By Ken Draper

The theme of this yearend seems to be that Neighborhood Councils had an abominable 2006. Their quest for empowerment was thwarted at every turn. The demise of the system is eminent. The City grinch stole the NC Christmas.

If you’re getting depressed and looking for some relief, I’m your guy. I’m about to give you a half dozen or more reasons why 2006 was a good year for NCs. Starting with my sense that oh-six was a wakeup call for councils. Fate just slapped the NC donkey along side of his head with a two-by-four. You know the old joke. Got his attention.

For Neighborhood Councils, the year actually got off to a good start. New NC-friendly Planning Director got sworn in, and for the first time, a Neighborhood Council representative served on the review committee. The NC Congress launched on February 4. What Janice Hahn called a truly historic day. And, after some raised NC voices, the city agreed to plan that would ensure Neighborhood Councils representatives would serve on the important 912 Commission. And, come June, more than have of the 29 Commission members appointed were Neighborhood Council board members.

Heady times for the empowerment movement. Even when NCs were having their election problems with the DONE (more than 38 with procedural glitches that for most lead to election delays), they had enough political heft to move Dennis Zine to demand that DONE GM Lisa Sarno come before the City Council and explain the mess.

Of no less import, with the support of more than half of the Neighborhood Councils, Jason Lyon had his Council File Number initiative moving through the system. With an emotional pitch from Hahn, the Education and Neighborhoods Committee said yes and with some persistent nudging from Dennis Zine in the Rules Committee, the motion got to the full Council. Neighborhood Council momentum was reaching warp speed.

This is where the grassroots empowerment stars fell out of alignment. Working under the radar, the City Council, League of Women Voters and the LA Chamber of Commerce conspired to ignore their own city attorney, bypass the City Ethics Commission and Neighborhood Councils and rush a term limits extension ballot measure …cloaked in faux ethics reform … onto the November ballot. The now infamous Pro R.

Neighborhood Council activists couldn’t stand the smell any longer, drew a line in the sand and decided to oppose the proposition because the phony reform language made it a bad measure and because the Charter’s early notification process for NCs had, one more time, been violated. The two ascending issues … Council File Numbers and Prop R … ultimately collided and sent the perception dominos into a free fall that would be felt through the remainder of the year.

The NC opposition to Prop R reverberated through the City Council chambers when the Council File Number motion landed there and likely cost the Neighborhood Councils the two votes they needed for approval. And the dominos continued to fall. Prop R lost badly at the polls in November, Controller Laura Chick posted her audit in early December recommending that DONE have more power to better patrol NC miscues and a week ago, the USC research folks handed out a draft of their latest polling that they say shows Neighborhood Councils with serious respect, civility and diversity problems which prompted claims that the system had failed. It also inspired the current rash news story and opinion piece leads telling us what a rotten year empowerment had.

Consider this: NCs got them a friend to run the Planning Department. More than half of the 912 Commissioners are from Neighborhood Councils. Jason Lyon managed to thread his Council File Number motion through the system and onto the City Council floor and the Council devoted two hours to debating it and then split down the middle on support. When Lyon launched his idea, no one in Council liked it. Do you think that any neighborhood group … before NCs … could get two hours of debate time from the City Council and half of the vote?

Prop R lost in November, but they made some folks nervous during the campaign. They also got a valuable education on suing the city and got some serious respect from some of the collaborators along the way.

NCs launched a Congress of their own this year and powered their way onto the Congress of Neighborhoods program when Lisa Sarno and the administration tried to shut them out. They were also named in Hahn’s motion to represent NCs in a collaboration with the Mayor’s office and DONE to plan the next Congress of Neighborhoods.

Representatives from the NC Congress launched a counter attack last night at the Board of Neighborhood Commissioners meeting with their own detailed counter arguments to Lisa Sarno’s ‘Weapons of Mass Dysfunction’ report of a few weeks ago and convinced the commissioners that the report needed further review. Its bias and agenda are now obvious and blatant.

The way I see it: On balance, not a bad year at all for Neighborhood Councils. It was an overdue wake up call  for a somewhat complacent group of neighborhood voices. And, you know the caution about not waking the sleeping giant. 2007 could be THE year of real empowerment. _