What Does a City Do?

LA's Mayor and Councilmembers Seem to Have Forgotten the Residents They Serve

Counting the time I worked for an NGO (the American Red Cross), I spent a bit more than 40 years in public service. Thirty-two of those years were spent working for cities--one with the City of Santa Ana and 31 with the City of Fullerton in north Orange County. Fullerton is a mid-sized city, (population about 150,000); it is a full-service city, meaning most services are provided by city staff. For almost all my career with Fullerton, my home department was Public Works, but as any employee of a smaller city can attest, you often work across departments according to need. After I began doing performance auditing in the early 1990’s, I my team did work for the Police, Fire, Library, and Development Services Departments, plus Public Works.

One of the nice things about working for a smaller city is that you often get to see the results of your work. That’s especially true of Public Works. My department repaired the streets, trimmed the trees, supplied the water and took away the waste. Our crews maintained parks and removed graffiti. When we restructured and contracted out tree trimming as a result of one of our reviews, I saw more trees trimmed than in previous years.

I also found I liked the informality of a smaller city. If I had an important question, I could call or email the City Manager directly, without going through a screen of assistants. I, and almost all other employees, was on a first-name basis with all the city’s department heads (although I always referred to the Police and Fire Chiefs by their titles in front of their staffs). I believe that informality made my job easier and more efficient; if I had a question, I could go directly to the person in charge to get an answer.

One thing I learned early in my career is that cities are where most people interact with government. If someone wanted a pothole fixed, they called us. When a robber broke into a home, the resident called our police department. Even the City Clerk’s Office provided notary service. Since Public Works is a public-facing department, we received dozens of service calls daily. Sometimes, the call was for a service provided by the County, like clearing a flood channel, so we had a directory to point callers to the right agency. Like any other local government, Fullerton wasn’t perfect, but the vast majority of our employees were dedicated public servants who tried to provide the best possible service they could. Smaller cities are also more intimate; well over half our employees lived within city limits and a resident could bump into a Councilmember at the local grocery store. Many people had no clue who their state representatives or federal Congressperson was, but they knew their Councilmembers.

Because Fullerton is a full-service city, residents often expected the Council to step into issues that have nothing to do with it core services. I well remember one gentleman at a City Council meeting delivering a long diatribe about the evils of wi-fi in schools, until a Councilmember gently reminded him the school district--not the city--handled conditions in schools. Other speakers asked the Council to take positions over which it had no control, such as federal policies that didn’t directly affect cities. Most of the time, Councilmembers were wise enough to demur the invitation and remind speakers cities can only control local issues.

That experience raises an interesting philosophical and practical question, “What do cities do”? The simplest answer is that cities provide services that most impact the quality of life of their residents. They are the primary point of contact between government and citizens. Basic things like public safety and infrastructure maintenance can have a profound effect on residents and businesses. This simple rule seems to have been lost on elected leaders in Los Angeles. In LA, small business owners complain that homeless encampments block the entrances to their stores and intimidate their customers. Street trees can go 20 or more years without being trimmed, and the streets are marred by potholes. When homeowners complain about homeless encampments in neighborhood parks and on sidewalks, they are often met with lectures about how the unhoused have nowhere to go or how economic injustice feeds homelessness. Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez has poured $28 million into social and other support services in MacArthur Park just west of downtown, yet crime and drug abuse continue to plague the area. The park is one of the few green spaces where working families, whom Hernandez claims to represent, can go for recreation, yet they are confronted by open-air substance abuse, gang activity, and random crime. Councilmember Nithya Raman, who is running for Mayor, has ignored community pleas to close, (or at least control), the Riverside Bridge Home, where a homeless man was murdered last July. But she did find $42,000 to fund a no-bid contract with a nonprofit she founded, SELAH, for unspecified services at the shelter. These are just two of the many examples of local officials ignoring the basic needs of their constituents in favor of ideological or personal agendas.

Perhaps nobody embodies the disconnect between local needs and action than Mayor Bass. She often pushes herself into national debates while virtually ignoring local priorities. She was quick to stand in front of the federal courthouse to condemn the arrest of journalist Don Lemon following an ICE protest in a St. Paul church. Yet she seems allergic to appearing in the same court when it comes to testifying about LA’s $1 billion homelessness budget, preferring to hide behind a wall of high-priced attorneys who have been paid almost $7.5 million to block information about the Mayor’s signature Inside Safe and other city homelessness programs. She has consistently claimed homelessness has declined by citing numbers that are notoriously inaccurate, while at least two Councilmembers, Monica Rodriguez and Traci Park, have called the city’s programs a flat-out failure.

Looking at the arc of the Mayor’s tenure to date, I get the impression she never successfully made the transition from being a US Representaitve, where Congressmembers are insulated from their constituents by large staffs, to the gritty reality of running a big city. People expect their local elected officials to deliver services and advocate for their constituents. There’s nothing wrong with condemning the arrest of a journalist for doing his job, but it seems injecting herself into national controversies at the expense of local issues has become a habitual behavior for the Mayor.

Perhaps no single crisis shows how unprepared the Mayor was for municipal governance than the Palisades Fire. The issue isn’t her absence from the city on an international mission as it is with the actions--or lack thereof--she’s taken since. Instead of taking affirmative, consistent and decisive action, she’s appointed and then unappointed a recovery czar, fired the Fire Chief, and, as we recently discovered, involved herself in editing the LAFD’s after-action report to soften the impact (a charge she denies). Instead of meeting fire victims on the streets in informal and approachable encounters, her press conferences have been carefully staged and choregraphed to control her image as an authority future. On the few occasions when regular citizens have had a chance to vent their frustrations to her, she’s either run from the cameras or froze, stone-faced, refusing to respond.

The mayor and the DSA-affiliated Councilmembers have also failed in the primary way local officials should deal with national issues: as advocates for reform. If we’ve learned one thing about homelessness in the last 20 years, its that Housing First/Harm Reduction doesn’t work as the primary (or sole) solution to homelessness. Yet HUD and the state continue to fund Housing First programs at the expense of alternatives. Local officials, who deal with the practical consequences of Housing First’s failures, have chosen to pursue easy funding instead of advocating for change. In other areas, like land use, municipal officials do not hesitate to lobby Sacramento for local control. But when it comes to homelessness, the same officials are content to collect state and federal money, knowing full well the programs they fund don’t work. Part of a local official’s job is advocating for their constituents at higher levels of government. Instead, local officials have abandoned their obligation to taxpayers as advocates for change by continuing to support a policy they know doesn’t work, whether through blind ideology, a cynical effort to maintain political support, or plain incompetence.

Mayor Bass treats local government as a continuous public relations project, while some “Progressive” Councilmembers use the city as a petri dish for their social experiments. To the Mayor, the Palisades Fire was primarily a PR problem to be spun instead of a crisis that must be confronted and solved so people can move back to their homes as quickly as possible. To Councilmember Hernandez, crime and drug overdoses at MacArthur Park are just symptoms of a wider socio-economic problem, and its problems must be addressed with theoretical (and ideologically acceptable) solutions instead of real action.

The Mayor and Councilperson seem to have forgot the primary mission of a City and its leaders is to serve residents and businesses. They seem themselves as actors on the national stage instead of municipal public servants. While they spend time in front of cameras pontificating about high-profile issues, their constituents suffer with real-world and entirely solvable problems. It as if the mundane business of running a city is unworthy of their attention while they focus on Bigger Things.

The problem, of course, is that cities are at the end of the policy trail. Most federal and state policies are implemented at the local level. Cities are in the business of implementing programs for the benefit of their constituents. Its all fine and good to contemplate the larger societal issues behind some policies, but city officials’ primary duty is to get things done for taxpayers, whether its fixing a streetlight or addressing criminal activity. That’s how a city official’s success should be measured.