HTLA: How Much Power Does LA's City Council Really Have?

Episode 25

LA City Council Tapes  00:00

[music in] [audio clip] [Nury Martinez speaks] ...Let me take him around the corner and then I'll bring him back. [Gil Cedillo responds: Yeah.] [duck under]

Brian De Los Santos  00:03

All right. So let me be straightforward here. We're seeing a lot of political power happening in these conversations.

LA City Council Tapes  00:09

[audio clip continues] [Nury Martinez speaks] He also wants his guy elected, so he needs a district that Adrin Nazarian can win. [duck under]

Caitlin Hernández  00:13

I think understanding that LA city has a very powerful council cannot be overstated.

Brian De Los Santos  00:20

From LAist Studios, this is How to LA. I'm Brian De Los Santos. And that other voice you just heard was Caitlin Hernández. They've been writing a lot about the whole city council shakeup and its implications over at LAist. To be honest, I'm not super involved with politics. I can't vote and I don't really know all the ins and outs of LA's political system. So Caitlin's here to help me out. Today, we're diving deep into the kinds of power that the LA City Council has. You might be surprised how much control they have over your daily life. I know I was.

Caitlin Hernández  00:57

You know, something I've tried to make clear to even like friends and family in my life is like, state and national elections are important, [music out] but more likely than not, a local election or local councilmember is going to affect your life more than anything else. [Brian: Mm.] They're responsible for creating local laws, for creating policies, for you know, trying to get some road updated with a crosswalk. They really have a lot of authority over how you live as an Angeleno in everyday life.

Brian De Los Santos  01:25

So there are 15 seats on the council. Can you tell me how are those districts made up?

Caitlin Hernández  01:30

So the 15 districts are redrawn every 10 years as part of the census. Every district is supposed to have on average 260,000 Angelenos. That's a pretty big number, made up of multiple different neighborhoods. The idea is that these lines are supposed to be drawn pretty fair and balanced. But in reality, I think especially with these tapes, what we've seen is that there's gerrymandering.

Brian De Los Santos  01:54

What Caitlin is essentially talking about is manipulating the districts to get power.

Caitlin Hernández  01:58

Yes. One of the topics that was brought up during those leaked tapes was you know, how can we strip Councilmember Nithya Raman of her renter's district?

LA City Council Tapes  02:07

[audio clip] [Kevin de Leon speaks] Oh, Nithya, yeah. [Gil Cedillo speaks] She doesn't merit. She is not gonna help us. Her district is not a district we can count on. [Kevin de Leon speaks] So you're saying that's the one to put in the blender and chop up, left and right. [Gil Cedillo speaks] Yeah.

Caitlin Hernández  02:17

Like, we're not gonna give this councilmember K-town. We're not gonna give them you know, this area of Los Angeles, because it's not beneficial to us.

Brian De Los Santos  02:24

[music in] I want to s- hear some real life examples that you might know. Maybe it's in your district, or maybe it's in other districts where you're like, Okay, this exactly how things went down with the councilmember. What are some of the things that we can see with our eyes the way that councilmembers work in our communities?

Caitlin Hernández  02:38

I think a good example you could see is in Lincoln Heights with Councilmember Gil Cedillo's district. I think last year it was, I covered this story about the Flat Top in Lincoln Heights, which is like this really scenic overlook that's pretty popular on the East side. It's beautiful, very accessible, you just walk up there, and you can sit and overlook all the way from Downtown Los Angeles to Catalina Island if it's really clear. For the most part, it's undeveloped. There are some like, encroaching buildings at the bottom. But the residents there got really active because there are developers that own parts of the land that are trying to build these mansions on there. These residents that live in Lincoln Heights wanted to stop that. [music out] And one of the things they did was call on their councilmember to take action to put a halt to that, which they can do because councilmembers have authority over land use. They didn't get any response. That Councilmember Gil Cedillo did not do anything about that and has yet to do anything about that. I think this is a good example of how who you have in office can affect the outcomes down your street. And, you know, this was someone who was voted in office.

Brian De Los Santos  03:47

And as some of y'all may know, Gil Cedillo's part of that conversation that was leaked over on those tapes. [music in] So he's super relevant to this conversation on redistricting.

Caitlin Hernández  03:56

And he's also going out of office soon, which, you know, could mean that there's some better outcomes there. You have Eunisses Hernandez coming into office probably in December if he doesn't step down.

Brian De Los Santos  04:05

Got it. I'm learning already. You know, I'm just letting you know Caitlin. [laughs] Okay, remember that Koreatown example from Caitlin? Well, K-town is also a great example of just how complicated the district maps can get. Before the lines are set in stone for the decade, the council appoints an independent commission to draw the new district maps.

José Del Rio  04:26

They're able to make a recommendation to the city council and the city council then is able to take that map, look at it, make any sort of adjustments, or they can throw the map out entirely and draft their own map, which is very similar to what this iteration of city council did just last year.

Brian De Los Santos  04:42

This is José Del Rio.

José Del Rio  04:44

And I am currently a political consultant. During 2021, I was monitoring Los Angeles's redistricting process.

Brian De Los Santos  04:52

He worked with California Common Cause with the goal of fixing [music out] some of these power imbalances we're talking about. I asked him about what happened last year with K-town being redrawn.

José Del Rio  05:01

So to understand what happened last year, you have to go back about a decade. In 2010, the city of Los Angeles had an advisory commission charged with drawing the district line. And the map that ultimately city council adopted actually carved up Koreatown into four different districts. So essentially, Koreatown had four different city council members representing them from 2010 to 2020. Now, that's a big deal. By being split up into four different districts, their political power was diluted. Anytime there's an issue, depending on where you lived in Koreatown, you may have a different city council person to bring it up to, versus someone who lives down the street. And when you're talking about livelihoods of everyday Angelenos, that's incredibly important, right? There's a huge, huge population of AAPI Americans, of Latino Latinx Americans, renters, folks who take public transit, etc., etc. What ended up happening is that anytime there was an issue, in one portion of Koreatown, you brought it up to one city council person, and that city council person would say, You know what, that's not happening in my part of Koreatown. Talk to this person. Folks were essentially bounced around between city council person to city council person. Fast forward to 2020. It took a huge community outpouring from folks all over the city to put that sort of pressure on city council as well as the commission to get it reunified.

Brian De Los Santos  06:30

Okay, so I kind of want to home in on the tapes, and this [José: Yeah.] is why we're doing this episode. We're, we're talking to people- how redistricting can really, truly bring out political power. Tell me why that is and why people should be paying attention to that. Not just- Yes, it's very shameful to hear the racist remarks, the homophobic remarks, the way that people express themselves in that conversation, but it, it really is about power here. [José: It really is.] Can you guide us through that?

José Del Rio  06:56

On top of how disgusting and how horrific those comments are, redistricting holds a lot of power politically, which makes these comments that much more troublesome. The reason being is that redistricting and voting rights as a whole are really the foundational right from which all other rights stem from. It determines who gets funding, how much funding, funding for what. It determines who your neighbors are. It determines who you need to go to for assistance with housing. These are the individuals who have the most power and most control over our daily lives. There's an old adage, an old saying in redistricting: Elections are where you can choose your elected officials, but redistricting is where elected officials get to choose their constituencies. That can lead to corruption. That can lead to issues like the city of Los Angeles is facing currently.

Brian De Los Santos  07:48

So [sighs] what's next to happen, because if there is gonna be a special election for former Nury Martinez's seat, that's gonna cost at least 3 to 4 million dollars. What's kind of next for the LA City Council?

José Del Rio  08:02

I think this is a pivotal moment for city council and for the city of Los Angeles. What we're looking at is an opportunity for the community to band together to not only cast out the hatred that's in city council, but also really look at our processes and procedures, and see how we can prevent something like this from happening in the future.

Brian De Los Santos  08:23

José says we should revisit the city charter, which by the way, was written when I was only eight years old.

José Del Rio  08:29

Our city's charter acts as like a local constitution, right? It's where we look to for guidance. It's where we look to for instruction, but things change. Our charter was written 25 years ago. The city of Los Angeles was so much different back then. And we should have a commission every 10 years, just like redistricting, to look at the charter [music in] to see what things need to be changed, what items need to be added, what items need to be subtracted, to ensure that, like the city of Los Angeles, the charter is growing with us.

Brian De Los Santos  09:02

After the tapes leaked, Councilmember Mitch O'Farrell introduced the motion that if approved, would go before voters in the next election. If it's successful, it would expand the number of seats on the city council. So if the LA City Council is expanded with more seats, is that something that is gonna help the city move forward? Or is it just gonna be another splice of power?

Caitlin Hernández  09:24

I don't know if I can really give an answer to that question. I think the thought behind that is that, you know, councilmembers in smaller districts will have a better chance at getting to know who lives in their district, what they need, what their, what their essentials are, where they live, what their neighborhood's like. It's really hard to do that if you represent such a large swath of LA. And so when you have a councilmember that represents say, for example, maybe only Koreatown, they have a chance to get really intimate not only with what the space is like, but who's in it, and what, what they want to know.

Brian De Los Santos  09:57

All righty, y'all. That's it for us today. Thanks for listening. Please go subscribe and rate us wherever you listen. Support for this podcast is made possible by Gordon and Dona Crawford, who believe that quality journalism makes Los Angeles a better place to live. This program is made possible in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a private corporation funded by the American people. We'll catch up on Thursday because I'm off tomorrow. Y'all stay cute. [music out]