HOWARD FINE
Staff Reporter
Last Tuesday, 136,000 L.A. residents made a decision that will affect the lives of nearly 3.7 million of their fellow Angelenos for decades to come: They voted for a new city charter that overhauls the structure of city government.
That’s only 3.5 percent of the total population, or 17.1 percent of all registered voters.
But wait, it gets worse. On election night, as results from the historic balloting began trickling in, KNBC-TV Channel 4 didn’t even bother making the vote its lead item. Instead, it covered a capsized boat.
There are no shortages of stories about voter apathy in Los Angeles, a city where some might measure civic involvement by the number of Dodgers games attended each season. But even by L.A. standards, the charter reform vote might have reached a new low in a shrugging citizenry.
“You’re the first one this morning,” a Westwood precinct worker greeted a voter last Tuesday at 7:25 a.m. almost a half-hour after the polls opened. After the voter cast his ballot, she said, “Tell your friends, please.”
Overall, only about 226,000 people turned out to vote on the city charter, roughly the same turnout as in the April 13 primary election. Even during the last citywide mayoral election in April 1997, when interest in city politics was supposed to be at its highest, the turnout was only 32 percent to reelect Mayor Richard Riordan.
“Look, the people in office here in L.A. today are not exactly high-voltage personalities,” said Jerry Nachman, former editor of the New York Post who has relocated to Los Angeles. “In New York, you had Koch, D’Amato, Giuliani; in the Bay Area now you’ve got Willie Brown and Jerry Brown. These leaders can stir people’s juices and get them out to the polls. You just don’t see that in L.A.”
Of course, low turnout is not a problem limited to Los Angeles. Voter participation has been declining nationwide for more than 30 years to the point that the 1996 presidential election saw turnout fall below 50 percent for the first time this century.
Even in New York, hardly a wallflower when it comes to civic participation, only 40 percent turned out for the reelection of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani in 1997, when charter reform also was on the ballot.
But it’s generally acknowledged among those in media and politics that L.A.’s lack of involvement reaches unusual perhaps even extraordinary proportions. And it’s not just with elections: The recent controversy over the police shooting of a homeless African American woman who was brandishing a screwdriver has generated relatively little public interest. Even efforts to get an NFL franchise are generally being greeted with shrugs and an attitude of “they need us more than we need them.”
What gives?
Observers of L.A.’s political and civic culture say the city has long lacked an activist civic tradition. They blame everything from the current charter’s roots in the Progressive era to the spread-out nature of the place and a population that’s often on the move.
“L.A. has never been a city where the population has been activist,” said author and political commentator Earl Ofari Hutchinson. “It’s not like the Eastern cities, with their traditions of ward politics and neighborhood politics. Here, the way government is set up almost pushes people away from the political process.”
Hutchinson, who has been critical of the recent police shooting of Margaret L. Mitchell, said such an incident in New York, Detroit or Washington would have resulted in immediate outrage. Not here, said Hutchinson, who was recently quoted as calling L.A. “one of the most lethargic, apathetic, politically backward cities I’ve ever seen in terms of getting people engaged.”
Part of the disengagement stems from the diffuse nature of power structures in Los Angeles as well as other Western U.S. cities. These structures were set up in the early decades of this century by Progressive leaders who were reacting to the often-excessive cronyism and corruption in Eastern cities.
Local elected offices were designated non-partisan, so as to be free of the political patronage system that dominated New York and Chicago. Legislative and executive powers were dispersed among many government bodies to avoid too much power being concentrated in a small group of individuals or one person.
“People wanted to get away from the party-dominated machine politics of the older cities in the Northeast; they didn’t want another Boss Tweed,” said William Fulton, publisher of the Planning and Development Report, a regional newsletter on development issues, and author of “The Reluctant Metropolis.”
But while politics here have been relatively free of corruption, there is a downside. The lack of a central power structure means that when people want something done, or when things go wrong, it’s hard to know exactly where to go, or whom to hold responsible.
As a result, people begin to feel more distant from government, problems fester and cynicism builds. In addition, the non-partisan nature of local politics means that there are no party organizations to mobilize their troops during elections.
“People aren’t as involved in government in L.A. It’s just not a participatory civic culture,” said Stephen Erie, professor of political science at the University of California, San Diego, who has written extensively on L.A. government.
The mental distancing of Western cities is compounded in L.A. by the often-daunting distances between far-flung neighborhoods like Woodland Hills or Wilmington and City Hall. It can take a round trip of 75 miles to resolve something as simple as the height of a fence next door.
“People here feel disconnected from government,” said Raphael Sonenschein, political science professor at California State University, Fullerton, who just wrapped up his role as executive director of the L.A. Appointed Charter Reform Commission.
Of course, said Fulton, that often suits local politicians just fine. Low voter turnout, he said, usually benefits incumbents, who then have little incentive to change the setup. That’s why there has been no concerted effort on the part of elected officials to make changes that might boost voter turnout, like moving local elections to ballots with statewide or national candidates, re-introducing partisan local offices, or holding elections on weekends.
Besides issues of distance and heritage, there’s also the area’s transitory population.
“When I visit relatives in St. Louis, many of the people I knew there 30 years ago still live on the same block,” Hutchinson said. “Here, just try to find people who live on the same block for 30 years. It just doesn’t happen all that often.”
As a result, he said, people don’t put down deep roots in their communities beyond their immediate neighborhoods.
Add to this the hundreds of thousands of immigrants from distant lands who have poured into L.A. in recent years and it creates constant turnover in neighborhoods.
“People here identify more strongly with their immediate neighborhood, their ethnic community or their church, but not with the city as a whole,” said journalist and author Joel Kotkin, who is a fellow at Pepperdine University’s Institute for Public Policy.
