The Los Angeles City Council on Wednesday moved forward with a wide-ranging package of potential revisions to the city’s constitution, including taking a first step toward giving noncitizens the right to vote in city elections.
The noncitizen voting measure was part of a package of proposed city charter changes that will be placed before voters on the Nov. 3 ballot. The package also includes a measure that would allow the council to set policy at Los Angeles Police Department.
The proposal to allow noncitizens to vote was proposed by Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martínez and approved on an 10-5 vote.
“I believe it’s a simple principle that should guide us: If you live in the city, contribute to the city, raise your family in the city, and are impacted by the decisions made in the city, you deserve to have a voice in the city,” Soto-Martínez said.
At the same time, the council majority sidelined other measures that had been recommended by the Charter Reform Commission, including expansion of the City Council from 15 seats to 25 and a move to ranked-choice voting, where voters list candidates in order of preference.
“I would have liked to have seen a more comprehensive charter review. But we are where we are,” said Councilmember Tim McOsker in an interview Wednesday evening.
Still, McOsker said that important measures moved forward.
Under the council action Wednesday, the city’s lawyers will draft ballot measures dealing with a host of other topics — establishing of a director of Public Works, switching to a two-year budget cycle (instead of every year), establishing a capital infrastructure plan to guide the city’s infrastructure planning, increasing the monetary penalty for ethics violations and other changes.
The council will still need to cast another vote for the measures to appear on the ballot.
Yet to be decided is how the proposals will be packaged on the ballot. The city attorney’s office submitted a recommendation on Tuesday to break up the charter into a number of amendments.
If approved by voters this fall, the non-citizen voting measure would enable to the council to pass an ordinance allowing noncitizen residents of Los Angeles to vote in citywide and Los Angeles Unified School Board elections. Councilmembers Bob Blumenfield, John Lee, Tim McOsker, Adrin Nazarian and Monica Rodriguez voted no.
Rodriguez said the city needs more information about whether Los Angeles County, which runs city elections, would be capable of handling the change. She also questioned whether, at a time of federal immigration crackdowns, the city would end up putting noncitizens in greater danger by adding them to a voter database.
“Given the dynamics that we have right now, what we’re creating is a list of individuals that could then just be the target [of] another potential federal administration,” she said after the vote.
On police oversight, the council voted 10-5 to put a measure before voters that would allow the council to set policy at the police department. Currently, the five-person, civilian-run Board of Police Commissioners, appointed by the mayor, has that responsibility.
Soto-Martínez said such a measure would have given the council more power over police during last year’s immigration raids. The council already would have been able to end pretextual stops if it had authority to set policy itself, he said.
“If council had the power to do this we would have made tremendous positive changes in this city,” Soto-Martínez said earlier this week during a meeting of the Rules, Elections and Intergovernmental Relations Committee.
Some council members stressed caution over the proposed change.
“I think the city should be very careful to examine whether the proposal solves a demonstrated problem or merely shifts authority,” Councilmember John Lee said during the rules committee meeting earlier this week. “This could unintentionally politicize policy decisions and create instability as policy priorities shift with each election cycle.”
The city’s police union said Wednesday that the city failed to meet and confer with them over any of the proposals at the LAPD, as required under the collective bargaining process. The union asked the council to suspend consideration of charter amendments that affect its members.
The council also backed a proposal to double the amount of money set aside for the Department of Recreation and Parks, which has struggled for years with staffing cuts and aging facilities.
Under the City Charter, the agency receives a minimum allocation equal to 0.0325% of the assessed value of all property assessed for taxes within city limits. The council voted 14-1 to draft a charter amendment doubling that allocation.
The increase had been sought by a coalition of park advocates, who said the park agency never recovered from cuts that began during the Great Recession. A council committee recommended a smaller increase earlier this week, arguing that the city would not be able to afford such a big increase during a four-year ramp-up.
In a compromise, Rodriguez pushed for the parks allocation to be doubled, taking it to 0.065%. — but over a 10-year transition, instead of the four that was previously considered. Park advocacy groups welcomed the deal, saying it would make park space, recreation facilities and senior centers more accessible.
“Kids, seniors and families all across L.A. are going to get what they need and deserve,” said Sarah K. Friedman, a manager of special programs for the advocacy group Trust for Public Land.
Councilmember Bob Blumenfield cast the lone opposing vote, warning his colleagues that the proposal would tie the hands of future councils, making it much more difficult for them to balance the budget during difficult financial times.
“The more things we wall off, the more difficult that process [of balancing the budget] is going to be for all of you,” Blumenfield said.
The Department of Recreation and Parks received a $292 million minimum allocation this year, out of a $359 million budget. On Wednesday, the council asked its budget team to report on the amount of money that would be allocated as a result of Rodriguez’ proposal.
The last time the city took up a large-scale update of the charter was in 1999, amid an effort by some San Fernando Valley civic leaders to secede from Los Angeles.
For some advocacy groups, this latest attempt came as a huge disappointment. Some of the long sought changes, such as council expansion and ranked-choice voting, were recommended by the Charter Reform Commission. The council’s five-member rules committee tabled those ideas, saying they need more study.
Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson said it would be better for the city to “do it right than to do it fast” when changing the charter. He proposed creating a new committee to examine the implications of adding 10 more council seats.
“A bigger council makes the mayor more powerful than the mayor would be now,” he said earlier this week. “In every city that has a large council, the mayor is vastly more powerful than the situation that we have in L.A. today.”
Mike Bonin, a former councilman who is now executive director of the Pat Brown Institute at Cal State L.A., said he had hoped that after four years, the City Council would approve at least one major reform, like council expansion.
“It’s the great punt of 2026,” he said. “It’s an underwhelming result for a lot of effort.”
The call for a larger council was revived four years ago, following the leak of secretly recorded conversation between three council members and a labor leader that featured racist and disaparging remarks. An ad hoc committee focused on reform spent several months discussing the issue, only to forward it to the 13-member Charter Reform Commission.
The commission endorsed the idea of adding 10 council members, a move that would reduce the size of each council district to roughly 159,000 residents, down from 265,000.
The council’s decision to shelve so many reforms will only fuel public apathy and distrust, said Ross Weistroffer, an organizer with Fair Rep LA Coalition, a group of nonprofits that pushes for good government and fair representation.
“We don’t need further study,” he told the council. “We need further courage from our electeds.”
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