). Then, he concluded the chapter on this note:
The control o f greedy or predatory impulses is imperatively necessary,
and therefore states, and even a world state, are needed for survival.
But we cannot be content merely to be alive rather than dead; we wish
to live happily, vigorously, creatively. For this the state can provide a
part o f the necessary conditions, but only if it does not, in the pursuit
of security, stifle the largely unregulated impulses which give life its
savor and its value. (66)
There is little explicit separation between the O and I perspectives, but it is clearly
implied that they are not the same thing. However, Russell is not maintaining that
they must be separate things. He is protecting individual choice; this tells us that he
values it above all and primarily in this non-governmental realm containing both the O
and I perspectives.
It might seem that government is merely a necessary evil in Russell’s mind;
but, this is too shallow a reading. “I have not meant to suggest that governments
should have no other functions [than essential ones]. But in the main, their function in
the other spheres should be to encourage non-governmental initiative, and to create
opportunities for its exercise in beneficent ways” (58). This is because, “it is
necessary to urge the desirability of freedom to experiment, for this class [of
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intellectual entrepreneurs] included all that has been best in the history of human
achievement” (59). Russell therefore would not support reducing the funding to the
National Endowment for the Arts so people might chose privately what arts they
wished to support or school voucher so that parents might pick into which private
school they could enroll their children, he would argue for public support o f the Arts
on competing sides of the fence and for more and better public schools. Yet, this is
not a “left wing” argument either; he also contents, “Among the things that are in
danger of being unnecessarily sacrificed to democratic equality, perhaps the most
important is self-respect. By self-respect I mean the good half o f pride - what is called
‘proper pride’ The bad half is a sense o f superiority” (48). Again we see that had
Russell had the terminology, he would have enjoined us to actively support a multiple
perspective in the vein of UST.
This last quote would have been greeted with cheers in the San Fernando
Valley, or most of the rest o f LA during the charter debates. Russell’s anti-oligarchy,
pro-personal initiative model would have found great favor with the more
conservative politicos, including the secessionists. But, the pro-business regulation
and diversity subsidizing facets of the model would have found favor with their
opponents. For this reason, Russell’s design offers us a useful model to begin
considering a new corporate management strategy for LA (as does the speculative
one following). Still, it must be understood that it was written in post-WW II
England and requires some re-interpreted and updating for the US. For example, the
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evils of centralization that Russell harangues against are not as extreme in America
and even less so in LA. Russell was not familiar with the equally obstructive
parochial phenomena of NIMBYism, or the possible tyranny of a small non
governmental groups. So, we are called upon to factor these new developments into
his mix. However, the surprising thing is not this need to update; but rather, how, in
the main, applicable Russell’s thoughts are without modification despite the difference
o f 50 plus years, thousands of miles, and the level o f government addressed. He
foresaw much o f what too many corporations did not understand until the 1980's and
some still do not.
This brings us to attempt a specific application of Russell’s thinking as best
can be extrapolated and in the form identified in the pervious section. We could
create a 3x3 matrix of 9 cells with our three components of design, education, values
specification, and reality template, on one axis and the three perspectives, T, O, and P
on the other.
TABLE 8-1 - UST DESIGN STRUCTURE IMPLEMENTATION MATRIX
components and
perspectives
technical org’tional/social personal/individual
education technical-
educational
org/social-
education
person/individual
education
values
specification
technical-values
specific
org/social-values
specific
pers/individual-
values specific
reality template technical-reaiity
template
org/social-reality
template
pers/individual-
reality template
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By filling in each cell we would create the multi-level interventions that we know to
be required for such organizational change. So, we would have cells on the personal-
educational activities as well as the organizational-educational ones and the technical-
educational ones; the other two components would have similar cells. Furthermore,
this matrix would be imbued with the ethical perspective identified as missing in the
current system as the three components and the three perspectives each embody the
three ethical dimensions, holism, transcendence, and self-critically as delineated earlier
in an integrated manner. Following this matrix-driven approach, we will run down
the issues and themes identified in the case study to posit specific alternative actions
following from Russell’s thinking.
The educational-technical activities would be centered around expanding the
civic corporation’s problem-solving capacities. The idea would be to free the
creativity o f citizens by supporting multiple perspectives. Specifically, a re
orientation o f the levels of control would be needed. Greater emphasis would be
placed on examining other concrete examples o f organizational structure and
functioning; readings and presentations on the latest ideas and techniques from
academics and professional conferences should be supported as well. Technology
could be employed to enhance connection between levels o f control. The basic
difference with present usage would be a redirecting of creativity up from the citizens
by bringing control to them, soliciting differing alternatives, and using UST-type
thinking rather than problem solving. The educational-organizational/social activities
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would be the appreciation and cataloguing of various social units approaches to
various social problems. For Russell, this could take on the form o f mediating
organizations such as employee boards, arts councils, planning committees and the
like. Further, these various approaches would be yoked together in social
management; for instance, companies would still run businesses but with employees
(on boards or as trustees) would have no small measure o f control over corporate
actions as would the local jurisdiction. Conflict would be permitted at a certain level
of administration but not between levels. Again, the educational component would be
served by the embracing o f the multiple perspectives that would permit personal
creativity to emerge. Perhaps the best example of this cell o f action would be the
California General Plan Process that sets the management plan for every area every 10
years. Finally, the educational-personal/individual activities would be two-fold: the
creation of opportunities for creativity by re-orientation o f the information flow and
the establishment of incentives for personal action. Though Russell thinks the former
will be sufficient, LA of 2000 is not the same as Oxford of the 1940's. Personal rights
have corresponding responsibilities; by fulfilling these responsibilities we are
educated. So, activities such as jury duty (to learn what is really happening in law
enforcement), voting, attending board and general plan meetings, and the like, should
be attached with some financial reward or social sanction to make them near
mandatory. Also, the city should have a more pervasive and accessible information
presence in the city. Finally, people should be encouraged by the municipality to
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attend classes and develop their professional and creative talents as so doing now
increases the public capacity as well.
Moving to the values specification-technical cell we would find most changes
in the expansion from a single value, melting pot, approach to a multi-value, stew,
approach. Learning to work with multiple value sets in a socially positive manner
would be a challenge; a new set of experts would be required to guide the shift in
focus. In addition, a new form o f manager would emerge who relies more on
communication skills and discernment between value sets from the benefit of all; but,
as Mitroff and Linstone state, “It can be argued that the selection of the proper
perspective constitutes the test o f effective decision making and implementation”
(107). For those not naturally blessed, there are guidelines and characteristics as
documented last section. One of the main focuses of this study area would be the
establishment and monitoring of thresholds of significance for the difference between
the gap in values desired and performance obtained. The values specification-
organizational/ social activities would involve governmental outreach in the form of
interviews, surveys, and focus groups, mediating institutions, decentralization, and the
integration of communities of values. While this could take the form ofNBCs, it
would not be NBCs as structured in the 1999 Charter. NBCs with powers in line
with those advocated by many from the Valley and Harbor might do the trick. LA
penchant for voluntary groups and small businesses could be very helpful in this
instance. Likewise the use of commissions could be helpful, but only if they include
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multiple perspectives and are chosen from the people not dictated by the Mayor and
Council. This leads personal value expression activities for the values specification-
personal/individual area. Again, LA has a good history in this area; however, these
expressions need to be channeled for the public good as much as they are currently
directed at standing out from others. Autonomy and creativity need to be facilitated;
but, civic responsibility needs to be equally revered, and the strengthening o f them
both enhances the dialogue between them which will further strengthen them as well.
We can now move on to the reality template-technical area; here we begin
dealing with more specific mechanisms based on the previously expressed re
orientation. The reality of a single culture LA is giving way, but not in its
governmental perspective. To do so, we could begin by educating the senior decision
makers (elected officials, G.M.’s, and their deputies) on the need for and advantages
ofUST-type thinking. Then, we could offer them support in re-focusing their staff.
The other techniques mention in the T areas could be initiated, as well. Decision
making organizations would need to be changed, in addition; commissioner selection
could be opened and insistences could be made that boards and employee groups be
expanded or formed to empanel multiple perspectives as a part of the decision making
processes. The reality template-social/organizational would dictate that mediating
organizations be established with the support of the city. Organizations to deal with
child care, health insurance, housing, transportation, parks, libraries and so on with
power and expertise would need to be established; organization with hundreds or
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thousands o f interested members, not 5 person committees would be the goal and
responsibility o f the city. The government’s budgeting and arbitration of the
mandated multiple perspective organization would be a statement of civic value while
still acting as a higher level of control over the organizations. Likewise, use of, as
opposed to current ignoring of, the general plan and its standard process for the
publicizing and settlement of social group conflict could re-orient the civic
government in a beneficial manner.
But, in many ways the challenges offered in the reality template-personal/
individual area are the most difficult. If working with the LA City Council is, as has
been described, like “trying to herd cats”, then managing LA is like herding millions
of cats. The creativity o f our residents needs, in a major way, to be partially diverted
toward the commonweal; participation is the key to making a civic system work and
that cannot be a hope or assumption o f government, it must be a responsibility. While
a more citizen-driven government will help attract some o f these energies, enough to
satisfy Russell’s thresholds, such attraction will not satisfy the education element (and
the corresponding transcendent or self-reflective ethical values) needed to achieve a
UST-type system. So, incentives based on current reality are need. Perhaps voting,
jury duty, and working with a mediating organization should have a corresponding
financial reward or their lack of a financial penalty. A $5000 fine could be assessed
for those not fulfilling jury service every five or so years, or a vacation day to vote or
a 9 day two-week work cycle with a 10t h day in service to a civic organization could
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be created. The key here is that the individual’s connection to the society needs to be
made more explicit so that the individual can see the connections as existing rather
than having to be created. The transportation, housing, and health care systems do
effect them whether they realize it or not; by making the impact known, people will be
more inclined to direct that impact. If some of the transportation numbers about the
pollution, lost hours on freeways, and underutilization of services are true, it would be
cheaper to make Metrolink free. How would that change peoples’ behavior? In
short, more options would be good but the basic civic business would need to be
taken care of and that would require incentives and disincentives. The generation and
evaluation o f these actions outlined above should have been the thrust o f a city
charter that sought to create an LA capable of leading us into the next century.
Structuring a system to do all of this would surely be a challenge, but a challenge in
the tradition of putting a person on the moon or building an aqueduct to bring water
500 miles to a growing city.
Let us take a minute to survey the issues discussed in the charter debate and
extrapolate how this Russellian alternative would have advised us to act on them.
First, a bill of rights would be a necessary statement of the multiplicity that is the city
and a template to guide social action. The council size would be small, but would be
so because decentralization would disperse the decision making leaving much less
upon which the Council would be required to act. Consensus would be replaced with
multiple perspectives, conflict, and perspective selection. The scope of participation
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would need to be expanded in a multiple intervention manner. The Mayor - Council
balance would be subsumed in a decentralization that would alter the checks and
balances idea and reduce these two political titans to important but not controlling
parts of an integrated system. The Mayor’s hiring and firing of department heads
would not be an issue as departments are morphed into organizations the leadership
of which would be selected by those organizations, not the Mayor. Management by
compartmentalization would be replaced by a UST-type management style. Likewise,
leadership and personnel would become functions of perspective discernment and
communication rather than ideological and professional compatibility with higher ups.
NBCs might still be employed but their spatial identity would be a proxy for value
enclaves. The general plan process would deal with most of these concerns and a
multitude of other moderating civic organizations would be in place to handle
customer concerns. Finally, the idea of representation would come more in line with
Pitkin’s idea of recreation on a different level as the newly employed decentralization
would create such levels.
RADICAL INDIVIDUALISM/CIVIC EMBODIMENT ALTERNATIVE
If the goal of the political structure is to create a multiple perspective,
complimentary system rather than a singularity, then perhaps, radical democracy by
individuals would create a paradoxical dialectic in which the whole is strengthen as
the parts are strengthened. As in a good family or a championship sports team, the
better the group collectively the better the members are individually. Why can these
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ideals not be utilized for our society as a whole? The hope of this line of thinking is
to push this worship of the individual, which is so prevalent here in LA but has been
politically operationalized only for the few, to a radical level for all until the system
reorients itself by learning, as non-violence attempts to do, or the system collapses by
an inability to meet its needs as our political system did with the Articles of
Confederation, the Depression and New Deal, or could with the growing disparity of
wealth. Can it possibly work?
One could respond that it is not that different than reliance on the market.
Aggregate demand drives the economy, and no one calls it unruly or impossible. Why
can these same techniques not be transferred to public corporate management?
Conservatives have been arguing this position for years; many charter reformers from
VTCA to the Chamber of Commerce voiced plans based on this line of thinking as
mentioned previously; the Weingart examples says that it can be done. What if we
held them to their word? After all, people stop at red lights and stop signs not
because of the police enforcement but because they understand the social utility in it.
What if we truly operationalize John Stuart Mills’s call in, On Liberty, “the only
purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized
community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others ... Over himself, over his
own body and mind, the individual is sovereign” (141). If the same level o f freedom
could be granted in the political sphere, there would be no telling where that road
might take us.
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This speculative alternative relies principally on the use of education. This
theoretical model moves from present embeddedness to future embodiment. As
designed in the 1999 Charter, NBCs must be embedded in a location. But, LA is not
its buildings, houses, streets, or institutions; it is its people. The first step in
operationalizing this goal of embodiment would be to remember this fact. Rather than
E Pluribus Unum (out of many, one), we might be better off with E Pluribus Nos
(out of many, us). This means that we, as citizens, must learn to embody LA and/or
America through our practices; whatever it is we want LA to be must be embodied in
its people. Part of this would be civic rituals, not unlike those Durkheim suggested,
part o f it would be authority-based learning not lineage-based authority or
opportunity, part would be education o f the rights and responsibilities of the citizen,
part would be the study of the civic law in order to hold people to what they must be
to support our becoming what we wish to be, and finally part would be open,
dynamic, and continuing discussion o f what we wish to be with multiple modes and
measures for its obtainment. This obviously reflects UST-type conclusions with its
reliance on multiple perspectives. In today’s LA, many of us already have a good start
on this as we are children of several cultural traditions.
The focus of education would have to be expanded from merely math and
science to the study and appreciation of cultural distinction by each and every
individual. This is not un-American; remember that the current math and science
emphasis was a government driven reaction to Sputnik in the 1950's. Thus, by
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beginning with the embracing of distinction as a first principle, we would safeguard
our autonomy and our democracy. However, since you cannot have distinction
without similarity, the study and appreciation o f similarity (not forced compliance) is
of first order as well. This study must be no fault study in order to benefit from the
complimentary forces and synergistic energies of these dialectic relationships and to
avoid the problems of externalizing as was discussed earlier. In the same manner that
learning a foreign language helps you understand English better or playing tennis can
help your golf game or learning to drive a large truck can make you a better driver o f
your family minivan, so too, the understanding o f multiple cultures will help one
appreciate and integrate one’s own culture and resist the need to create modalities o f
exclusion and hegemony.
This understanding echos the thinking of the architect of American education,
Thomas Jefferson. Merrill Peterson explains Jefferson’s views this way in his opus,
Thomas Je fferson and the New Nation:
Of course the schools would teach reading, writing, and arithmetic. The aims
of primary education included moral improvement, the acquisition of skills
necessary for the common personal and business transactions of life, and
instruction in the rights and duties of citizens. The last of these particularly
absorbed his attention in 1778; and he specifically directed instruction in the
history and experience of other ages and nations so that young citizens may
come to recognize tyranny in embryo and exert themselves to crush it.
Instead of drawing their moral lesson from the Bible, the children were to take
the histories of Greece, Rome, Europe, and America as their texts. (147)
The idea of learning from many experiences was an intention of one of our founding
fathers who felt that it was our public duty to educate citizens and leaders alike, “That
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not was more important, none was more legitimate, than that o f rendering the people
the safe, as they are the ultimate, guardians of their own liberty” (146). So, it is in
keeping with the role of education in the democracy,, according to one of its greatest
theorists and advocates, Thomas Jefferson, that civic education start as the
responsibility of the schools; and as such, would constitute a required element of
education. This would require the outlawing of home schooling as the home reflects
the culture o f the family as opposed to that of the society and permits the one in place
of the other rather than in addition to the other.
Why is it that we claim to be the citizens and rulers o f this democracy but we
do not have to understand its laws? A recent NY Times article illustrated the lack of
embodiment o f American civic understanding even amongst the best and brightest of
our kids. “The study sponsored by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni,
found that none of the 55 [top universities] required American history for graduation.
And only 78 percent of them required students to take any history classes”(A25). Was
this because they already knew this material from high school? “Nearly 80 percent of
seniors at 55 top colleges and universities, including Harvard and Princeton, received
a D or an F on a 34-question high school level test on American History”(A25).
Those who do not remember history are destined to repeated it, and the cost rises
with each generation. We could require high schoolers to take classes on the legal
structure o f the state, city, and federal governments; they could not be harmed by
knowing their rights and the punishable rules of society. If knowledge is power, this
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would be formidable empowerment. Make the law a part o f them, not something
restricted to the legal high priests. The Jewish tradition does this with its Bar (Bat)
Mitzvah and has had great success for thousands of years. Could we not do the
same? Could we not nest Los Angeles in our hearts, rather than our streets or other
tangible externals? But the schools cannot shoulder the entire burden, we know
multiple level intervention is required.
To more systematically examine these interventions, let us employ our 3X3
design matrix for implementation structuring. The educational-technical activities
would focus on shifting from a centralized, macro approach to a more individual
driven orientation. Marketing would replace command and control and corporate
decisions would have to be tunneled through the individual; the idea would be to give
the money or power to the persons and let them decide how to spend it. Problem
solving would become customer satisfying. The educational-organizational/social
activities would take the form of mediating processes more than organizations. Ways
of finding out what is where, not unlike Internet search engines, would create social
learning beyond the mandatory school requirements. The mediating mechanism such
as the social safety net would be replaced in favor of personal choice and niche
industries. Organizational learning would be increased by the enhanced power of the
individual to affect and dictate organizational action. The most important learning
would be on the individual level. The tradeoff for the expanded rights and power for
persons would be the fulfillment of civic responsibilities and the understanding of how
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these responsibilities link the society. So a combination of mandates and incentives
would be required. We could make serving on jury duty (something the numbers
suggest only about 3% of us do) mandatory for obtaining a driver’s license or make
the service high paying. The same can be done for voting or public service. Students
not preforming, in this model, could be required to attend more classes, not
suspended from the very instruction they require; or we could give rebates to people
who participate in PTA. We could make voting a requirement for obtaining a driver’s
license. We could offer health coverage to those that preform civic duties assisting
the police, fire, and/or medical services. In other words, we could be creative in
restructuring the incentives in the culture to at once free citizens to make more
decisions for themselves while also imbuing those citizens with civic understanding.
Clearing stating values would be more difficult with this alternative. The
values specification-technical will be moved toward understanding the civic
consumers’ desires and ascertaining which things, such as water, police, and schools
are civically significant enough to mandate and operate. They would also have to
ascertain to what degree these services are meeting the purpose to which they were
designed. The values specification-organizational/social actions would be aggregate
demand groupings and performance thresholds regulators. The transactions o f the
individuals must have rules and these rules must be enforced. The organizational
values will drive this rules regime, and the dialectic nature of the system will
necessitate decisions which will in turn necessitate statements of values to explain
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these decisions. The values specification on the personal/individual level will be
primarily through actions and choices made by the individuals. Purchasing o f goods,
private and public, will articulate the values of those buying or forgoing them. If
people choose to lower taxes rather than fund a school, then they will have to live
with the effects of their choice. Reality is a cruel but clear teacher.
This brings us to the reality template component of this alternative which
would be the easiest in already individualized LA. On the reality template-technical
level, we would need to define realms o f required understanding and of actions and
individual control. In regards to the first, we would have to craft a system to provide
these things to all and verily their transmission. Drivers’ test type actions would be
expanded into many different areas, and standards of civic understanding would need
to be established. In regards to the second, choice should be enhanced wherever
possible; let the market work. This realm could expand to include voting on civic
issues and do away with the need for a legislative council completely. The reality
template-social/ organizational activities would be to do away with mediating
institutions in the society such as political parties, HMO’s, and commissions. If
people are willing to pay for something, they will; and whoever can provide it best,
will do so. The process of involvement, be it shopping, civic duty fulfillment, or
education will serve the functions previously attributed to “parasitic middlemen and
bureaucrats”. This will be akin to privatization on a large scale. Finally, the reality
template-personal/individual actions would require the fulfillment of the civic
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mandatory activities design to integrate citizens’ understanding by embodying in them
the civic ideals. While beginning with reshaping education, it would continue by the
creation of incentives and requirements devised to reenforce this embedding such as
working in a museum, officiating at a youth soccer game, or serving as a librarian.
The city would only become as integrated and successful as its citizens, and the
failures of the city would serve as warnings and learning opportunities for the citizens.
The government would hold the difference between the two up to the citizens for
review, deliberation, and decision. Some of these decisions we can speculate upon
using those in the charter reform debate.
The radical individual, embedded model would have taken important positions
on many of the debated issue of the 1999 LA Charter. The bill of rights would have
been seen as essential to separate the mandatory from the individual. Council size
would be “the smaller the better”; the Board o f Supervisors has only 5 members and it
functions for the entire county. That which would be left to the Council should be
minimized and most o f that would be administrative so there is little value in more
persons as it would only add cost. The issue of consensus would be replaced by
either an overwhelming mandate for the mandatory things or a market determination
on the other things. The scope of participation would be expanded as all would be
required to participate in mandated things beyond that the choice would be each
persons’ so the question would not be if participating but how. The Mayor - Council
balance issue would be important on mandated matters, but irrelevant on others. The
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balance might be better served by regular citizen voting on key issues so as to reduce
the Mayor and Council to administrators rather than decision makers. The Mayor’s
hiring and firing of department heads would not be favored in this alternative as
departments should be directed by the market and peoples’ choices. The Mayor’s
direction would muddy this unnecessarily and unproductively. Compartmentalization
would be replaced by niche marketing, and leadership and personnel would be
tempered and disciplined by the market rather than idealized standard or personal
favoritism. NBCs would be seen as another layer of government and a waste of
money; similarly, representation would be viewed as a poor proxy for market
understanding and to be avoided to the degree possible.
The meta-question this study has asked has been: how do we manage well. Do
we act as we think is best or do we try to find the right rules of God, science, or
philosophy and hope they are right and that we can follow them? The latter absolves
of responsibility for results; the former places the damnation squarely on us if we are
wrong. But, the former allows us to learn from our mistakes; the latter places all the
responsibility on the designer. I argue it better for us to start taking responsibility for
our social governance; it is the ethical thing to do.
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Asset Metadata

Creator O'Malley, Michael Anthony (author)

Core Title "Pay no attention to those men behind the curtains": An ethical examination of Los Angeles charter reform activities 1996--1999 by use of crisis management

School Graduate School

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Religion

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag business administration, management,OAI-PMH Harvest,Philosophy,Political Science, public administration

Language English

Contributor Digitized by ProQuest (provenance)

Advisor May, William W. (committee chair), [illegible] (committee member), Mitroff, Ian I. (committee member)

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c16-105893

Unique identifier UC11338213

Identifier 3027759.pdf (filename),usctheses-c16-105893 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier 3027759.pdf

Dmrecord 105893

Document Type Dissertation

Rights O'Malley, Michael Anthony

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the au...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus, Los Angeles, California 90089, USA