Power Struggle

WHEN LOS ANGELES CITY COUNCIL MEMBER Nithya Raman, who is running for mayor against incumbent Karen Bass, was asked in the most recent mayoral debate whether she, if elected, would fire the city’s police chief, she equivocated, saying that she was unhappy with his performance but that it’s “not easy” for a mayor to remove the chief of police. Mayor Bass countered that a mayor could remove the chief at any moment.

The testy exchange was emblematic of a running theme in this year’s hotly contested campaign for mayor of the nation’s second-largest city. Pundits — and even candidates — like to say that Los Angeles is governed by a weak-mayor system: that its chief executive is hamstrung by institutional restraints that prevent her from exercising power that other big-city mayors possess.

The lack of mayoral authority, according to this line of thinking, explains why Los Angeles mayors have such a difficult time getting a handle on homelessness, or crime,  or why the city can feel overburdened by regulation or, conversely, under-planned and haphazardly constructed. If only the city had a strong-mayor system, those pundits proclaim, it could finally wrestle those problems under control.

The problem with this argument is that it’s false. Los Angeles mayors are more powerful than those of almost any other city in California, and they are, in some respects, even more powerful than their counterparts back East.

“This drives me crazy,” former Mayor Eric Garcetti told me recently, and he sounded like a guy who’d been waiting to get this off his chest. “It’s so not correct, just in political science terms.”