For the past six months, a small group of leading scholars have quietly gathered to envision a less fractured version of Los Angeles city government.

The LA Governance Reform Project is an academic supergroup of sorts, with members from institutions across the region. Its mission is complex, but also quite simple: to research and develop an unbiased set of government reform proposals for consideration by the City Council and the general public.

The group began meeting after a leaked audio recording was turned upside down

Los Angeles

City Hall last fall exposed members of the Los Angeles City Council and a bold plan by labor leaders to consolidate power during the city’s decade-long redistribution process. The raucous and racist remarks exposed in the footage were the culmination of years of scandal at LA City Hall and sparked widespread support for government reform, particularly around the city’s redistricting process.

We are not elected officials. We are not people who stand up at the protest. We realized that one of the things that was needed was a truly independent analysis, free from the influence of the council or other voices, said Ange-Marie Hancock, former chair of USC’s department of political science and international relations.

Hancock, who now directs Ohio State University’s Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, is one of two co-chairs of the project, along with Dean Gary Segura of the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs.

Major governance reforms require changes to the city charter, which require a vote of the public. It is widely expected that the City Council will introduce a government reform proposal to the vote in 2024 that will include independent redistribution, although the details of what that will look like are still highly debated.

LA Governance Reform Projects’ interim recommendations, released Thursday, include expanding the number of city council seats to shrink districts, implementing an independent redistricting commission and strengthening the city’s ethics apparatus. The recommendations aim to promote accountability, reduce corruption and promote positive relationships between different groups in a diverse city, the draft report said.

The group plans to collect community and stakeholder input over the summer before finalizing its recommendations and submitting them to the council

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council in the fall, the report said.

Under the city’s current redistribution system, the

City

the council has the final say on district lines, and elected officials appoint members to the redistricting panel who essentially act as their proxies. An independent committee would remove that power from the council.

The ad hoc committee on city government reform, set up last fall by council member Nithya Raman and now chaired by council president Paul Krekorian, has been hopping around the city in recent months, holding independent redistricting hearings and public testimony. During those meetings, Krekorian occasionally referred to the forthcoming academic report and said his committee would take it into consideration before making policy recommendations.

The ad hoc committee will meet again in August after the council’s recess in July and is expected to decide on reform recommendations to be sent to the full council on Sept. 18, Krekorian’s office said.

Efforts to mandate independent redistribution are also being pushed at the state level, along with numerous other reform efforts at the local level.

“Such a wave of reform energy is rare. Sometimes decades pass between reform periods,” the group writes in the introduction to its report. “Los Angeles is in the middle of such a moment right now and it’s not obvious.”

Along with Segura and Hancock, the team was led by Raphael Sonenshein (former director of the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs in Cal State LA), Sara Sadhwani (professor of politics at Pomona College who also served on the California Citizens Redistricting Commission), Boris Ricks (director of the Center for Southern California Studies at Cal State Northridge

California State University, Northridge

) and Fernando Guerra (director of the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University).

Their work was supported by the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, the Weingart Foundation, and the California Community Foundation.

They recommend expanding the council from 15 to 25 members, with 21 members elected by district and four full members. The number of municipal districts has not changed since 1925 and each councilor represents approximately 260,000 more people than any other city in the country.

The report recommends that the city establish two independent redistricting commissions, each with 17 residents, to draw district lines for the City of Los Angeles and the Los Angeles Unified School District, respectively.

The draft report strongly recommends placing a package of governance reforms on the November 2024 ballot, rather than the March primary ballot, to reach a larger electorate.