Too Many Officials, No Leaders

What Los Angeles needs: a coherent discussion of our shared future.

What Los Angeles has: a laugh track.

Greater Los Angeles--you define its boundaries--is a community, except in name. Except in organization. Except by how we govern ourselves. Regionally, we have grown big without thinking big. We entrust no civic body, no individuals, to see from our mountains to our coast. Yet vision, above all, is the catalyst for making our community livable. At the start of the millennium, I opened a file folder for news clippings: “Ideas Offered for the Future of Los Angeles.” It’s the slenderest file on my desk.

Our democracy has gone to seed. The garden of self-governance is a weed bed. And the secessionists are feeding fertilizer to the nettles and dandelions of our civic organism when they seek to add a harbor city, a Hollywood city, a Valley city to the underbrush of cities we already have.

Whom do we count on, in what office, for leadership to meet our shared challenges: transportation, education, public safety, cultural and ethnic harmony, population growth, economic opportunity, housing, recreation, a better community for better living? If all the mayors of our region gathered to discuss our civic agenda and each was allotted just 30 minutes to speak, it would probably take longer than two weeks just to open the meeting.

Who can make the case for us in Sacramento and Washington? Who can crack heads there when needed?

We have no process for achieving progress.

How can citizens keep abreast of things? Knowledge is the basic ingredient of intelligent democracy. Yet, all our community’s newspapers, radio stations and television stations combined do not have the person power, time or space to keep the public informed of agencies and officials who determine our civic life.

Do you know where your sales tax dollars go? How your motor vehicle fees are distributed? Do you understand the powers of the Southern California Assn. of Governments? The independent Vector Control District controls what exactly? Is your city a charter city or a general law city or a contract city? Why do mayors run on platforms to fix things, like schools, over which they have no authority? Chances are, anyone who actually understands how our community is governed is too big a bore to listen to.

Greater Los Angeles is a city-state. As envisioned by the Greeks long ago, this is the ideal structure for self-governance: Neighborhoods are linked to villages, which are drawn together in districts, which in turn form the larger whole: a government organized to reflect the way we live.

If we could improve the quality of life by splintering ourselves into more cities, we would have paradise already.

We have a tradition here. Our forebears diluted power so that we would not be oppressed by it. Which is fine until that day when we find that it’s so watered down that we’re all powerless.

The Greater Los Angeles of today is the product of intense civic planning, particularly in the last 55 years. It was planned by developers, tract by tract. Now, this region is built out. Tracts and neighborhoods have merged. Old quarrels about dividing up the pie overlook the fact that we now dine off the same communal plate. The opportunities and problems of the future occur on a scale that overwhelms the scattershot governmental organizations created opportunistically by real estate moguls.

Men and women to match our mountains? Thanks to secessionists, we will spend the rest of the year, and maybe years to come, plotting out mole hills. We should be going in the other direction: toward accountability and rationality. Instead of more horizontal layers and more tug o’ wars and more contentious politicians and more confusion, we should be striving toward a vertical, streamlined government.

We need people to blame when things go wrong. Real people whose names we know. We need enough of them to keep things lively, but not so many that they can pass the buck. We need characters in our civic life--a few characters as big as the collective “us,” leaders who reflect our own character, people around whom a center of gravity forms. Instead, we, the most celebrity-minded people in the history of people, are administered by a busload of clerks.

Democracy and local control? Adding more mayors and councils and commissions would, in the end, make matters worse. Inevitably, our problems must be confronted regionally. Unless we do it directly, regional authority will be imposed on us by Washington and Sacramento, as has occurred incrementally already. And look around: Regional boards and associations don’t answer to us at the ballot box.

The difference between a vibrant community and a failing community turns on a single idea: Do residents believe they can shape their own future. How in the world can we do that if not together?