Opinion: Los Angeles needs a truly independent redistricting commission, the council can’t be trusted
Barring outright graft — never far away when it’s the Los Angeles City Council we’re talking about — there is perhaps nothing more disgusting for citizens to witness in the political machinations within L.A. City Hall than hearing councilmembers pontificate about how their own council district maps should be drawn.
We all got to hear way too much of that talk late last year in the secretly recorded conversation of three council members and a labor leader horse trading over boundaries and making racist comments about the people who live in the city’s neighborhoods that they nominally represent. That’s because Los Angeles electeds, scandalously, have gamed the system to allow the 15 elected council members themselves to decide how the sprawling city is divided up into political divisions.
Because they also appoint a citizen redistricting commission that takes a first pass at drawing the city political map, council members can pretend that they leave the work, properly, up to others. But since they have complete veto power over the draft map with which they are presented — power they essentially always exercise — the commission is a sham.
Because the situation is so blatantly corrupt, politicians in the state Capitol have put forward corrective legislation, Senate Bill 52, which would allow the Legislature to establish an independent redistricting commission for the city.
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