Neighborhood Councils: Don’t Need Another Law in Order to Take Meeting Minutes

GELFAND’S WORLD--The recent CityWatch editorial by Greg Nelson and Ken Draper on overreaching by the Board of Neighborhood Commissioners (BONC) dealt with the question of rules to regulate the taking of minutes at neighborhood councils. 

At first, the question sounds absurd. Most of us are used to the fact that organizations take minutes, and that includes our neighborhood councils. My neighborhood council does the standard sort of written minutes and also does audio recordings. We haven't gone as far as full video recording as yet, but we have talked about putting videos out over the internet. 

Now the BONC wishes to discuss rules that regulate the taking of minutes, and I can only think of an old story about an elementary school back in central Indiana. A friend of mine explained that the school had a long written list of rules. One of them made it a violation to move a piano. We found this strange, to say the least, that a school administration would find it necessary to have such a rule. We could only guess that some students had, at one time in the history of the school, tried to move a piano, and mischief had ensued. For all I know, that rule is still in force. I'm not aware of other school districts passing rules about moving pianos, but I will admit that I haven't checked them all. I suspect that even the LAUSD has more pressing issues to deal with. 

You are entitled to muse that the BONC proposal is another piano moving rule. Students  ARE NOT ALLOWED TO MOVE PIANOS and, in addition, NEIGHBORHOOD COUNCILS ARE REQUIRED UNDER PENALTY OF LAW TO TAKE MINUTES. An elementary school can suspend piano movers, but what penalty the BONC might try to enforce on failure to take minutes is one of those deep questions like the early evolution of the trilobites. 

Nelson and Draper are making a good point here, and at the risk of blowing my own horn, I would add that it is a point I have been making in this column for a number of years. Most of my concerns deal with limits on freedom of speech that the city bureaucracy, the Department of Neighborhood Empowerment (DONE), and the BONC have considered in their fruitless quest to make neighborhood councils look and act like the city's appointed commissions. 

For example, when these city agencies insist that neighborhood council representatives respect each other, I marvel. Somehow, the City of Los Angeles is bringing back the medieval concept of thought crimes to our modern metropolis. Of course they understand that they can neither diagnose failure to respect in any given instance, nor can they enforce their version of acceptable thinking, yet we are continually bombarded with demands that we respect each other. 

In this case, I think we are seeing a failure to communicate the fact that people are not supposed to interrupt each other in formally structured meetings. It would be enough just to say so, but for some reason, the BONC and DONE have been graced with amateur social science theorists over the years, and they are always trying to generate new feel-good rules, most of which involve how we are required to think. 

The question therefore arises as to whether the proposed BONC action on the taking of minutes is a legitimate necessity or just another feel-good proposal. I would suggest that it is neither, and that the reason goes to the way that the BONC and DONE have viewed their own roles. 

Basically, BONC members, particularly the new appointees, are always trying to do good, and the way they approach doing good is to suggest more rules which put more demands on neighborhood council participants. As my friend Doug put it, they are bureaucrats trying to invent democracy. 

Where the BONC and DONE go wrong is in trying to demand and enforce particular kinds of behavior. For example, we have been deluged with requirements that we take some new kind of training or sign some new form. As a particularly pernicious example, consider the proposed policy which will invite DONE to require training of an individual or of an entire board in the event that DONE finds fault with some governing board behavior. 

DONE is not a court of law, and neighborhood council participants are not convicted criminals. Legally, the city and its agencies might be able to remove an elected board member from a neighborhood council governing board, but I suspect that there is not much else that can be done legally. They can't fine us, and they can't sentence us to the bureaucratic equivalent of a penal colony. 

What the BONC and DONE can and should do is of a different kind. You might think of it as the adoption of a different kind of psychology. 

If some rare neighborhood council (and apparently there have been some) fails to take minutes at its governing board meetings, the remedy is simple. As far as DONE is concerned, if there are no official minutes then it didn't happen. You want to appropriate funds for a community event? Then demonstrate that a board meeting was legally held, that there was a motion on the agenda, and that the board voted in favor of the appropriation. The way that this is done is to take minutes and to provide the appropriate section of the minutes to DONE as part of the funding process. 

If there are no minutes, then it didn't happen. 

The same argument holds in the case of the more political actions taken by a neighborhood council governing board. If the board wants to oppose some new commercial development, then it can do so by placing a resolution on its agenda, notifying the affected developers in advance, having a meeting, and passing a resolution. If there are no minutes, then it didn't happen. If any neighborhood council member wishes to stand up in front of a City Council committee and recite the motion, there better be minutes. That doesn't mean that we all have to carry around sheaves of printed minutes. But if there are no minutes, the developers have a perfect right to point out that there is no such neighborhood council resolution on file. 

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At some level, this may look like nitpicking, but it's actually not. It's an argument that the BONC and DONE stop trying to be dictators with power over our lives, and simply explain that actions have consequences. 

Actions -- or in this case inactions -- have consequences. 

That's all they need to say. Facing the absence of a system for taking minutes at some neighborhood council, DONE is not obligated to treat anything that council does or says as official. No funding proposals will be honored, no appointments to citywide boards will be official, and in general, the neighborhood council will cease to exist as a useful structure. 

BONC and DONE don't generally like this sort of approach, because they think they have failed each time a neighborhood council doesn't act at the level of mine or yours. But it's actually a better approach, because it puts the responsibility for board behavior where it belongs, which is on the voters. If your board has failed you, then replace its members. 

There is another related issue, which is the failure by our news media, the city government, and our neighborhood council system itself to inform the voters about our elections. That includes the qualifications and behavior of incumbent board members. If a neighborhood council is not taking minutes and thereby losing all of its funding, the residents of the neighborhood have a right to know. If an elected board member routinely misses meetings, the voters have a right to know. If a neighborhood council board member consistently votes in a way that is opposite to what the community thinks, then the voters have a right to know. 

That's all that is necessary. The BONC and DONE have shown that they don't really trust our city residents to make their own choices in neighborhood council elections. The remedy is to improve the election system, to enforce the rights of the voters, and to believe in democracy.

 

(Bob Gelfand writes on culture and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected]) 

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CityWatch

Vol 13 Issue 86

Pub: Oct 23, 2015