A year from now, voters in Los Angeles will get to decide if they want an independent redistricting commission to draw the lines that create City Council district boundaries — or if the City Council will keep its long-held power of drawing its own district boundaries, an often politicized process without voter approval.
The City Council voted unanimously on Wednesday, Nov. 29, to place on the November 2024 ballot the question of whether voters should decide who draws the lines.
“Unfortunately, in the 100 years that this city has had council districts, we have never had independent redistricting,” City Council President Paul Krekorian said during a press conference ahead of the council vote. “It’s been the council that has drawn its own districts. And the system that we have right now is frankly the worst of all worlds.”
The council vote followed months of debate and discussion by a council committee assigned to look into local government reforms for Los Angeles.
Calls to end the City Council’s power over redistricting, which occurs every 10 years when the 15 City Council district’s boundaries are redrawn, began before last year’s audio leak scandal. In that backroom discussion, which was secretly taped and released to the public, three current or former city councilmembers met privately to discuss how to redraw the city council district lines to benefit themselves or their allies.
The scandal upended City Hall and put a spotlight on the potential for the city’s longstanding redistricting process to be tainted. In the existing system, the politically-appointed commissioners who make recommendations to redraw the district boundaries are handpicked by city elected officials, and the City Council has the power to override their recommendations.
Next November, voters in L.A. will decide if they want an independent commission to redraw council maps, or stick with the status quo. Under the ballot measure, the redrawn district maps would be final, meaning the councilmembers would have no power to override the commission’s decision.
Kathay Feng, vice president of programs for Common Cause, a national nonprofit that advocates for representative government, said she’s confident voters will support independent redistricting, which is aimed at restoring the public’s confidence in their govenrment.
“This is not a small thing for the legislative body itself to put forward this level of independent redistricting proposal before the people, that doesn’t have strings attached or secret mechanisms, that would give power back,” Feng said.
The independent panel would be made up of 16 commissioners and four alternates.
In the coming weeks and months, the City Council will consider a related issue that has been long-debated: how many council districts should Los Angeles have? Angelenos currently have just 15 representatives on the City Council, with each councilmember representing nearly 265,000 Angelenos on average.
By comparison, New York City has 51 councilmembers, who each represent fewer than 173,000 people on average, and Chicago has 50 councilmembers who represent about 55,000 people each.
Alongside that debate, the council in the coming months will consider how to potentially strengthen the city’s ethics commission to work on further reforms at City Hall.
