Sacramento was a very different city in 1921 than it is today. Yet the last major redrafting of the Sacramento city charter occurred way back then, when the city’s population was 66,000.
Today, with nearly 500,000 residents, the current charter – which vests “all powers of city government” in the City Council and delegates executive powers to an unelected city manager – no longer meets the city’s needs. Sacramento’s mayor, the only citywide elected official, has weaker powers than the mayors of other large American cities.
That’s why, despite recent setbacks in the courts, Mayor Kevin Johnson and his supporters should not give up on the push for reform. It is too important to drop.
But they should shift gears.
The mayor and council still have very different ideas about reform. The mayor wants a stronger executive role, perhaps too strong; the council appears to favor reforms that update the charter but pretty much leave the current balance of power as is.
The courts have made it clear that residents have two paths for reform under state law and the California Constitution:
• The council may propose a charter and submit it to the voters, or
• Voters may elect a charter commission. As in a recall, voters first vote on the question: “Shall a charter commission be elected to propose a new charter?” Secondly, they vote for candidates to serve on the commission. If the first question receives a majority of votes, the top 15 candidates are elected to the charter commission. Any registered voter can be a candidate. By law, the commission has two years to submit a revised charter to voters.
As they ponder a course of action, strong-mayor supporters should look at the Los Angeles experience in the late 1990s. That city successfully overhauled its 1925 charter, creating a strong-mayor system in a 1999 vote.
That city had similar differences between mayor and council. And as in Sacramento, the council in Los Angeles appointed a charter commission and wanted recommendations to get council approval before going to voters. The mayor rejected that and wanted an alternative route for charter reform.
But the similarities end there.
Unlike Mayor Johnson, Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan pursued the route of an elected charter commission whose recommendations would go directly to the voters without prior council approval. He collected signatures to place an elected commission on the ballot, and a second commission was elected.
So two competing charter reform commissions went about their work.
Raphael Sonenshein, executive director of the council-appointed commission, has written: “Out of this nearly impossible tangle, reformers managed to knit a new city charter that greatly expanded institutions for citizen participation and addressed long-standing weaknesses in the role of the mayor.”
It worked because the two commissions ended up being independent of both the mayor and council; the leadership of both commissions realized that eventually the two commissions would have to come together and settle on a unified proposal, recognizing both would fail if separate proposals went on the ballot; and community groups came together to put the pressure on when the mayor had exaggerated ideas of what powers the mayor should have or the council tried to block any change.
Voters passed the new charter 60 percent to 40 percent.
While the two-commission process was less than ideal, in the end it worked because enough people recognized that a charter has to be a political document that is a product of compromise.
In short, there is precedent for working within existing options to achieve comprehensive charter overhaul in a highly charged political environment. And other California cities, not just Los Angeles, have shown that it is possible to achieve charter change. Fresno also comes to mind.
The goal in Sacramento is to get reasonable, thoughtful charter change. To that end, an elected commission remains an option that reformers should examine. The existing council-appointed charter committee, unfortunately, already has made it clear that it has little interest in real change.
When a city has many interests and political divisions, compromise is inevitable – and that should be the aim as civic leaders press forward.