Much of the past year has

Los Angeles

political leaders have laid the groundwork for a potentially seismic change in city government: increasing the size of the city council for the first time in a century.

Some, including Council President Paul Krekorian, have begun to call for expanding the council to 23 members, up from 15. Others, like Council Member Nithya Raman, are looking at whether

more than

Double the size of the council, increasing its ranks to 31 members.

The push for more council members has been fueled by a wave of scandals at City Hall. But even if voters sign off on the final plan to add more politicians, a proposal expected in next year’s municipal elections, they could end up waiting nearly a decade for that change to take effect.

That’s as councilors are also considering the idea of ​​holding elections for the new, bigger council in 2032, more than a decade after the audio leak scandal that sparked new demands for reforms and transformed council expansion into a prominent City issue. Hall.

If the council chooses 2032 as the implementation date, the city would be spared the need to oversee an additional redistricting process, which would require a citizens’ panel to spend at least several months drawing new boundaries for each city district.

Independent reform group recommends expanding LA City Council to 25 members

Redistribution normally occurs once every ten years, following the publication of new US Census population data. The next regularly scheduled redistribution will take place in 2031.

If the council were to expand before that date, an additional map-making process would be required to ensure that each council district is approximately equal in population size and in accordance with the Voting Rights Act, which aims to ensure that racial minorities have the opportunity to unite. elect a representative of their choice.

Raman, whose district is anchored by the Hollywood Hills, recently said she favors 2032 as the year for municipal expansion. In an interview, she said that conducting an additional redistricting process sooner ahead of the 2026 elections could most likely be disruptive for the city.

‘I would have liked this one [new council] Boundaries have come more quickly,” she said. ‘But I also know, having experienced redistricting, that it is a long and very disruptive process for the residents. I think doing it once, when the new census numbers come out, feels like the least disruptive way forward.”

During the city’s last redistricting process, Raman spent weeks fighting a citizen committee proposal that would have dramatically rezoned her neighborhood. Although the municipality later went with a different map, Raman still lost 40% of its old ward.

Raman said she remains “open to discussion” on either date for council expansion in 2026 or 2032. Meanwhile, the reform organization known as California Common Cause has come out strongly in favor of 2032, saying such a schedule would give the city enough time to create a “fair, transparent and equitable” redistricting process.

Russia Chavis Cardenas, the group’s voting rights and redistricting program manager, said city officials should use those years to recruit and select new redistricting commissioners, hire and train redistricting staff and create a new office at City Hall to compile U.S. census data. analyze.

Some advocacy groups have taken a different stance, saying voters don’t have to wait that long for desperately needed reforms.

Planning the council’s expansion for 2032 would benefit many of the council’s incumbent members and ensure their districts remain unchanged if they run for re-election between now and 2030, said Unrig organizer Rob Quan LA, an anti-corruption group.

“Some of them don’t want this to affect them during their time on the council,” said Quan, who is pushing for an expansion of the council to take effect in 2026.

The council’s ad hoc committee on government reforms will meet next week

9/18

to review expansion proposals, ranging from 21 to 31 council members. The final ballot language is expected to reach voters in November 2024, when the presidential election is expected to generate particularly high turnout.

Under the current system, each district of the municipality is allocated approximately 265,000 people. If the council expands to 21 members, the number of voters would shrink to about 189,000 per district. If the council grew to 25 members, the number of voters would drop to about 159,000. With a council of 31 members, each district would have a population of approximately 128,000.

Proponents of good governance have long argued that a larger council would be more responsive, more representative of the population and less prone to the kind of corruption that has resulted in the convictions of three council members since 2020. These arguments gained steam last year. year after it was revealed that three other councilors and a senior union leader had been involved in a secretly recorded conversation about redistricting that used racist and derogatory language.

During the discussion, recorded in 2021, the four participants Ron Herrera, then in charge of the LA County Federation of Labor, then-council members Nury Martinez and Gil Cedillo, and Kevin de Len, who remains on the council, discussed ways to draw up council districts set. this would benefit themselves or their allies.

Quan, the organizer of Unrig LA, said he believes the final maps are “tainted” and should be replaced as soon as possible. He also claims that since U.S. Census data is already available, the city could launch a new redistricting process in 2025 and have a new set of maps ready for the June 2026 election.

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For a majority of the current members of the council, such a process would be unpredictable.

Council members are currently working to ensure that the next redistricting process is handled entirely by an independent citizen panel, a change that would prevent council members from having the final say on the contours of each district. With an independent citizen commission responsible for creating maps, current council members could find themselves in redrawn districts that are very different from the ones they currently represent.

In contrast, if council expansion were postponed until 2032, ten of the council’s current members would retain the ability to seek re-election two more times in their existing districts.

David Levitus, executive director of the nonprofit LA Forward Institute, said he sees some self-interest in the effort to plan the council’s expansion for 2032. Increasing the size of the council, he said, would immediately reduce the political power of each of the council members. current members of the council.

“It is clear that there are elected officials on the council who would very much like to maintain the current district formations and the size of the council districts.”

several more

According to Levitus, whose group is pushing for expansion of the city council in 2026. “The status quo is easier for them than quickly moving to a new system.”

Still, at least one unsubscribed council member said he, too, is leaning toward 2032 as the year for council expansion.

Councilman Bob Blumenfield, now midway through his third and final term, said he believes the city bureaucracy will need additional time to accomplish all the infrastructure changes associated with the municipality’s expansion, such as building new office space and redesigning the public space. system for financing each district.

“It’s not that it’s not possible” by 2026, Blumenfield said. “But there is a lot to do within two years.”