With 15 city council districts in Los Angeles, each councilmember represents nearly 265,000 Angelenos on average. By comparison, New York City has 51 councilmembers, who each represent fewer than 173,000 people on average, and Chicago has 50 councilmembers who represent about 55,000 people each.
Those figures were cited by city staff during a Thursday, April 20, meeting of the L.A. City Council’s governance reform committee, which is considering changes to the city’s redistricting process and the number of seats on the City Council.
This week’s meeting focused on how many councilmembers L.A. should have, and how many residents each councilmember should represent.
L.A.’s population is expected to grow to 4.3 million by 2030, according to a staff presentation. If each councilmember represented 250,000 residents at that time, the council would need 17 seats. If there were 21 L.A. councilmembers, each would represent 200,000 Angelenos. And if there were 29 council seats, each councilmember would represent 150,000 people.
Council President Paul Krekorian, who also chairs the ad hoc committee on governance reform, said he didn’t know the right number of council seats, but said that keeping it at 15 should not be an option. Nor did he think that following New York City’s model, with its 51 councilmembers, was sensible.
“If you have 50 councilmembers, the council president becomes much more powerful, just like the Speaker of the House is so powerful in the House of Representatives, and the speaker in the Assembly is so powerful in the state Assembly – much more than average members — because somebody has to run that large, inefficient herding-of-the-cats operation,” Krekorian said.
“As council president, I’m going to say it’s not a good thing to give the council president more power,” he added.
At the same time, Krekorian noted that L.A.’s council districts are “gargantuan” and have become too “unwieldy.”
“If any one of our…
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