A Bourgeois Revolution

LAKEWOOD — In California, at least, the season of its cities has finally arrived. In causes big and small, voters more and more conceive their political lives within municipal boundaries. Blame the state’s boomers again, who are passing into their prime voting years, cocooning for the long haul into old age and redrawing the circle of their concerns within the limits of communities and neighborhoods. Thomas P. “Tip” ONeill’s truism that “all politics is local” isn’t about ward heeling any more. It’s about defining the state’s political agenda.

While the globalization of nearly everything from the state Capitol to the corner market tests every loyalty, some voters have come home again to influence city councils and wed them to the causes of the passionate, whatever those causes might be. From gun control to wage control, questions once framed solely as state and national policies are increasingly decided in city-council chambers:

Ammunition sales. Gun-control advocates who believe handgun policy in Washington and Sacramento is a captive of the National Rifle Assn. are turning to city halls. In Los Angeles, which already prohibits multiple-handgun purchases, gun-control advocates want to ban or limit the sale of ammunition. Councilman Mike Hernandez favors an outright ban. Councilman Mike Feuer wants to limit sales and require the same background check for ammunition that is needed for a gun purchase. City attorneys think municipal ordinances regulating ammunition sales would hold up in court. California Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer would probably agree.

Campaign spending. Perennially stalled in Congress, “soft money” spending limits are already a feature of Orange County political campaigns. The county and several of its cities--Irvine, Huntington Beach, Anaheim and Orange, among them--cap the amount that partisan organizations can spend to influence city-council elections and local ballot measures. The limits are effective enough to irritate the wealthy and well-connected Republicans of the Lincoln Club of Orange County. The club is seeking to overturn Irvine’s 1995 law that prohibits associations with dues greater than $320 a year from “soft money” campaign spending. The law prevented the club from influencing a 1997 Irvine City Council race.

Liquor advertising. Neighborhood associations disturbed by alcohol-related crime and community blight turned to the Los Angeles City Council after confronting the strength of the state’s liquor lobby. The ordinance that community members and Feuer drafted prohibits billboards, storefront banners and lighted signs advertising alcohol (including beer and wine) within 1,000 feet of schools, churches, parks and residential areas. City planners estimated that the prohibition would affect 97% of the city’s 2,777 billboards. Last month, while U.S. District Judge J. Spencer Letts prepared an opinion on the constitutionality of the ordinance, city inspectors began serving notice to liquor-store owners and billboard companies that the advertising restrictions had begun. Similar laws have been upheld in Baltimore and Tacoma, Wash.

ATM surcharges. Santa Monica city officials and San Francisco voters battled the state’s powerful banking industry last month with bans on user surcharges (above the usual $2 transaction fee) that banks exact from cardholders for withdrawals from “foreign” ATMs. These ordinances are likely to be overturned in court because federal regulations generally preempt local laws, but not before nearly a dozen other California city councils will consider similar bans.

Growth limits. Local determinism has had its greatest impact on urban planning, largely as a result of 20 years of grass-roots efforts by the Sierra Club, environmental coalitions and neighborhood activists. Earlier this month, voters in cities around the state adopted growth boundaries to regulate edge development and turned down opportunities to hold “no growth” referendums for every tract of new houses. What distinguishes these efforts is the coordination of community campaigns by activist organizations in neighboring cities to prevent uncontrolled growth from skipping from one community to a town nearby.

Cable system “open access” rules. Congress and the state Legislature have fumbled telecommunications policy for 20 years, dismissing local interests in favor of consolidating a cable industry that is still based on city-by-city franchise agreements. Cable operators want to become general-purpose information services, combining TV, local telephone and high-speed Internet access. To provide these services, they have invested heavily in upgrading coaxial cable to fiber-optic networks at a cost of millions of dollars per city. Cable operators want to recover their investment and protect the exclusivity of their services while they do. Cities are skeptical.

In the absence of a coherent national policy, big cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles (and little ones like Lakewood) have struggled to balance competing community and business interests. San Francisco favored an open-access model that required cable operators to open their systems to competing Internet service providers, a position first adopted by Portland, Ore. L.A. City Council members adopted a wait-and-see position, based on the city’s remarkably thorough analysis of the issues.

“Living wage” policy. The intersection of municipal activism with state and national policy is clearest in the rapid rehabilitation of the labor movement in California and its support of living-wage legislation in San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Jose, Oakland, Pasadena, West Hollywood and Oxnard, and in Ventura and Los Angeles counties. Like most of the 38 cities and localities across the nation that have adopted living-wage regulations since 1996, the L.A. city and county laws apply only to contractors who deal directly with government. In San Jose, a living wage of $9.50 an hour (with health benefits) extends to businesses that have received city redevelopment funds. In Santa Monica, a proposed living wage of $10.69 an hour (with benefits) would apply to a limited number of workers in the private sector, mostly hotel employees and some shop clerks.

These causes and city governments’ responses to community pressures don’t add up to a seamless city policy. Urban-growth limits are real and are likely to be adopted by other California cities. Living-wage laws are mostly symbolic. The open-access debate shows cities acting intelligently in the vacuum of national policy.

But there’s no denying that the city politics behind these recent decisions, after years of apparent irrelevance, now matter deeply to some California voters. The reasons why are partly cultural and generational, and one of them is troubling in a democracy.

Term limits. Term limits have diminished the state Legislature in the eyes of “stakeholder” voters--those willing to join and be active in community-based organizations. City-council term limits have elevated more activists into the ranks of city-council members. Advocacy organizations now have a Darwinian choice: to nurture a comprehensive solution in Sacramento, with its high costs and uncertain continuity of support, or bear with a purely local solution and all its limits. Activists are picking the local option, if only because the relationships among the players are more stable than among Sacramento’s perennial freshmen.

One-party politics. In a state dominated by a single party, some speakers, because of party affiliation, feel muted. Some legislative decision-making may seem purely rubber-stamping. City councils and county boards of supervisors are roughly nonpartisan, and coalitions of community organizations, blending many voices, may find them more congenial. The relative transparency of local government, in turn, reinforces voter allegiance even if the outcome on any one issue is unfavorable. When voters and local governments finally align on an issue, there’s a powerful synergy.

They’re more bourgeois. Although they’re unlikely to admit it, stakeholder voters are mostly city people, even if they live in suburbs. They’re developing urban political habits that California voters, particularly in L.A., were never encouraged to have. The former elites have leaked out to their gated and income-graded compounds, leaving a new California bourgeoisie to reinterpret middle-class life here as city life. They’re succeeding, using cultural, gender and ethnic lessons that encourage political life.

Local sophistication. City councils and city staffs are better educated and more media aware than they were even 10 years ago. It’s not surprising that they can articulate issues like telecommunications policy and social justice for their communities and are capable of collaborating with advocacy organizations to shape city and county policies.

Mimicry. California cities are extraordinarily well-connected, particularly in Southern California. A good idea in one will clone in months to dozens more. Advocacy organizations don’t have to convince each city council from scratch to have a regional (or even statewide) impact. The Internet, e-mail, meetings of the departments of the League of California Cities and the increasing number of regional councils of government will carry their message ahead of them.

Two cheers, then, for the new bourgeoisie of stakeholder voters, but only two. The biggest reason for their success in turning some city councils into the avant-garde is a troubling one.

Stakeholder voters have a disproportionate impact on local government because they vote in local elections in relatively greater numbers than the rest of us. In small-town contests in Los Angeles County earlier this month, fewer than 11% of registered voters in some cities went to the polls. Fewer than two in five voters bother to cast ballots in off-year national elections. And nonvoting is disproportionately concentrated among lower-income citizens.

Stakeholder voters and city councils, now so much alike in ethnic makeup and economic status, are increasingly effective partners in acting on issues that seem to go nowhere among distracted legislators in Sacramento and Washington. The cost is government by the passionate few, and government no less remote from the ordinary many.

Which, because of term limits, low voter turnouts and the ambitions of activist city-council members for the next rung on the ladder of office, will overwhelm Sacramento soon, while California’s bourgeois revolution rolls on. *