The Los Angeles City Council voted Tuesday to approve a law aimed at boosting transparency at the Charter Reform Commission, by requiring that members of that panel disclose any private talks they have with the city’s elected officials.
The vote comes about two months before the commission, which began its work in July, is scheduled to finish its deliberations and deliver a list of recommendations to the council.
Councilmember Monica Rodriguez, who proposed the ordinance, said she has been trying since August to pass a measure requiring the disclosure of such private conversations, known as “ex parte” communications. That effort was greeted with “nearly six months of stonewalling,” she said.
“While this is an important victory for oversight and transparency, government accountability shouldn’t be this hard to secure,” she said.
The ordinance, which also applies to communications between commissioners and elected officials’ staff, is expected to go into effect in about a month. Meanwhile, the 13-member Charter Reform Commission approved its own policy a week ago requiring the disclosure of private conversations between its members and city elected officials.
Some government watchdogs say the disclosures are needed to prevent council members and other city elected officials from seeking to dictate the details of the recommendations that are ultimately issued by the commission. The volunteer citizens panel is currently looking at such ideas as increasing the size of the council and potentially changing the duties of citywide elected officials.
“If the public is going to trust the outcomes of our charter reform process, it has to be transparent and credible,” Commissioner Carla Fuentes, who pushed for the new disclosure policy at its Jan. 21 meeting.
The commission has not yet voted on a proposal to also require disclosure of communications with elected officials’ staff.
It is also looking at the idea of adopting ranked choice voting, where voters list all of the candidates in order of preference, and switching the city to a multi-year budget process.
Councilmember Bob Blumenfield raised warnings about the council’s vote on Tuesday, saying charter reform is substantively different from the 2021 redistricting process. Council members should be engaging in conversations with its volunteer commissioners, to help them better understand how the city is run, Blumenfield said.
Those communications will ensure the commissioners make an informed decision what to recommend for the ballot later this year.
“I don’t want this message to be that it’s somehow bad for council members and mayor and elected officials to be engaging in this process,” he said. “To the contrary, I think we need to double down our engagement. We need to speak to those commissioners. They need to learn a lot more about how this city really works for this thing to be effective.”
The commission is scheduled to take up the motion to disclose staffer conversations at its next meeting on Feb. 7.
Rob Quan, an organizer with the group Unrig LA, said he doesn’t want to see a repeat of 2021, when members of the citizens commission on redistricting were regularly contacted by council members’ aides. Those ex parte communications were not disclosed, he said.
“If it didn’t apply to staff, we would simply be reinforcing the power of the staff, which have from day one been the most problematic aspect of this commission,” said Quan, whose group focuses on government oversight.
He and a group of other transparency activists have proposed a total ban on ex parte communication, which hasn’t been considered by the current commission.