For months, Angelenos have heard local elected officials say they’re working to reform City Hall, following scandalous revelations that three City Council members and a labor leader met secretly to discuss how they or their allies could personally benefit by drawing new council district maps.
The redrawing of district boundaries, known as “redistricting,” is understood by scholars and pundits but is hardly a household concept despite its importance.
Across the nation, city councils undergo redistricting every decade to account for changes to a city’s population, adjusting district boundaries and at times increasing the number of districts in a city if the population grows or shifts.
This is done so each council district is roughly the same size, and to assure local representation.
But despite seeing its population explode and roughly quadruple over the past century, the L.A. City Council has remained at 15 districts – the same number that existed in 1925 when there were fewer than 1 million residents in the city.
Today, with just under 4 million residents, each council district represents nearly 265,000 Angelenos.
The 265,000 figure is so big that researchers publish papers about L.A.’s singular situation, where an individual councilmember speaks for more than a quarter million people.
No other municipality in the U.S. has that many residents within a single city council district. Phoenix has nearly 201,000 residents for each of its eight council districts. In New York City – where the population is more than twice that of L.A.’s and the city council is divided into 51 districts – councilmembers represent fewer than 173,000 people each on average, according to an L.A. city staff report.
“Our districts are gargantuan,” L.A. City Council President Paul Krekorian said in March, during a meeting of the council’s obscure Ad Hoc Committee on City Governance Reform.
“If any one of our districts was an independent city of its own, it…
Read the full article here