These reforms strengthen representation, cut backroom power, and modernize how the city makes decisions.

Key changes:

• Expand the Los Angeles City Council to the maximum available option presented to the full commission, to restore representative balance and reduce corruption and patronage risks.
  
  

• Require automatic resizing after each census (starting with 2040) so no council district exceeds 125,000 residents, so representation keeps pace with population.
  
  

• Clarify executive authority and administrative responsibility within the Charter to support coherent administration, cross-departmental coordination, and clear accountability for outcomes. Explicitly, this should clearly lay out chains of authority within the executive branch to reduce fragmentation and limit informal or duplicative management of departments.
  
  

• Implement ranked choice voting for citywide and council elections to improve representation, reduce polarization, and give voters more real choices.
  
  

• Lower the voting age to 16 for municipal and school board elections. Extend the franchise to 16–17 year olds who live, work, pay taxes, and are directly affected by city and school district decisions. Evidence from jurisdictions with youth voting shows improved civic literacy, stronger lifelong voting habits, and positive spillover effects that increase parental and household turnout in local elections.
  
  

• Mandate Charter Update Commissions every 10 years so the city’s foundational document keeps up with current needs.

These reforms unlock housing, remove artificial barriers to density, and let LA grow upward and inward in a way that supports culture and affordability.

Key changes:

• Require General Plan updates every six years so citywide planning reflects real growth, climate, and infrastructure conditions.
  
  

• Integrate Planning, Housing, and Public Works into one growth oriented structure for coordinated land use, infrastructure, and permitting.
  
  

• Commit structurally to pro housing, pro density policies, aligned with the state mandate for about 94,000 new homes per year.
  
  

• Reorient capital and infrastructure budgeting toward growth enablement, not just maintenance.
  
  

• Ensure planning decisions are data driven and transparent, tying infrastructure investment directly to density, sustainability, and mobility outcomes.
  
  

• Remove building height and density limits from the City Charter and move them to ordinance or plan level policy, where they can be updated as needs and technology change.
  
  

• Require a centralized, citywide Capital Improvement Plan, updated every 10 years, that mandates cross-departmental coordination, shared timelines, and joint accountability across departments involved in planning, infrastructure, housing, and service delivery.
  
  

• Establish a borough style governance model with regional boroughs (for example Downtown, the Valley, the Harbor, the Westside, Northeast LA, the Eastside, Central LA):

  • Borough councils would handle local land use incentives, street closures, event programming, nightlife regulation, local capital improvement planning, and livability decisions.
    

  • Citywide policy would stay unified, while boroughs make context specific choices closer to residents.

A modern city needs modern financial oversight. These reforms give Los Angeles a stronger fiscal backbone and more independent watchdogs.

Key changes:

• Designate the City Controller as the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) to consolidate fiscal leadership and improve citywide financial strategy.
  
  

• Provide the Controller with an independent, protected budget, modeled after the Ethics Commission, to safeguard oversight independence.
  
  

• Clarify the Controller’s audit authority to explicitly include all city programs, even those under independently elected officials.
  
  

• Authorize the Controller to hire outside counsel when facing conflicts of interest with the City Attorney’s Office.
  
  

• Charter-protect the Fraud, Waste, and Abuse Unit, currently established by ordinance, ensuring its permanence and independence.
  
  

• Require accurate vacancy reporting, realistic staffing-level projections, and clawbacks for departments that overstate vacancies.
  
  

• Charter requirement that departments publish annual performance metrics, which become auditable benchmarks for the Controller.
  
  

• Departments must submit annual reports showing progress on Controller audit recommendations.
  
  

• Require departments to provide financial and staffing data to the Controller within defined deadlines.
  
  

• Mandate standardized, plain-language annual reports on pension obligations and other long-term liabilities.
  
  

• Require departments to pay legal settlements from their own budget, never the general fund, to align incentives with accountability.
  
  

• Require that any legal liability payouts come from the sued department’s budget, not the city’s general fund.
  
  

• Clarify and expand the City’s authority to establish or participate with public or nonprofit financial institutions for public purposes, including infrastructure, housing, small business support, and climate resilience.

  
  • Authorize the City to invest public funds in locally beneficial lending and financing activities, subject to transparent risk management standards, independent oversight, and fiduciary safeguards.

  
  • Require that any City-affiliated public financial institution or lending authority operate under clear governance structures, regular independent audits, and public reporting requirements to ensure accountability and financial integrity.
  
  

• Adopt staggered budgeting cycles:
  

  • Two-year operational budgets in odd-numbered years.
    

  • Two-year capital budgets in even-numbered years.
    
    This would allow long-term fiscal planning, stability, and project continuity.

These changes modernize the city’s workforce systems so LA can actually hire, retain, and support the people who make the city run.

Key changes:

• Modernize the city’s civil service and personnel systems to prioritize performance, efficiency, and flexibility.
  
  

• Increase professional management capacity within departments, reducing reliance on political appointees and patronage.
  
  

• Align personnel systems with charter reform goals, ensuring hiring, promotion, and evaluation reflect measurable performance outcomes.
  
  

• Codify merit-based hiring standards and leadership development pathways for department management.
  
  

• Empower Personnel and Management to lead reform initiatives focused on recruitment modernization, workforce planning, and digital efficiency.
  
  

• Create interoperable job families so employees can transfer between departments without new civil service lists each time.
  
  

• Move whistleblower safeguards from policy level into the Charter; protect workers who report waste, fraud, or abuse.
  
  

• Modernize all civil service exams and require mandatory updates every five years to reflect current industry standards, real-world skills, and contemporary job requirements.
  
  

• Require continuous recruitment, digital testing, and staffing pipelines that match long-term capital and operational needs.

These reforms coordinate the city’s physical backbone: streets, sanitation, capital projects, and the systems that make daily life work.

Key changes:

• Integrate Public Works more directly with Planning and Housing, ensuring synchronized zoning, infrastructure capacity, and project approvals.
  
  

• Create a unified infrastructure planning process linking capital improvement priorities to long-term housing and transportation goals.
  
  

• Consolidate all street maintenance, and right-of-way service divisions into a single, unified Department of Streets & Sanitation, with all existing union contracts fully grandfathered. This streamlines service delivery, simplifies accountability, eliminates overlapping jurisdictions, and preserves every worker’s current protections, seniority, and bargaining rights.
  
  

• Place all sanitation and street-cleanliness functions under one department rather than dispersing them across multiple agencies, improving efficiency and accountability while preserving all current worker protections.

• Allow City Council, specifically the Public Safety Committee, to modify Police Department policy as a coequal voice with the Police Commission.

• Expand the Los Angeles Board of Police Commissioners to at least nine members to improve representativeness, distribute oversight workload, and reduce institutional capture.

• Require that appointments to the Police Commission reflect the diversity of the City of Los Angeles, including consideration of race, gender, geography, and lived experience, while preserving appointive flexibility.

• Establish mandatory timelines for nomination, confirmation, and appointment to Police Commission vacancies to prevent prolonged vacancies and weakened oversight.

• Designate the Police Commission as a paid, full-time role, enabling full participation by qualified residents regardless of personal wealth and strengthening professional accountability.

• Authorize multiple appointing authorities for the Police Commission, including appointment of a portion of commissioners by the Ethics Commission, and several by public election, to enhance independence from political pressure and reinforce public trust.

• Clarify that Police Commissioners are subject to discipline or removal via council firing or public recall for failure to carry out their oversight duties, including persistent inaction, neglect of accountability responsibilities, or documented oversight failures.

• Modify Section 574(a) to clarify the Police Commission’s duty to affirm protections for nonviolent protest and assembly.

• Strengthen the authority of the Inspector General by requiring regular audits of police stops, detentions, and enforcement activity, with public reporting on demographic disparities and patterns of concern.

• Require that Inspector General findings and recommendations related to civil rights, use of force, and public safety practices be released publicly and receive a documented response from the police commission within defined timelines.

Taken together, these reforms do more than tweak rules. They reset how Los Angeles works at its core.

Big picture goals:

• End Los Angeles’s stagnation in growth and infrastructure renewal.
  

• Build a city structurally capable of meeting state housing and climate goals.
  

• Restore functional separation of powers, so each branch of city government can do its job effectively.
  

• Make planning, finance, and personnel systems proactive, not reactive.

• Budget honesty & transparent accounting as an anti-corruption pillar
  

• Embed efficiency, transparency, and growth into the Charter, making reform a permanent feature.

Bottom line:
Fix the rules, and we can unlock a Los Angeles that works for working people, gives young people a real future here, and actually delivers on the promise of this city.

This document presents a structural Charter reform framework prepared by Livable Advanced LA to support the Los Angeles Charter Reform Commission’s ongoing work. It is intended as a practical quick reference that consolidates the reform concepts actively being discussed across the Charter reform process.

The framework is intentionally limited to reforms appropriate for inclusion in the City Charter. It emphasizes structural authority, accountability, and long-term institutional capacity rather than policy programs or operational details, which are more appropriately addressed through ordinance, administrative action, or future implementation processes.

At its core, the framework is guided by a long-term objective to simplify and clarify the City’s governance structure. This includes moving toward a City Council that functions as a clearly legislative body with responsibilities that are easier to understand, paired with well-resourced and professionally staffed departments capable of handling administrative, service delivery, and constituent-facing functions effectively. The intent is to reduce fragmentation, role confusion, and micromanagement while strengthening accountability and operational capacity across City government.

The items listed are not presented as mandates or final positions, but as Charter-level enabling concepts designed to clarify powers, remove structural barriers, and strengthen democratic accountability. Where appropriate, more precise Charter amendment language has been developed separately and can be provided as a technical addendum for reference and drafting purposes.

The goal of this document is to support informed deliberation by commissioners and to enable them to consider a broader and more coherent set of structural reforms during the Charter revision process than would otherwise be simple or possible.