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THE VIEW FROM HERE - Mayor Bass’s appointing Raymond Meza to Los Angeles Charter Reform Commission is like Trump’s appointing Pam Bondi as Attorney General. According to the Los Angeles City Charter Reform website, Raymond Meza is currently Deputy Chief of Staff at SEIU Local 721 as well as the chair of the Charter Reform Commission. (For a litany of Bass’s other missteps, see Daniel Gus Substack)
What is SEIU 721?
The Labor Union, SEIU 721, is the exclusive representative of the [LA city] employees and Raymond Meza is its deputy chief of staff. SEIU 721 and the City are two distinct entities with conflicting priorities. Because the Union and the City are adversarial entities, Meza has a conflict of interest. Meza may not owe his duties to both the union and to the city.
The Fraud in the Charter Commission’s Formation
All the Charter Commission members are selected by the mayor and city council. No matter what the Commission decides, the city council alone determines the actual measures on the ballot for November 2026. As the recent Citywatch article and Meza interview shows, Meza has no plans to stop the city’s criminal Vote Trading System. I suppose that does not matter since the Commission itself is an impotent farce.
Let’s Admit Who Runs Los Angeles
Wall Street calls all the shots and its main goal is to suck every last dollar out of Angelenos with decades of land use frauds. The main ploy is to constantly increase density which makes land values escalate far above fair market value so that hundreds of billions of excessive mortgage dollars flow upward to Wall Street. Density also brings traffic congestion so that the city and county squander billions of dollars on mass transit – which Wall Street funds. It’s the density-mass transit vicious circle. Wall Street is stealing billions of dollars with LA’s needless Manhattanization and subways, while our quality of life deteriorates, the percentage of poor increases, and the city loses businesses and its Family Millennials. Everyone accepts the absurd lie that LA must build more. We have a glut of empty units, which gets worse each day as more Millennials leave, and Baby Boomers die. Hollywood has been losing population since 1990. Every new unit is more money for Wall Street.
The One and Done Rule Has Turned LA into a Criminal Enterprise
Wall Street perpetrates a multitude of frauds on Angelenos, but the overarching criminal fraud is the One and Done Rule where every construction project a councilmember places on the city council agenda must receive only Yes votes from every other councilmembers (abstentions count as Yes Votes). Hence, each project, no matter how horrible, passes unanimously. In return, each councilmember is guaranteed that each and every project he places on the city council agenda will receive only Yes Votes. As the result, the city becomes denser forcing land values artificially higher, requiring higher mortgages.
This Vote Trading System, which Penal Code § 86 criminalizes, is often called the One and Done Rule. That means a developer has to bribe only the councilmember in whose district he wants to build in order to have a guarantee that his project will receive unanimous approval. Unless a councilmember can guarantee passage of a project, developers have no reason to be generous. Suppose a developer had to be nice to a majority of the fifteen (15) councilmembers to get a project approved? How much more would that cost him?
One has to admire how smoothly the criminal Vote Trading System functions. Kudos are due to former Mayor Eric Garcetti for perfecting the One and Done Rule. Garcetti had one addendum to the rule – developers had to contribute to the Mayor’s Fund. Rather than calling the contribution a bribe, LA termed it a “donation.” Developer and former mayoral candidate Rick Caruso bragged about his $125,000 bribe, er, donation.
Meza’s Inanities
The CityWatch article shows that Meza is like a blind man looking in a dark closet for a black hat which isn’t there.
Inanity #1 Transparency. Blabbermouth Donald Trump is both the most transparent and the most corrupt public official in US history. Transparency does not guarantee honesty. For LA, however, there is zero transparency. The developer and the city councilmember determine everything about a project long before anyone knows anything about it.
Inanity #2 Revigorate Neighborhood Councils. Here’s the inherent flaw with Neighborhood Councils. They have zero power. The City Council has exclusive power to enact ordinances and it’s naive to think that the city council will give up one iota of power. Apparently, no one on the commission knows the Neighborhood Councils’ history. It falls into the category of “Been There Done That.”
Inanity #3 Size of City Council. Because Wall Street calls all the plays at City Hall, merely increasing the size of the city council will not rectify the city’s systemic corruptionism. The charter’s purpose in increasing the council’s size is to fix a loophole in the One and Done Rule.
Councilmembers Mitch Englanders’ and Jose Huizar’s fiasco highlights a weakness in the Rule. Some council districts have tons of projects, e.g., Hollywood’s CD13 and DTLA CD 14, while mega developers had no interest in other districts, e.g.,CD 6 and CD 1. Thus, Englander and Huizar used their position on PLUM Committee to force developers to make more payments to far away council districts. They spread around the wealth which greatly increased the developer’s costs changing it to the One and Many Rule. Also, the other councilmembers then owed them political favors The Sea Breeze Project exposed the financial implications of Englander’s and Huizar’s use of PLUM. The developer’s cost under the One and Done Rule was only $263,000 – $203,000 to councilmember Hahn and $60,000 to Garcetti, but [it’s alleged that] PLUM extorted an additional $400,000 from the developer. Councilmembers in faraway districts were happy for some developer dollars to come their way. If the city increases the number of districts, the size of each is smaller, but the lines can be drawn so that there is a wider distribution of projects. Instead of fifteen corrupt councilmembers, LA can have twenty-five.
There is one charter reform which would destroy the One and Done Rule. It’s called The Corruption Eradicator The Commission won’t even discuss it.
(Richard Lee Abrams is a former Los Angeles-based attorney, an author, and political commentator. A long-time contributor to CityWatchLA, he is known for his incisive critiques of City Hall and judicial corruption, as well as his analysis of political and constitutional issues. Abrams blends legal insight with historical and philosophical depth to challenge conventional narratives. A passionate defender of civic integrity and transparency, he aims to expose misuse of power and advocate for systemic reform in local government. You may email him at [email protected]. The opinions expressed are those of the author and not necessarily of CityWatchLA.com.)
