Comments
MY THOUGHTS - After four years of studies and promises, City Hall is still delaying one of the most important governance reforms Los Angeles needs.
The Los Angeles City Hall recording scandal was supposed to change how City Hall governs. When secretly recorded conversations among senior city leaders became public in 2022, exposing racially charged discussions about redistricting and political power, Angelenos demanded meaningful reform. Trust in City Hall collapsed, careers ended, and elected officials promised to rebuild public confidence.
Two reforms quickly emerged. First, politicians should no longer control the once-a-decade redistricting process that determines their own political boundaries. Voters overwhelmingly agreed, approving an independent redistricting commission in 2024. Second, Los Angeles should finally expand its City Council. That promise, however, has gone nowhere.
Nearly four years after the scandal, Los Angeles still has the same 15-member City Council that existed before the recordings surfaced. Despite countless hearings, commissions, academic reports, governance panels, and public discussions, the Council recently chose not to let voters decide the issue. Instead, members created yet another committee to study a question that has already been studied repeatedly. At some point, studying becomes stalling.
This debate is no longer about whether Los Angeles should have 23, 25, or 30 council districts. It is about whether City Hall has the political will to modernize a governing system designed for a city that existed a century ago.
The current 15-member City Council was established in 1925, when Los Angeles had fewer than 1.2 million residents. Today, the city is home to nearly four million people, and each councilmember represents approximately 265,000 residents. To put that into perspective, if a single Los Angeles council district were incorporated as its own municipality, it would rank among the 100 largest cities in the United States—larger than cities such as Glendale, Arizona; Irving, Texas; and Richmond, Virginia. Each of those cities has its own mayor and city council. In Los Angeles, one elected official is expected to represent all 265,000 residents.
That is an extraordinary concentration of political power. Councilmembers are not simply legislators. They exercise enormous influence over housing developments, land-use decisions, homelessness policy, economic development, constituent services, and billions of taxpayer dollars. The corruption case involving former Councilmember José Huizar demonstrated how much authority individual council offices can wield and how vulnerable that system can become when so much power is concentrated in so few hands.
Expanding the Council would not solve every problem facing Los Angeles. But it would distribute political power more broadly, improve constituent access, create more responsive representation, and reduce the outsized influence each individual office currently holds. Most importantly, it would bring Los Angeles closer to the governance models used by other major American cities.
New York City has 51 council members representing approximately 8.5 million residents. Chicago's 50 aldermen each represent roughly 55,000 people. Even cities considerably smaller than Los Angeles provide residents with far more direct representation. Los Angeles remains the national outlier.
Support for expansion is hardly a fringe idea. Councilmember Tim McOsker has publicly stated that the Council should grow, even if the precise number remains open for discussion. Councilmember Nithya Raman recently expressed frustration that, after years of work, the issue appears to be delayed once again.
Independent experts have reached similar conclusions. A panel of governance scholars convened after the recording scandal recommended expanding the Council to 25 members, including both geographic districts and regional at-large seats. Earlier this year, the City's own Charter Reform Commission reached essentially the same conclusion.
The evidence has already been collected. Independent scholars have weighed in. Charter reform commissions have made their recommendations. Council committees have spent years studying the issue. There is little left to analyze. Yet City Hall continues to ask for more time. After four years, the obstacle is no longer a lack of information it is a lack of political will.
Nothing illustrates City Hall's priorities more clearly than what happened this spring. A proposal to allow noncitizens to vote in city and school board elections moved from introduction to a proposed ballot measure in a matter of weeks. Whether one supports or opposes that proposal is beside the point. It demonstrates that when City Hall decides an issue is urgent, government can move remarkably fast. Council expansion, by comparison, has spent four years trapped in procedural limbo.
To be fair, thoughtful people disagree. Councilmember Traci Park argues that residents are not asking for more politicians. She believes Los Angeles needs more police officers, firefighters, sanitation workers, and basic city services not additional elected officials. Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson has also expressed reservations, arguing that a significantly larger council could shift more governing authority toward the mayor and upset the balance between the executive and legislative branches. Those are legitimate concerns worthy of public debate.
But those are arguments for holding an election not for postponing one. Democracy functions best when voters decide important structural questions after hearing competing arguments. Los Angeles residents are fully capable of weighing the costs, benefits, and trade-offs of council expansion. What they cannot evaluate is a proposal that never reaches the ballot.
After four years of studies, commissions, hearings, and recommendations, Los Angeles is no closer to resolving one of its most significant governance questions than it was immediately after the City Hall scandal. Every year of delay preserves a governing structure designed for a city that disappeared generations ago. The City Council has heard from scholars, charter commissions, governance experts, and its own members.
The evidence is no longer the obstacle political will is. Whether the Council ultimately grows to 23 members, 25 members, or another number is a debate worth having. But after years of study, there is no justification for postponing that debate any longer.
Los Angeles doesn't need another committee. It needs a vote.
(Yonthan Mendal is an accomplished writer, researcher and leading expert on Jewish-Arab relations and Middle East affairs. He serves as Director of the Center for Jewish-Arab Relations at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute and as a Research Fellow at the Forum for Regional Thought. His work focuses on politics, identity, media and regional dynamics in Israel and the broader Middle East. Widely respected for his scholarly analysis and public commentary, Mendel is a prominent voice on democracy, coexistence, public policy and cross-cultural dialogue.)
