100 YEARS OF LOS ANGELES SCUTTLING BOROUGHS.

Byline: Beth Barrett Staff Writer

Los Angeles officials have long promised new communities that were being annexed by the city - from the Harbor to the San Fernando Valley - control over local issues through a borough form of government.

Now, actually fulfilling a century of broken promises is seen by many as the best and perhaps only way to keep the city from breaking apart.

Beginning in 1909 with the Harbor communities of San Pedro and Wilmington, reluctant neighborhoods were drawn into Los Angeles with assurances written into the City Charter they could soon form boroughs with real powers akin to small cities, including the right to authorize taxes, request special bonds and control their own money.

The same promises of boroughs were made to the Valley in 1915, and to much of the Westside a year later. Community campaigns were mounted, paperwork was completed and the demand for the anticipated boroughs made.

But each request was rebuffed by City Hall and borough creation was blocked through a variety of legal and political maneuvers. Even when the biggest legal hurdle - ambiguous language in the California Constitution on creating boroughs - was clarified in 1950, nothing ever came of it despite several efforts to push for local empowerment.

With secession for the Valley and Hollywood headed to the Nov. 5 ballot, the stakes have abruptly changed and city officials now are under pressure from a variety of directions to decentralize power by creating boroughs with authority over local issues.

``If they thought it was a last ditch effort to save the city, I think they would be willing to put (boroughs) on the ballot, and take the risk of losing their authority if that was the price,'' said James Ingram, a political science professor at San Diego State University, and an expert on Los Angeles charter reform.

``If they made good on their promises, it might hold the city together.''

Fred Siegel, senior fellow at the private, nonprofit Progressive Policy Institute in New York, said Los Angeles is ``ideal'' for a borough system, superior even to New York City, where one is in effect.

``In New York, the borough system once worked, but now Manhattan capsizes everything,'' Siegel said. ``In Los Angeles, you have a genuine polycentric city where it's harder for one borough to rule the roost.''

Siegel said boroughs are the best way for Los Angeles to balance its ``general and parochial'' interests, so the city as a whole as well as its neighborhoods can be energized and rebuilt.

But others said the seriousness of the pending borough plans and secession notwithstanding, there is little reason to believe the council will move to legislate themselves out of power.

``There's a long history of dangling the borough concept in front of communities, only later to withdraw that promise whenever the secessionist movement or other discontent has been diffused,'' said Tom Hogen-Esch, a political science professor at California State University, Northridge.

He said any council action on boroughs probably ``is not viable as a legitimate offer at this point because it's so clearly a last ditch, gun-to- your-head strategy to keep the city together.''

``It's a case of too little, too late.''

The choice of paths is now before city leaders, who must have ballot measure documents completed and filed with Los Angeles County by Aug. 9.

There are two borough proposals on the table, including one spearheaded by Councilwoman Wendy Greuel to create a commission to study the matter.

Former Assembly Speaker Bob Hertzberg has crafted a detailed plan for nine boroughs representing 400,000 residents. Each would be divided into five districts with five elected officials representing about 80,000 residents each.

The current 15-member council, with districts of about 246,000 each, would be abolished and a nine-member board of borough presidents would meet every two weeks to deal with citywide issues.

The plan, Hertzberg said, would make government more responsive to neighborhoods, while the mayor and borough presidents would oversee citywide issues. Hertzberg wants the borough option on the fall ballot.

``The best chance to keep the city together is to make good on the promise of our history,'' Hertzberg said.

Hertzberg said he has talked to several council members and to Mayor James Hahn about the proposal. Hahn did not return calls Friday.

Deputy Mayor Matt Middlebrook called Hertzberg's plan ``an interesting idea'' but said Hahn is focused on the new advisory neighborhood council system.

``It is in place and growing. Neighborhoods throughout the city are working with City Hall to improve their neighborhoods,'' Middlebrook said.

Hertzberg said a ``deep sense of frustration'' still exists in neighborhoods, ignored by a government that prefers the convenience of the status quo, with its large council districts and easy access to special interest money.

``It's a lack of faith in the political system,'' Hertzberg said of community discontent. ``People are searching for a sense of place.''

Boroughs dangled

In 1909, when Los Angeles was wooing the communities of Wilmington and San Pedro to obtain a port for the city, the cities were promised a borough that would ensure their future autonomy, said Ingram, the political science professor.

By the early 1970s, the borough provision had been eased out of the 1925 charter altogether.

And when charter reform commissions in 1999 rewrote the 1925 charter with promises to retool L.A.'s government, the borough option was not put back in.

George Kieffer, former chairman of the appointed Charter Commission, said he and his staff didn't see a groundswell of support for boroughs three years ago, and instead saw advisory area planning commissions as the vehicle for more responsive local government.

``I viewed the area planning commissions as the embryos from which boroughs could grow,'' Kieffer said. ``It was my personal intention that area planning commissions would be a potential step toward boroughs as that concept might develop because they'd have control of one-third of what government does, perhaps the most important third.''

Kieffer said the next step toward boroughs could be to elect area planning commissioners.

Hertzberg said area planning commissions and advisory neighborhood councils don't go far enough in fundamentally redefining the city's power structure to give back the kind of control and autonomy necessary for neighborhoods to reclaim their vibrancy.

``It just doesn't get to the essence of the issue, which is what a real borough does,'' Hertzberg said. ``It fundamentally changes the power structure. You don't have to raise a million dollars to get elected (to a borough board).''

Joel Kotkin, senior fellow at Pepperdine University's Davenport Institute who has worked on Hertzberg's borough proposal, agreed the existing local advisory boards don't have adequate local authority to be effective.

He said there is no evidence the current power elite wants ``that baby to grow up.''

Kotkin said boroughs likely will have to be ``imposed by the outside'' because it is in the interest of the ``insider class'' to retain a ``dysfunctional system'' it has mastered and prospers from.

Borough blocked

The first sign that something might be amiss with the city's promises of a borough for the Harbor came in 1917 after a Wilmington group completed the paperwork necessary to form a borough, relying on a state constitutional amendment that seemed to allow it, Ingram said.

The council, however, put off the election, and the California Supreme Court subsequently backed the council on legal technicalities, he said.

A more reform-minded Board of Freeholders rewrote the charter - with backing from the Associated Chambers of Commerce from the San Fernando Valley and civic groups in the Harbor and Westside - to include provisions for a borough system. The 1925 charter was not to be a ``paper tiger,'' Ingram said.

``Under the 1925 charter, the boroughs had more power than the proprietary departments,'' including water and power, and harbor departments, he said.

The 1925 charter allowed an ``advisory borough board'' to authorize the council to levy a borough tax, to control the expenditure of all funds credited to the borough, to request special elections to vote on special district bonds, among other powers.

But boroughs still were blocked, partly because the charter didn't address a state Supreme Court ruling on whether one part of the city could independently become a borough.

Siegel, with the Progressive Policy Institute, said the optimum historic moment for creating an L.A. borough system came in the 1940s, in response to secession movements in the Valley and Harbor.

In 1949, Harbor Assemblyman Vincent Thomas introduced a constitutional amendment, which passed, clearing the way for advisory boards to be created.

Three years later in 1952, then Mayor Fletcher Bowron commissioned studies of borough systems and proposed carving up the city into five such jurisdictions.

But CSUN's Hogen-Esch said no substantive proposal was ever produced.

In 1973, voters were asked to remove the charter language under the pretext it was a ``housekeeping amendment,'' Ingram said. The argument used at the time - that boroughs could not be created in only a part of the city - ``was untrue,'' Ingram said.

But the borough idea didn't die.

In 1998, with Valley cityhood driving charter reform citywide, David Fleming, chairman of the Economic Alliance of the San Fernando Valley, proposed a borough system for the city.

A poll of Valley residents who had voted at least once in the previous two years, commissioned in part by Fleming, found 60.1 percent favored making the Valley a self-governing borough within the city.

Yet, Fleming's borough plan ``was scoffed at'' by those in power, said Hogen-Esch.

``This makes the Valley's argument that it's only when there's this threat of secession - and the threat has never been more credible than now - do policymakers finally agree to some substantive changes. But as with prior borough proposals, nothing will come of this, for the same reasons that nothing came prior. The City Council has no interest in decentralizing power to the community level.''

Fleming called Hertzberg's plan ``a very interesting piece of work,'' adding it takes his 1998 borough proposal ``a lot further.''

Fleming, like many others, however questioned the timing of putting a borough measure on the November ballot, saying it could confuse voters on secession, and quash future debate on the merits of a borough system.

``It takes a long time to sell something like this,'' Fleming said.

Fleming added that he doubts the council will do more with the borough option than to use it as a ``smoke screen'' to try to stop secession.

``A lot of people downtown are clinging to the status quo with fierce determination,'' Fleming said. ``The way downtown feels, there's nothing wrong with the city.''

Raphael Sonenshein, a political science professor at California State University, Fullerton, and executive director of one of the two charter reform commissions, called boroughs ``important as a concept in a city that's a little short on intermediate levels between where people live and the government.''

But he questioned whether a legislative body of borough presidents meeting every other week would leave too much power in the executive branch, resulting in ``an imperial mayoralty.''

``You'd essentially create a part-time visiting city council,'' Sonenshein said.

Siegel, with the Progressive Policy Institute, said American cities with strong mayors have had the strongest revivals, saying the problem in Los Angeles is council unaccountability.

Sonenshein also also said boroughs might decentralize Los Angeles too much.

``I wonder about the wisdom of essentially creating no city, as opposed to the secession proposal of two (or three) cities, or the status quo of one city reformed. This makes you wonder where is the city in all this? There isn't a Valley city or a downtown city,'' Sonenshein said.

Civic leader David Abel said boroughs address the problems associated with the vast size of the city.

``It's a plan worth exploring,'' Abel said. ``It's at a higher plateau than anything else that's come forward.''

Reporter Harrison Sheppard contributed to this report.

CAPTION(S):

box, map

Box:

THE LONG HISTORY OF BOROUGH PROPOSALS FOR LOS ANGELES

SOURCE: Bob Herztberg Proposal

Map:

LA BOROUGH PROPOSAL

Here are the boundaries for the nine Los Angeles boroughs and 45 districts proposed by former Assembly Speaker Bob Hertzberg. Each borough will have five districts.

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