Political theater

At the core of the City Charter that Los Angeles voters adopted in June 1999 was one simple goal: to allow the people to hold their elected representatives more completely accountable for their official actions and for the operations of city government. It would be troubling, to say the least, if the charter's enhanced accountability turned out to be so feeble, so vaporous that it could be circumvented by simply moving around the pieces on the city organization chart.

Now City Atty. Rocky Delgadillo has taken the rather bumptious step of suing Controller Laura Chick to block her equally aggressive attempt to subpoena his lawyers, and the dispute centers on whether a certain clause in the charter allows or prevents Chick from auditing programs housed in the office of an elected official. The theater of it -- two politicians going after each other, each willing to spend scarce city money in an attempt to prevail -- can be taken as entertaining, irritating or both, but it is in the end a sideshow. The central question is whether accountability among Los Angeles elected officials really is possible. We assert that it is -- but not without public vigilance, some ponderous and patience-trying discussion, and the occasional constitutional crisis.

The dispute is welcome, even if it winds up in court. In intervening, as it did Tuesday, the City Council must choose whether to sweep the dispute into a backroom for closed-door talks among the elected "family" or, instead, to clarify in the open whether it believes voters really changed anything -- and how they changed it -- when they adopted a charter that calls for a more political, assertive and powerful controller.

More political? Absolutely. In his complaint, Delgadillo alleges that Chick's actions are politically motivated. And of course they are, just as his are. The controller and city attorney are both elected offices. Candidates campaign, they raise money, they make promises, they get elected, then they try to get reelected. They are politicians. The notion that an elected official can be apolitical is absurd.

For years, Los Angeles had a controller with no actual authority beyond making sure that the checks were paid and the books balanced. "Bookkeeping, bookkeeping and more bookkeeping," is how Charles Navarro, city controller from 1961 to 1977, described the job to The Times on his retirement. Auditing and testing the effectiveness of city programs was a responsibility of civil servants and was deemed too important to be left to politicians.