Posted: Sun Mar 04, 2007 3:53 am Post subject: Insanely few rule LA City and County
I was very startled when I recently read that only 15 councillors rule LA City and only 5 board members rule Los Angeles County, which has a population of almost 10 million!!! Thus each member represents ca. 2 million voters!!! Is that some kind of sick joke or just Californian democracy?
It seems very odd for me, because in Norway every municipality with more than 100.000 inhabitants and each province with more than 300.000 inhabitants must both have a council of at least 43 members. And I think the situation is similar in the rest of continental Europe. I admit that 12 was the ideal number of city councillors in the Middle Ages, but this is not a small medieval city, but a megacity! _________________ Wer fremde Sprachen nicht kennt, weiß nichts von seiner eigenen. = Those who don't know foreign languages, know nothing of their own. (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)
Last edited by Fredrik on Sun Mar 04, 2007 7:28 am; edited 1 time in total
Wow, that is a tiny government for such a huge population. To make matters even worse, Wikipedia says that no new member has been elected to the Los Angeles County Board since 1996.
New York City, which I'm more familiar with, has a mayor and a 51-member council. (There's no overarching county government there because each of the 5 boroughs is its own county.)
Location: El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles del Río de Porciúncula
Posted: Mon Mar 05, 2007 2:03 am Post subject: Re: Insanely few rule LA City and County
Fredrik wrote:
I was very startled when I recently read that only 15 councillors rule LA City and only 5 board members rule Los Angeles County, which has a population of almost 10 million!!! Thus each member represents ca. 2 million voters!!! Is that some kind of sick joke or just Californian democracy?
Ridiculous, innit? And to make matters even worse the LAPD only has around 9,000 police officers (covering an area of 473 square miles), compared to NYPD, which has over 35,000, I think. Of course NYC has several million more people, but LA covers wider territory and has this pesky ongoing problem with street gangs (... and people wonder why we build huge walls around our property and own guns!)
These are just some of the reasons why communites within the city (Hollywood, the San Fernando Valley, etc.) have been trying to secede and create their own, more responsive city governments.
The only reason I can think of as to why LA (the city) only has 15 councilmembers, compared to New York's 51, is simply that no sitting councilmember wants to lose their powerbase. So every ten years (?) when Los Angeles redraws its council district boundaries, councilmembers squabble over the more affluent and influential neighborhoods and fight for more constituents (i.e. more potential voters), rather than doing what's best and create more manageable smaller districts. So you end up with insane district boundaries that look like this:
Oh, time for the Guvernator to restore order with some enlightened despotism in the best Austrian Habsburg fashion! _________________ Wer fremde Sprachen nicht kennt, weiß nichts von seiner eigenen. = Those who don't know foreign languages, know nothing of their own. (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)
But are we talking about the City of Los Angeles or the megalopolis of the Greater L.A. Area? Those might be two different things, as the City of London is just a small segment of the actual place we all call "London". What we all think of as just "L.A" is actually a conglomeration of different cities, each with its own city limits and jurisdictions.
[img]
http://www.holidaycityusa.com/los-angeleshotels/map.gif[/img]
And if Holiday Inn doesn't have a location there, it doesn't get a name! _________________ An apple a day....
But are we talking about the City of Los Angeles or the megalopolis of the Greater L.A. Area? Those might be two different things, as the City of London is just a small segment of the actual place we all call "London". What we all think of as just "L.A." is actually a conglomeration of different cities, each with its own city limits and jurisdictions.
No, the City Council is for the city as a whole. The LA neighborhoods in that picture are, for the most part, communities that were annexed by the city during an expansionist period in the early part of the 20th century. As far as I know, those neighborhoods don't even serve as formal governmental units anymore. I don't think you could say that LA is an conglomeration (in other words, it doesn't contain autonomous "cities within a city" like New York does), or that it has multiple jurisdictions.
It's similar to how Boston annexed a lot of surrounding towns during the late 19th century, which live on as neighborhoods.
Aha! Good point. I wasn't sure if the greater LA area was all under one council or not, since they do refer to themselves as independent cities, like Hollywood, Beverly Hills, West LA, etc.
And jeez, Boston sure had a voracious appetite! _________________ An apple a day....
Aha! Good point. I wasn't sure if the greater LA area was all under one council or not, since they do refer to themselves as independent cities, like Hollywood, Beverly Hills, West LA, etc.
I just checked: Beverly Hills is an independent city, but Hollywood and West LA are fully annexed neighborhoods with no separate government. Here's a map that shows the city proper - a hodgepodge of annexations that alone contains over 4 million people - together with the surrounding cities, like Burbank, Santa Monica and Beverly Hills:
Quote:
And jeez, Boston sure had a voracious appetite!
Yeah, I was surprised when I first saw that map. The original colonial city was just a small part of what's now Boston.
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And to make matters even worse the LAPD only has around 9,000 police officers (covering an area of 473 square miles), compared to NYPD, which has over 35,000, I think. Of course NYC has several million more people, but LA covers wider territory and has this pesky ongoing problem with street gangs (... and people wonder why we build huge walls around our property and own guns!) 
