The Los Angeles City Council on Wednesday unanimously approved a plan to create an independent redistricting commission for the city and place it on the November 2024 ballot.

The council’s action caps a years-long effort to resolve a process widely described as botched.

Under the city’s current redistricting system, the City Council has the final say on the maps, which are redrawn every ten years, and elected officials can appoint members to the redistricting panel who essentially act as their proxies. Implementing independent redistricting would limit the council’s influence over its own district lines.

If approved by Los Angeles voters, the new independent redistricting commission would consist of 16 commissioners

and with

four alternates

,

who serve a term of ten years. The application process is managed by the

c

ity

c

Lerk’s office, with the City Ethics Commission providing oversight. Upon completion of their term of office, commissioners are no longer eligible to run for any council district

seat

whose boundaries, among other limitations, they helped draw.

“The city of Los Angeles is building on the best practices from across the state and the country and, I think, really setting a gold standard that everyone is looking for,” said Kathay Feng, national redistricting director for the nonpartisan government accountability watchdog. group Common cause. Feng previously helped lead efforts to establish independent redistricting at the state level.

The

City

The proposal was drafted and extensively discussed by the City Council’s high-profile reform committee, which met in the wake of last year’s City Hall audio leak scandal to promote reforms and restore confidence in the scandal-plagued institution.

The reform committee is expected to consider a more controversial proposal to increase the size of the 15-member council at a meeting on Thursday. Increasing municipal size would also be subject to a public vote, as it would require changes to the city charter, as is the case for independent redistricting.

“Just over a year ago, this city was rocked by the revelation of a recorded conversation involving four of our city’s leaders who made shocking and deeply disturbing comments that left the entire nation stunned and, quite frankly, disgusted,” said Council President Paul Krekorian. said during a press conference ahead of the vote. “And it’s important that we remember that as shocking as the words that occurred at that meeting were, the topic of that meeting was redistricting.”

Krekorian, head of the reform commission, called the secretly recorded, leaked 2021 conversation “the direct result of the failed redistricting program that we currently have under our city charter.”

During the recorded conversation, three council members and union leader Ron Herrera said,

the

Than

–

The head of the powerful Los Angeles County Federation of Labor discussed ways to create district maps that would benefit themselves or their political allies.

They talked about chopping up Councilor Nithya Raman’s ward, with Councilor Kevin De Len saying it should be put in a blender. Racist or derogatory comments were also made about black people, indigenous Oaxaca residents and others.

Herrera and then-council president Nury Martinez resigned in the wake of the scandal. Councilman Gil Cedillo, who had already lost his bid for re-election, finished his term. De Len will stand for re-election in March.

Krekorian described the city’s current redistricting system as “the worst of all worlds.” The council retains control of the process, while the public is given “a fig leaf of supposedly independent redistricting” as council members do not draw the lines themselves, he said. Yet they can influence the process and have the final say.

(Council members drew their own district boundaries for much of the last century. The current quasi-independent system of appointed commissioners was the result of changes to the city charter approved by voters in 1999.)

If approved, the new process “will really give people an opportunity to have confidence in the fact that the way the district lines are drawn is only intended to serve the public interest and not the interests of elected officials,” Krekorian said .

Raman and Krekorian first proposed an independent redistricting proposal in December 2021. But that

effort proposal

got stuck under Martinez’s leadership. It only advanced after the leaked conversation emerged in October 2022, an inciting event that created widespread momentum for City Hall’s reform efforts.

“It wasn’t until after they came out that we could really begin the process of designing what that new system would look like for the city of Los Angeles. … It’s been a long time coming, it’s been a hard battle-won,” Raman said.