(LOS ANGELES) October 5, 2023 - In a unanimous vote, the Ad Hoc Committee on City Governance Reform, chaired by City Council President Paul Krekorian, has adopted a complete set of recommendations for an amendment to the City Charter creating an Independent Redistricting Commission to draw the boundaries of City Council districts in future elections. The proposed amendment will now be submitted to the City Council to place on the November 2024 ballot.
The Ad Hoc Committee was created by Council President Krekorian as one of his first acts on being elected to lead the Council in the wake of a scandal one year ago that upended City Hall and galvanized public support for reform. Since then, the Committee has met 12 times in public sessions at City Hall and in neighborhoods from the Valley to the Westside to South L.A., reviewing exhaustive reports from the Chief Legislative Analyst’s office on every nuance of redistricting reform, receiving studies and hearing testimony from a consortium of leading academic experts, consulting with public interest advocacy groups such as Common Cause and the League of Women Voters, and hearing many hours of public comment.
“For the first time in the history of Los Angeles, we’re going to give Councilmembers and the public a month to review this proposal before we hear it in Council, so everyone knows exactly what we’re voting on before this goes to the voters,” said Council President Krekorian. “We are going to give the voters exactly what they have rightly demanded, a redistricting process in which the Council will play no part. Not in selecting the commissioners, not in drawing the maps or reviewing the commission’s work. A process where the voters choose their representatives and not the other way around,” said Krekorian.
The proposal approved by the Committee also strictly prohibits communication between members of the proposed commission and Councilmembers or their staff.
A second proposed Charter amendment, to reduce the size of Council districts by expanding the number of seats on the Council, will be taken up at a future meeting of the Ad Hoc Committee.
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