In a few days, Los Angeles voters will be casting ballots for city attorney — and in a few months, they could be voting to sharply diminish the city attorney’s authority.
The city’s Charter Reform Commission has proposed splitting the city attorney’s office into two parts — an elected city prosecutor, charged with handling criminal misdemeanors, and a mayor-appointed and City Council-confirmed city attorney who would represent the city in civil cases and advise the mayor, city council and city departments.
The City Council is reviewing the recommendation as part of sweeping changes to city government, including expanding the council from 15 to 25 seats, which could go before voters in the Nov. 3 general election.
The proposed changes to the city attorney’ office, however, come in the midst of a heated primary campaign, where incumbent Hydee Feldstein Soto is up against three challengers, including a state deputy attorney general and a deputy district attorney.
Both of those challengers say plans to bifurcate the city attorney’s office are rooted in longstanding conflicts between Feldstein Soto and the City Council.
Council members have expressed frustration over her handling of rising costs from an outside law firm, where the payout amount has grown to nearly $7.5 million — with some attorneys billing the city roughly $1,300 an hour.
And last year, City Council took a 12-0 vote to direct Feldstein Soto to withdraw an effort to halt a federal judge’s order prohibiting LAPD officers from targeting journalists with crowd control weapons.
“When I first heard about this idea, I thought it was probably the greatest indictment of the current city attorney that I’ve heard yet,” said John McKinney, a Los Angeles County deputy district attorney who is running for city attorney in Tuesday’s primary.
McKinney opposes the bifurcation, saying it will cause overlap and confusion. “If she was doing a good job … we wouldn’t even be having this discussion,” he said.
Marissa Roy, another candidate in the race, hasn’t taken a position on bifurcation but said Feldstein Soto’s actions triggered the proposed change.
“The only reason that bifurcation, or splitting the city attorney’s office, is even going to be going before voters is because we’ve had an incumbent city attorney who has gone so rogue to politicize the role,” said Roy, a deputy state attorney general.
Roy said accused Feldstein Soto of inappropriately blocking an affordable housing project in Venice. And in her office’s role of drafting ordinance language, Roy said, Feldstein Soto has returned to city council ordinance language that isn’t “faithful to the intent of the drafter.”
Feldstein Soto said the proposal to bifurcate the office has nothing to do with her performance.
“This issue comes up every single time charter reform comes up,” Feldstein Soto said. “To me this is all political opportunism.”
Feldstein Soto has opposed the split, and former city attorneys have also come out against it, saying an appointed position threatens the independence of the city attorney’s office, takes away from voters the right to elect a city attorney and could cost taxpayers money in order to split the office.
In a March letter to the Charter Reform Commission, Feldstein Soto said an attorney “serving at the pleasure” of the mayor and city council would face an “innate, human pressure to harmonize legal advice with the political goals of the appointing officials.”
“I have been able to provide honest, accurate legal advice to the Mayor, City Council, Controller and departments — even when that advice is unwelcome — precisely because I am an independently elected officeholder with an ultimate duty to the public,” she wrote. “An appointed City Attorney, serving at the pleasure of the Mayor and City Council, faces enormous political pressure on all of these issues, behind closed doors, cloaked in privilege without an independent voice.”
Burt Pines, a former city attorney who served from 1973 to 1981, deeply opposes the bifurcation proposal, citing the threat to independence as the largest issue at stake. As city attorney, he said, he was empowered to tell city officials when a proposed action was unlawful and refuse to support it.
“You want to be able to call the shots as you see them, true to the law,” Pines said in an interview.
Advocates say other cities have bifurcated offices, and splitting it could reduce conflict and provide a clear delineation of roles.
After consulting with experts and good governance groups, the commission agreed the benefits of bifurcation outweighed the negatives, and it passed unanimously by the commission.
“It was easy to get consensus on this,” said Raymond Meza, chair of the commission. The commission’s proposal calls for the city attorney to be nominated by the mayor, and confirmed by the City Council.
In its report, the commission said that “the current structure creates conflicts when the same office advises the city and prosecutes cases. Separation provides clearer roles, reduces conflicts, and allows each function to be performed effectively.”
Other cities have different models for the city attorney’s office: Long Beach has a similar model with bifurcated duties, while New York City has legal representation split up several ways. The San Francisco City Attorney provides legal representation for the city and county of San Francisco, and the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office handles criminal cases in the city and county.
Mike Bonin, executive director of the Pat Brown Institute, said he has seen the question of splitting the office come up with at least three different city attorneys to varying degrees.
“Given that the city attorney is an elected position, there’s always going to be somebody who doesn’t like them,” Bonin, a former city council member, said. “You need to divorce the question from the occupant and focus on the role — the charter is not about a particular person, the charter is about the function of the office.”