Charter Panel Compares Big Orange to Big Apple

In a display of bicoastal open-mindedness unusual in a city that styles itself Not Yet New York, Los Angeles officials have reached eastward for advice on how to draft a new blueprint for local government.

Ruth W. Messinger, a tough, sophisticated former Manhattan borough president and doyenne of liberal politics on New York City’s Upper West Side, flew west last weekend as the guest of Los Angeles’ Elected Charter Reform Commission and immediately declared that it is not necessarily wrong to compare apples to oranges, at least if they are very big.

“New York likes to believe it is unique,” she said of the Big Apple. “I don’t agree.”

Messinger, who recently ran unsuccessfully for mayor against incumbent Rudolph W. Giuliani, described her own decade-old experience with charter reform, which came when a judge ruled that New York City’s unusual borough form of government violated the constitutional principle of one person, one vote.

Messinger’s appearance was noteworthy because one of the plans for reorganizing Los Angeles’ government involves breaking the city into semiautonomous boroughs bearing some resemblance to New York’s.

The Los Angeles borough idea is being debated as one way to increase the influence of neighborhoods by both the elected charter commission and its appointed counterpart, which aim to put proposals for a revised government scheme before voters next spring.

The borough idea, which is considered a longshot, has been bandied about in Los Angeles since shortly after the turn of the century, when residents of San Pedro and Wilmington were wooed into approving annexation by the false promise that they could later form boroughs if they wanted more self-government than the sprawling city could allow. The City Council and then the courts reneged on that promise. The idea cropped up again briefly after World War II, when a mayor proposed dividing the city into five boroughs, and again in the 1960s and 1970s in response to real or threatened secession movements in the Harbor area, the Westside and the San Fernando Valley. Each time it went nowhere.

One of its key proponents now is San Fernando Valley lawyer and civic activist David Fleming, who sees the creation of boroughs as an antidote to the latest secession drives. Fleming, who was one of the original prime movers of the latest charter reform effort, is passionately committed to the idea of seeing the city of Los Angeles become a loose confederation of “15 Burbanks.”

But he recognizes a potential public relations pitfall stemming from the use of the word “boroughs.”

“Perhaps we should refer to them as districts,” said the Iowa-born and -raised Fleming. “Boroughs are kind of identified by some with New York. Others think you’re talking gophers.”

While the gopher connection is merely confusing, the New York connotation could be politically deadly.

“People here have not the faintest interest in taking anything but maybe pizza and bagels from New York,” said Los Angeles city employee labor leader Julie Butcher.

Laura Lake, a Westside activist who was a leader of the 1980s slow-growth movement, which she called Not Yet New York, said she still has leftover buttons, if anyone needs some.

Mildly amused that Messinger had been invited to give advice, Lake observed: “The way I view New York is as the Old Country. It’s as if someone were coming from Europe to tell us how to run a democracy.”

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But Messinger, who was on a panel with charter reformers from New Orleans and Detroit, was not doing a sales job, merely responding to questions about the form of government in her city, which began 100 years ago when the boroughs of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island and the Bronx joined in a confederation.

The government that resulted featured a powerful mayor and two legislative bodies, a relatively weak City Council and a relatively strong Board of Estimate, with powers over the budget, land use and contracts. The mayor and two other citywide elected officials each had two votes on the Board of Estimate; the five elected borough presidents each had only one until the board ran afoul of federal equal representation law. The courts said it was unacceptable that Brooklyn, which was five times bigger than Staten Island, had the same one vote.

New York City’s solution was to abolish the Board of Estimate with a new charter that allowed more neighborhood representation with a radically expanded City Council. The council went from 35 members to 51 and, in so growing, allowed some relatively new ethnic concentrations, like Caribbean Americans, to achieve first-time representation, Messinger said.

The new charter preserved New York’s version of another form of neighborhood councils that are under consideration for Los Angeles. The New York versions, called community boards, advise elected borough presidents on uses for the very small portion of the mayor’s citywide budget that the borough presidents control and advise on requests for zoning changes.

Messinger said that in densely developed Manhattan, the appointed, voluntary community boards wield considerable influence despite their advisory status. Confronted with neighborhood objections, developers “don’t go away and not build,” she said. “But they change their plans to address neighborhood concerns before going on to the next level of review.”

That level takes them to the borough presidents who, as executives with extremely limited budgets and advisory status on land use matters, have more influence than raw power.

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Fleming envisions more autonomy for his boroughs, whose relationship to the central city he sees as a sort of state-federal one. Each borough would have control over its own public safety arrangements: It could choose, for instance, to be serviced by the LAPD or the Sheriff’s Department, or create its own policing entity. It would also control local street maintenance, libraries, parks and beautification efforts. But it would cede regional decision-making to a citywide government on which it would have proportional representation. The city government would deal with matters such as airports, harbors, utilities, major thoroughfares, public transportation and, possibly, schools.

To neutralize the business community’s principal fears that empowered neighborhoods would freeze out development, Fleming would offer tax incentives for development. He would give boroughs the power to tax and retain most of what they collect, sharing some with the central government, which would then redistribute some to poorer boroughs.

“It makes sense to take the city of Los Angeles and borough-ize it,” Fleming said. “People want smaller units of government.”

At the same time, he said, it is better to be a part of a whole than to secede.