How to not get things done in L.A.
Even a strong mayor can't overcome a weak city.
By Robert Greene
“It’s because L.A. is a weak-mayor city,” I heard someone say.
I was struggling with a dysfunctional parking meter in a city-owned lot, and complaining about it perhaps a little too loudly. I looked up to see a woman at an adjacent meter locked in a similar battle. When she saw that her remark had gotten my attention she continued the lesson.
“No one has any power to fix anything here,” she explained. “Not like in Chicago, where I’m from.”
She was expressing a core tenet of many residents’ shared belief about Los Angeles: We have a weak-mayor form of government.
But is that really true? Or do we just have a penchant for electing weak mayors?
The answers can become a bit complex, but in the simplest, political-science-textbook definition, Los Angeles is in no sense a weak-mayor city. Glendale, yes. Burbank, Santa Clarita — in fact most small and medium-sized cities in California operate on council-manager model, a weak-mayor form of municipal government in which an elected city council appoints a city manager to run things. The mayor may cut ribbons and make speeches, but has no power to hire or fire the police chief, the planning director, or any other department head.
That’s not Los Angeles. In L.A., it’s the mayor who hires and fires the department managers, and together they form a cabinet that’s charged with operating most city functions. There’s no appointed city manager (the city administrative officer is a budget analyst but has no executive power). The City Council can’t run anything without the mayor. It’s in Sec. 230 of L.A.’s charter: The mayor is the chief executive officer of the city.
So why does New York’s Mayor Zohran Mamdani seem so much more powerful than L.A.’s Karen Bass? For that matter, why did even his failed predecessor, Eric Adams look empowered? Why does Boston’s Michelle Wu, or Chicago’s Brandon Johnson? Or even San Francisco’s Daniel Lurie?
The answer — or at least, part of it — is that in California, most social service functions are assigned not to cities but to counties.
For example, the city of Los Angeles can’t effectively deal with challenges like homelessness because power over poverty abatement, public health, mental health, addiction treatment, and a variety of other services intimately tied to homelessness — all that is assigned to L.A. County. Yet the criticism for not solving homelessness is aimed at the city and, by extension, its mayor. Bass began her tenure and her drive to reduce homelessness by making nice with county supervisors because she couldn’t do much without them. It worked, until it didn’t.
The city once had its own health department, as Pasadena and Long Beach do. But L.A.’s closed in 1964 because at the time it seemed more efficient to contract with the county. Several City Council candidates are now slamming the quality and quantity of county-delivered health services and want the city to again have its own department. Finding the money, hiring the workers, and building the facilities would be complicated and expensive.
None of that is a problem in San Francisco, which is a combined city and county, allowing the mayor to coordinate all housing, health, and homeless services. Or in New York, which subsumes five counties, and where authority over almost every government service and program is headquartered in the mayor’s office. Mayors of those cities may or may not be effective in keeping mentally ill people off the street and on medication, but if they fail, their constituents know whom to blame. Those mayors can’t shrug and point to some other government as the responsible party.
It’s not so much the L.A. mayoralty that’s weak. It’s the city itself. Los Angeles mayors can’t fix homelessness, for example, because the City of Los Angeles can’t fix homelessness — not without the full participation of Los Angeles County.
The county, meanwhile, pulled out of the joint powers agency that it and the city ran to deal with homelessness. Now the city is doing the same thing.
Frustration over the limitations of City Hall power has led some L.A. mayors to find their happy place in other government agencies. Some focus on Metro, where they control a bloc of four out of 13 votes and enjoy a seemingly inexhaustible supply of tax funding for transportation projects (because voters have repeatedly passed ballot measures to pay for them). Eric Garcetti used his appointment power to sway water policy at the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. Antonio Villaraigosa set his sights on the Los Angeles Unified School District because, he explained at the time, big city mayors run schools. He failed in the sense that California law prevented him from running the school district the way New York mayors do, but he used his political acumen to sway school board elections and put several of his ideas in place.
In addition to the limitations on city power, there is a particularly Los Angeles culture that pushes back against strong mayors. Running through the city’s civic veins is a deep distrust of elected leadership and executive power. L.A.’s business elite had fits in 1911 when socialist Job Harriman came close to winning the mayoral election. New arrivals from East Coast cities were disgusted by the political machines that ran their hometowns. L.A. itself was under the patronage thumb of crooks like Charlie Crawford, who once ran the city from a bar on Maple Street, together with political boss Kent Kane Parrot, who controlled the mayor’s office. There was a strong movement to disperse power so completely that no elected official could ever get in the way of, well, anyone – big business, middle class homeowners, the mob. They designed a government that put no one in charge by putting everyone in charge. Department heads reported to subject-specific city commissions, for example the Library Commission, which selected the city librarian and enjoyed a pot of funds that could not be touched by the mayor or the City Council.
After voters recalled corrupt Mayor Frank Shaw in the 1930s, they elected L.A. mayors who were either stalwart and a tad dull, or else ex-legislators with limited executive chops. Fletcher Bowron and Tom Bradley fell into the former camp; Norris Poulson and Sam Yorty into the latter.
In all those years, from Bowron through Bradley, L.A. was known for its clean, well-run, professional government. And its relatively weak-mayor system – not a council-manager system in which a mayor is virtually powerless, but a sort of hybrid.
An appointed city administrative officer held the reins. The police chief enjoyed virtual life tenure. Department heads with civil service protection reported to appointed volunteer citizen commissions made up of the city’s wealthy elite and civic do-gooders. Decentralized L.A. government worked perfectly — if you were a white home-owning family who wanted nothing to change.
So Los Angeles became a City of No, where elected officials couldn’t or wouldn’t do much and political movements grew around stopping things: busing, building, taxing, race-mixing.
Then came the 1990s: the Rodney King beating, the riots, the crime peak, the collapse of the city’s self-confidence and the realization that the professional government of the 1950s and 1960s did not work well for redlined neighborhoods that were stuck with poor police and protection, too few fire stations, aging sewage pipes, subpar street cleaning, and simply less of the municipal services that that newer and whiter neighborhoods had.
The irony was that those better-off neighborhoods were unhappy too, convinced that all of their tax money was supporting their poorer counterparts in other parts of town. The San Fernando Valley mounted an unsuccessful campaign to secede from Los Angeles. So did Hollywood. So, briefly, did San Pedro, Eagle Rock, and Venice.
Richard Riordan succeeded Bradley and was confounded by what he perceived as his official powerlessness. He set in motion a charter reform process to make the city’s organizational chart more closely resemble a corporation’s, with the mayor as the chief executive officer. He bankrolled an election for a charter reform commission.
The City Council appointed a parallel commission, and the two panels crafted competing plans to alter the hybrid L.A. system and ultimately put on the ballot a unified plan that included the previously mentioned Sec. 230: The mayor is in charge.
And just in case anyone still might think that the city administrative officer was a city manager who ran things, the commissions changed the name to manager of the Office of Administrative and Research Services, just to drive home the point that this person wasn’t in charge of anything.
But, as the saying goes, culture eats strategy for breakfast. L.A.’s civic culture was suspicious of change, and the council adopted an ordinance changing the name back to city administrative officer, notwithstanding what was in the new charter. Reclaiming the title of the city’s top staffer didn’t expressly diminish any of the mayor’s new power, but it signalled the council’s allegiance to the old ways.
By the time the new document was adopted, Riordan was almost termed out — under a term limit measure that he had championed before he was elected.
Even though he served during L.A.’s weakish mayor era, many considered him to be a strong mayor. Why? He was granted strong emergency powers following the 1994 Northridge earthquake. He had a strong political partner in attorney William Wardlaw, who was close with President Clinton and made sure that Los Angeles had the attention of the White House. He got his new charter passed, although it didn’t give his successor the sweeping powers that he had in mind.
That successor was James K. Hahn, who served in elected office for 20 years under the old system and was used to it. Defeated for reelection, he was sometimes deemed a weak mayor in the new strong-mayor system – an assessment that leaves out his political sacrifice in defeating Valley and Hollywood secession and straightening out the Los Angeles Police Department by replacing Chief Bernard Parks with William Bratton. He also gave neighborhood councils — an innovation of the new charter — some skin in the game in the form of city funding.
Then came Villaraigosa and his blunted school takeover, and his successful drive to expand Metro rail lines. Eric Garcetti was at his best during the worst of the COVID pandemic. And then Bass, who like Riordan declared a state of emergency, but who unlike him had to deal with an unfriendly administration in the White House and backlash after the Palisades fire.
Hahn, Villaraigosa, Garcetti, and Bass all had more power than Bradley and his forebears. They exercised it, if not always skillfully.
But it’s still in L.A.’s DNA for the mayor to manage by persuasion and consensus rather than fiat, and that may be necessary, given that it must rely on others for an important set of municipal services: public health, schools, transportation, economic development, jails, welfare, freeways, and on and on. L.A. voters need their mayors to be skilled coalition-builders. Voters here tend to choose Assembly speakers, like Bass and Villaraigosa, or council presidents like Garcetti. Cat-herders, rather than thumb-breakers.
Now the whole situation is being revisited — again. The City Council on Wednesday debated and sent to voters another series of charter reform proposals, and the plans don’t all push in the same direction as previous, mayor-strengthening reforms. One would weaken the mayor’s power over the Police Department, for example, by reassigning some decisionmaking to the council.
The county, meanwhile, is fine-tuning sweeping changes that voters already adopted in 2024 as Measure G. Voters replaced the county’s no-mayor system with — well, it’s not yet clear what. In 2028 they will elect a county “mayor” for the first time, but whether that person has strong or weak powers depends in part on details still to come. Some of those particulars may come back to the ballot.
U.S. cities generally move over time from weak to strong-mayor formats. Portland, Oregon jettisoned its ancient commission form of government in 2024 and now has its first-ever strongish-power mayor. The idea is to gain the executive-legislative checks and balances that have long been the cornerstone of the U.S. Constitution.
But what are Angelenos thinking about that now, with an overreaching, authoritarian U.S. president who sends federal troops onto L.A. streets, and a supine Congress that won’t step in? A powerful executive who rules by fiat and ego may no longer look quite so attractive. Voters would do well to act ever so slightly out of character, dig deep into what might look like mundane details of city governance, and develop strong opinions about the reforms that come to them later this year. The minute details of governance matter.
Robert Greene, a Pulitzer Prize-winning former editorial writer for the Los Angeles Times, is an L.A.-based independent reporter and 2026-27 John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation fellow.
Great piece, though I’m skeptical of the last claim - I think in a moment of unitary federal executive authority, my sense of what left-liberals want is a countervailing unitary authority at the state and local level, not the perceived anemia of the current Democratic Party. People aren’t mad that Karen Bass has been doing too much, after all!
Useful, illuminating, and well-written, thank you!