New L.A. Council President Garcetti Previews Citywide Agenda

Eric, you've now been elected by your colleagues to be the President of the L.A. City Council. Your predecessor had four years in that job, and his predecessor had almost two decades. What can you do in this position to advance the city's public agenda? How does a Council President lead?

There are really two sides to the presidency. One of them consists of the formal powers, which, of course, entail running smooth meetings, appointing people to committees and making sure that committees reflect the expertise of the individual council members, and giving people faith that democracy works when they show up at City Hall. The informal side is about trying to consolidate an agenda that includes the one or two city-wide items that we would all like to accomplish. We don't want to always play defense, and we need to advance a proactive agenda, with the mayor, to improve Los Angeles. I'm going to focus as much on the second part as the first and really see if we can't knit something together that all Angelenos and all council members agree upon.

Surely each of your 14 colleagues has his or her own priorities for the city. Elaborate on some of your colleagues' interests, priorities.

Well, take, for instance, Bernard Parks. I think he's done a great job the last two years and wants to continue working to stabilize our local finances to make sure we don't make mistakes like starting new programs even though we didn't have a new source of revenue. He wants us to avoid using one-time funds to begin new initiatives. We stabilized and put a halt to that, and we enacted policies that have given us the highest bond rating of any local government.

Jack Weiss has focused on homeland security and making sure Los Angeles, which has been a target, is out in front with the funding and resources. Grieg Smith, who comes from a conservative district in the North Valley, is focused on the environment and ending our dependence on landfills and increasing the way that we recycle and generating the economic benefits that come from being a leading energy technology center. I could go on and on, but those are a few examples of how people bring their expertise deep into the policy workings and policy options for each of these areas.

Almost five years after the passage of LA City charter reform, has anything changed regarding the alignment and the relationship between the mayor and the council, or the council and the city's proprietary departments? As you assume the presidency of the city council in January, how would you assess the policy impacts of the charter reforms?

I think most of it has been more subtle than people had expected it would be. For instance, it does not diminish the informal powers of this mayor, who's been able to use a bully pulpit to bring people along to his vision. The neighborhood councils are also very significant players that don't have much formal power. Even so, we still have a huge participation deficit from the average Angeleno vis-à-vis his or her neighborhood council. I think one of the most significant areas has been the changes in the controller's office. Laura Chick has used audits not only to look after the people's money but also to look at how departments are performing. But by and large we're in a strong council/weak mayor system formally and one in which it is often governed by the rule of 15.

I think we are coming up now on a round of reflection. I think that people now are looking at how to get neighborhood councils to really have as many people voting for them as council members do. They should align the elections normal municipal elections to attract more depth from the neighborhoods. I think that we're lined up right now at a point where we can see what we've done and ask ourselves what we can improve. I'm a big believer in the Japanese philosophy of kaizen, which is constantly improving the operation, and while we're doing much better, we've got a long way to go.

One of the roles of the council is obviously to insure that past ordinances, rules and regulations are actually implemented and enforced. What is the oversight capacity currently of the council, or its staff, and does oversight need to be improved?

I think it needs to be strengthened. We're already at a deficit under term limits. Institutional memory fades every couple of years, and it's very important for a culture to set in, a culture of governance. It takes time for relationships to set in within governments, between governments, and among the people we represent. I think right now we should look at different council offices, which actually have decreased in our overall size in the last decade because our budget has remained static.

We also would like to strengthen the legislative analyst's office, because right now it's only about half the strength of our city's administrative offices, and quite often that means that the analysts are mostly analyzing things after we are proposing them. They don't have a research capacity. We need to have the best and brightest available to tackle projects like innovative transportation, innovative housing, innovative local finances. Right now that usually means getting an outside consultant or trying to get our academics to give us suggestions when really we should have that in-house.

Much of the public, probably because there's so little media coverage of local government, understands very little about public management. The City of Los Angeles is about to retain a number of new general managers, i.e. in planning, transportation, the port, and the redevelopment agency. What will attract the best and the brightest?

Los Angeles should be a magnet for the most highly qualified individuals. When I was recruiting somebody to head the CRA office in Hollywood, which is probably the most famous neighborhood in the world, we were able to get somebody who was just incredible and who realized that this is probably the best redevelopment job in America. We should be saying that to all of our candidates.

The difficult thing is that Los Angeles can be a confusing landscape. You've got at least 16 bosses and you've got just your division as a city agency or department where the county and the school district overlays on top of you in a way that if you're not fluent can be very daunting. I think we need to look at joint cooperation across government lines as well as how we strengthen some of our regional mechanisms for governance, whether it's SCAG or the MTA, we need to lead by giving up some of our powers. It's a very difficult thing to do as elected officials, but it's the only way I think to tackle some of those problems facing us.

At the end of the day, a kid who goes to school doesn't care where the school district stops and the city begins when he's walking to school and wants to be safe. They don't care about the boundaries of a community college disctrict, or where our workforce investment dollars are earmarked; they want to see a seamless pipeline from the school to the community colleges to good, paying jobs. It's incumbent upon us to think about government as being about people again, not about bureaucratic silos.

During the charter debate some years ago, one idea that arose, too late for serious consideration, was the boroughs idea. That proposal involved creating nine boroughs in the City that would each elect borough council, which would in turn elect a representative to a citywide council. The proposal also called for the alignment within boroughs of city council districts, school districts, and other governmental services so that consitutients would really have access and transparency. Is this idea still dead on arrival?

Alignment is a good thing, but it doesn't guarantee that people won't be territorial. I think that the emphasis on creating a culture that gets beyond territoriality is probably more important than even formally aligning our governmental units. It's kind of like the debate right now over mayoral control. That's really more about leadership than formal structure, in my mind. I've seen it work where there are good leaders, and I've seen it fail where there are not good leaders. So, what's really more important than lining up each of these things, because I've certainly seen when government is congruent, but you still have separate units, that the rivalries are just as big. The city planning department, the CRA, and the housing department all are congruent in the City of Los Angeles, but that doesn't mean that they work very well together. So, it's really important for us to first paint our thinking before we just assume that rearranging furniture in the living room is going to make things flow better.

You have not only been elected by your colleagues to be president of the council, but you were also elected by your constituents to be their 13th Council District representative. What are your district priorities?

I think my first responsibility is always with the district, and I think this is an exciting time for the neighborhoods that I represent. In Hollywood we don't have the feeble claim that it's just around the corner coming back – we know that it actually is back. We know we have 3,000 units of housing in the pipeline. We know that while some have been distracted about how we build affordable housing, we've actually done it in Hollywood, and we've done market-rate housing. It shows that both can co-exist.

In my own district two things take precedence: One is to provide a lot of opportunity for what is still a very poor district. I want to leverage a lot of this new development and to make sure that the jobs created are given to local youth, to people that live in the area, and who helped turn the neighborhoods around and to make the neighborhoods like Silver Lake and Hollywood and Echo Park, Atwater Village interesting places to be, with creative professionals and hard-working people who come from hundreds of cultures.

The second thing is to keep people focused on the basic services. Graffiti is something that people think we have to live with and we never improve upon, but we launched a program called UNTAG a year ago with Chief Bratton modeled on a program in San Jose that reduced graffiti by 97 percent over 10 years. After enlisting dozens of "block captains" and volunteers and getting funds to paint out graffiti, we've reduced it in one year by over 60 percent. Things like that give me a lot of hope that the leveraging of government is not what L.A. City does but what the people of Los Angeles can do, and I think that the mayor has a similar vision right now about how we actually get people out of their cars, out of their homes, and into their neighborhoods.

Two new L.A. council members have recently been elected. Has their election altered what the council will do re such issues as: inclusionary zoning, solid waste, and the other contentious issues the council and the mayor have faced the last four years?

It's very early to say, of course, how the new council will coalesce, but I know Jose Huizar ran on making affordable housing a priority. I know that Herb Wesson wants to see economic development in the mid-city, and it doesn't shift the debate so much as it does re-energize it. The housing bond that I was working on with the mayor – that he has now put his full weight behind – is a great example of creating alternative means of getting more affordable housing.

Inclusionary zoning I think is still out there, and I've talked to my colleagues about trying it in a place or two where we can show how it's going to work and also make sure we do it right. But, at the same time, you've got to look at housing people in the next year or two, and even if inclusionary zoning were to go through, it would take many years. We have a crisis and people want results. So, I guess that's a long-winded way of saying with the new council you have two incredibly experienced individuals, one who has helped start building $15 billion dollars worth of schools and somebody who was speaker at the largest legislature in the country. With that and the expertise of the other 12 individuals on the council, I think we're headed for some of our strongest times, and I think our collaboration with the mayor will be really good for everyone.

There's probably no one on the Council better prepared academically for public service. After five years in elected office, how does the actual experience compare to what you imagined when you were teaching and studying public policy and politics?

I like being a practitioner more than just studying it, and I have to say that this has been a deeper and more meaningful education in the last five years than all of the previous 30 years combined.