LA council can’t face the need for reforms

Los Angeles City Council leaders say they’re short-handed, and so need to reinstate disgraced council members who won’t resign to their council committee positions in order to get some work done.

Well, if they’re so short-handed, why in the world did they postpone indefinitely any movement toward expanding the council itself by pushing the proposal out for “study” to another ad hoc council committee, which then recommended yet more study by a citizen commission?

The citizenry might be excused for believing it’s because they don’t really care at all about the reforms that were so nominally excited about so very recently in the wake of scandal after scandal rocking City Hall.

As former Santa Monica Mayor Michael Feinstein noted in these pages, “But instead of an independent body, the ad hoc committee is recommending an advisory commission, with eight seats directly appointed by elected officials — four by the mayor, and two each by the City Council president and pro-tem, with five more nominated by the eight appointed members, subject to City Council approval.”

In other words, an inside job.

In case Angelenos need to be reminded, three former City Council members have been indicted on corruption charges: Mark Ridley-Thomas, Jose Huizar and Mitch Englander. Former council President Nury Martinez resigned in the wake of the secretly taped meeting in which she cast about ethnic slurs while conspiring to fix council district boundaries.

Current Councilman Curren Price faces charges of embezzlement, perjury and conflict of interest, and fellow current Councilman Kevin de León refuses to resign though he was in on the same meeting that Martinez was. And these two are the ones reinstated to that all-important committee work.

“Having two members of the council sitting idle while collecting full pay was imposing an excessive workload on the other 12 and interfering with the work of the council,” a council  staffer told City News Service.

What’s really interfering with the work of the council, constituents say, including the anti-corruption group Unrig LA, is having wildly problematic members un-idled to muck up the people’s business.