A Ballot Measure Would Let L.A.'s Council Abolish Its Public Works Board

Charter Amendment LA is 63 words on the ballot and about 6,000 words of charter text behind it.

Charter Amendment LA takes 63 words to put a question to Angelenos on the Nov. 3 ballot. The answer they’d be giving runs about 6,000 words, and one passage inside it would hand the City Council the power to vote the Board of Public Works out of existence.

The board is five commissioners, appointed by the mayor and confirmed by the Council, and the department calls them a five-member full-time executive team. They meet at 10 a.m. on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays in Room 350 of City Hall, under rules the board writes for itself, and they oversee the bureaus that run sanitation, street services, street lighting, engineering and contract administration. The city’s 2026-27 adopted budget carries the board as a department line of its own, at $29,696,853 and 94 regular positions.

The commissioners are also the only ones in city government who draw a salary, LAist reported this week. The City Controller’s payroll file puts a figure on that: four members of the board took $198,858.40 each in regular pay in 2025, the last full year it covers. Six people held the title at some point that year, as appointments turned over, and the city paid them $943,310.58 in all.

Section 581 of the charter has always opened the same way — members of the board “shall devote their entire time to the duties of office.” The measure’s redline adds five words to that sentence, unless otherwise provided by ordinance, and then adds a sentence that isn’t in the charter at all. By a two-thirds vote, subject to a mayoral veto it can override with three-fourths, the Council may “make any changes to the composition or existence of the Board of Public Works as well as add to, or remove, any of its powers and duties.”

What the board loses, one appointee gains. The same redline moves the power of eminent domain, which still needs Council sign-off, from the board to the director of Public Works. It moves the authority to accept a finished public works project, too; today the board can hand that off to the director only on jobs under $100,000. And it swaps two words at the top of Section 582 that carry more than their size: the director’s listed powers would come in addition to the general authority every city department head holds, where the charter now says instead of.

There’s a catch. Nobody has held the title of director since 2005. The charter created the post in 1999; in 2005 the Council folded it into the board’s own secretary, retitled executive officer, and the department has run without a director since. TJ Knight, a longtime city employee, holds that post today under the title acting executive officer. “The director position has remained in the City Charter but has not operated as a separate position since [2005],” Knight said in an emailed statement to LAist, which reported that Mayor Karen Bass’s office didn’t answer two requests for comment.

Public Works is the loudest argument in the measure, not the biggest piece of it. The same 16 pages would put Los Angeles on a two-year budget cycle, with the mayor’s proposal due by April 1 and the Council’s action due by June 1, and would require a capital infrastructure plan the charter has never asked for. They’d also carve software bought from its own manufacturer out of competitive bidding, and let the Council write further exemptions for contracts it deems vital to the city’s security, public health or safety, according to the Chief Legislative Analyst’s impartial summary.

The measure’s first two sections do the quietest work. Section 104 of the charter bars the city from mortgaging its property, and bars it from running any “purely commercial or industrial enterprise” unless the voters say yes first. Both subsections are repealed outright. A yes vote is, among other things, a vote to stop being asked.

Councilmember Katy Yaroslavsky, who is backing the measure, told LAist that the department’s work — streetlights, curb ramps, bike lanes, sidewalk repair — is fragmented because no one person oversees all of it. Councilmember Monica Rodriguez, the measure’s most visible opponent, told LAist the board provides “essential, open-meeting scrutiny over multibillion-dollar city contracts that Los Angeles taxpayers cannot afford to lose.”

Charter Amendment LA is one of eight city measures on the Nov. 3 ballot, and it passes on a majority of the votes cast. Nothing about the board changes the next morning if it does. Shrinking it, taking its members off full-time pay, or ending it outright would each take an ordinance the Council hasn’t written yet.

Sources: the City Council’s ballot resolution and the text of Charter Amendment LA (CF 26-1100-S11); the Chief Legislative Analyst’s impartial summaries; the Rules, Elections and Intergovernmental Relations Committee report; the City Controller’s payroll data; the Board of Public Works; and LAist. Retrieved October 1, 2026.

From the Handbook: Vote by Mail Deadlines in L.A. County: Every Date for the Nov. 3, 2026 Election