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NICK'S VIEW - Can people become so accustomed to failure that they choose more of it? That is the case with the Los Angeles City Council. Meeting three days a week has not produced meaningful results for our anguished city, so council members now want to cut meetings to just one day a week, thereby further deepening the city’s pattern of failure.
Consequently, in the hope of gaining greater political control, the Council placed the measure on the November 3 ballot and buried it in a confusing amendment to slip it past voters.
Council members—whose base salaries range from $245,255 to $270,389—voted last June 30, 12-0 to place a measure on the November 3 ballot that would sharply reduce the City Charter’s minimum meeting requirement. They want to meet one day a week. Monica Rodrigues, one of the fifteen Council members, walked out in protest, while two others were absent.
Consider the scale: Los Angeles has more than forty city departments, over 50,000 employees, thousands of contracts to monitor, and hundreds of land-use cases to review. On top of that, critical emergencies are constant.
Fewer meetings mean less oversight, and with diminished oversight corruption risks arise. Historically, corruption at Los Angeles City Hall has surfaced because of weak oversight. Federal investigations since 2018 reveal recurring incentives and vulnerabilities that increase corruption dangers. For example, one investigation found that $2.3 billion in homelessness spending was largely unmanageable, pointing to systemic failures in financial oversight.
Over the past 25 years, Los Angeles has recorded hundreds of ethics violations involving campaign finance, gifts, conflicts of interest, lobbying, and disclosures by councilmembers, candidates, lobbyists, and contractor donors. Councilmembers have faced criminal charges involving pay-to-play arrangements with developers; gifts, trips, cash, and political favors tied to land-use decisions; conflicts of interest and failure to disclose spousal income connected to projects they voted on; and cash, hotel stays, entertainment, and other gifts from businesspeople, followed by false statements to federal investigators.
Los Angeles cannot tolerate additional disappointments. It deserves better than failure. Yet a system is being intentionally built to reward insiders despite deficient performance, low-effort solutions, and lower expectations.
It is at Council meetings where many of the city’s most important decisions become law. They typically last two to eight hours, depending on the complexity of the issues, and give residents a public forum to hold officials accountable.
Rather than spending more public time on issues Council members seek to ignore the city’s most serious problems, including fiscal instability, budget strain, homelessness and housing failures, poor spending outcomes, transportation and traffic challenges, infrastructure decline, wildfire recovery, and climate vulnerability. Importantly, they must confront the economic pressures and affordability crisis driving families out of the region and weakening the workforce.
If the Council meets only once a week, it will certainly have a reduced legislative calendar, meaning fewer oversight sessions, reports, audits, and opportunities for public questioning. The four remaining days for Council members would be dominated by fundraising, donor relationship-building, and discussions with unions and developers tied to political strategy, not city governance.
Put plainly, they would spend only twenty percent of their time conducting the public’s business while devoting the other eighty percent to events that serve their political interests. Political work will become more valuable than governing. Of course, that is not what they were elected to do.
At one time, the City Council met every weekday at 10 a.m. because a city as large and complex as Los Angeles was understood to need constant legislative attention to keep business moving, although some meetings lasted less than one-half hour.
In the late1970s, the Council reduced full meetings to three days a week—Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. At the time, it was argued that daily meetings were inefficient because they forced department heads, city staff, and the public to travel to City Hall.
In practice, much of the detailed work on complex policies, budget matters, and land-use issues takes place in committee meetings. Los Angeles has twenty-three standing committees, but they do not meet on a consistent schedule. Most meet once or twice a month, with typical meetings lasting one to two hours.
Here is how the one-meeting-per-week concept developed. It is officially known as Council File: 26-1100-S13, and the ordinance was published effective July 15, 2026, after the Council’s final action five days earlier. The motion to place the charter amendment on the November 2026 ballot was made by Councilmember Katy Yaroslavsky and seconded by Councilmember Marqueece Harris‑Dawson. Councilmember Tim McOsker has been pushing the idea for years.
This move deliberately bypassed the Charter Reform Commission. Yaroslavsky and the Council wanted to avoid negotiating with the commission and facing public scrutiny. The commission is independent: it holds hearings, studies impacts, gathers public input, deliberates openly, and drafts proposals. They also wanted to control the ballot language, making it favorable and self-serving. With a simple majority, the Council sent the measure directly to the ballot.
Curiously, Yaroslavsky has been quoted saying, “I’m working all the time. I’m either working here, I’m working in my district, I’m doing dishes and vacuuming at home, and all I want to do is be more efficient in this space.”
After placing the measure on the ballot, the City Council now appears intent on misleading voters. To reduce scrutiny, it bundled the amendment with unrelated reforms, making the measure’s significance easier to conceal.
Frankly, the voters are being deliberately misled. The ballot measure is carefully worded to downplay its true impact through moderated language. To further obscure it, was deliberately bundled with unrelated ethics reforms. It reads as follows:
CITY ETHICS, ELECTIONS, AND GOVERNANCE. CHARTER AMENDMENT:
Shall the City Charter be amended to: increase the authority of the Police Department Inspector General and Fire Department Independent Assessor; prohibit Ethics Commissioners from running for certain elected offices for five years; increase penalties for campaign finance violations; require City Council to meet at least weekly rather than the currently required three days per week; increase referendum petition signature requirements; and make other changes regarding ethics, elections and governance? [The bold letter emphasis is mine and not in the amendment.]
The Charter Commission exists to prevent situations like this by examining why fewer public meetings are being proposed, why the issue received no public review, and how reduced public meetings would affect city governance. With intent and purpose, the City Council avoided the Commission.
A modern civic maxim that distills a recurring Greek idea from Plato and Aristotle says it all: “He who seeks power forgets purpose.”
(Nick Patsaouras is an electrical engineer, civic leader, and a longtime public advocate. He ran for Mayor in 1993 with a focus on rebuilding L.A. through transportation after the 1992 civil unrest. He has served on major public boards, including the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, Metro, and the Board of Zoning Appeals, helping guide infrastructure and planning policy in Los Angeles. He is the author of the book "The Making of Modern Los Angeles.")
