WE SHOULDN’T PUT UP WITH IT-Our neighborhood councils need to declare their independence. That doesn't mean we have to pack up and leave the city, but it does mean that we need to define our relationship with the City Council and the mayor. We need to become what the city Charter promised, which is to be as politically independent as possible. We are a long way from that level of independence, and the city government is what is standing in our way.
Right now the relationship between city officials and our neighborhood councils is abusive, authoritarian, and demanding. In a very real sense, the city government has done the best it can to infantilize us, and in so doing, to treat us as delinquent children. All of the new regulations point in that direction. For the first time ever, lawfully elected neighborhood council board members can be denied the right to carry out their official duties by a city government agency. Nothing could be more undemocratic than defiling the results of a public election, but that is precisely what the new rules do.
We shouldn't be putting up with it.
Curiously, there are some tools that we have available that would allow us to fight back. We just have to organize ourselves and be willing to use them.
This discussion is meant to lead up to a shameless plug for the panel I will be leading on Saturday, September 28, at City Hall. It will be about taking back our rights, and in so doing, making something useful out of this whole nearly-ineffectual system. The goal is to achieve what was promised to us 14 years ago.
You can sign up for the Neighborhood Council Congress and then select the panel which is titled Thinking outside the box: Gaining real power instead of just pretending.
To readers who don't participate in the neighborhood council system, this may all seem a bit rash. But those of you who do participate in the system know exactly what I'm talking about. As board members, we are increasingly encased in a straightjacket of rules, regulations, and demands.
Even so, as irritated as we are, we are not entirely unsympathetic with the city agencies that have to deal with us. The people in them are, after all, our friends, and we feel their stress. The Department of Neighborhood Empowerment has been put in an impossible position by the City Council and the budgetary authorities. It is supposed to manage the finances of 95 groups of amateurs and volunteers. It is supposed to kowtow to the demands of City Council committees who insist on massive reports, while thinking nothing of the fact that the entire DONE staff is barely equal to the staff of one City Council office. And of course, if one nickel is left unaccounted for, there's hell to pay.
One problem for us, believe it or not, is the money the city gives us to spend. When Mayor Jim Hahn decided to give each neighborhood council a yearly budget of $50,000, the intent was for us to use the money to carry out the essential functions that independent political bodies would want to engage in. For example, we were encouraged to rent offices and pay staff to do clerical work. We would be some sort of neighborhood level version of a city council.
Very few of our councils ever found any political need for the whole $50,000. Most of us didn't try to rent offices, and the few that did mostly stopped doing so. This observation is not hard and fast. Some councils still have office space and make use of it for meetings and committee activities, but even then, the costs don't amount to $50,000. Most of us have found other alternatives such as public facilities.
That has left a lot of money on the table, and we find ways to spend it. We are besieged by community groups that would like their own piece of our budgets, now down to $37,000 a year. We vote money to the local Shakespeare society, to the Boys and Girls Club, and to the local high school.
In short, we have become agencies for bestowing mini-grants. We spend a lot of our time at this, the internal politics becomes burdensome, and with the large variety of requests, we find ourselves more and more being questioned as to the propriety of some appropriation here or there.
And with this right to allocate public money to private local organizations, we have allowed the city agencies power over us. Their excuse is that we are spending public money. Their remedy is to attempt to turn us into city bureaucrats, subject to demands that we take training, that we take exams, and that we do so for the honor of being unpaid volunteers in public service. This is the complete abnegation of the original idea of neighbors coming together to have some say in the political process going on downtown.
Some of us recognize that the annual stipends have become the classical Faustian bargain.
Suppose we were to just say no?
That's the question that one of our Thinking Outside the Box panelists promises to ask: Suppose one area of a neighborhood council decides to split off from its original home and form a separate council. Furthermore, imagine that the new council decides to forego the city's money and acts entirely as an independent political organization. What's to stop it?
The advantages would be substantial, in that a different type of people -- more independent, more proud, more feisty -- would take the seats on the governing board. They would feel free to do what the Charter demands of us, namely to advise the city government on matters of importance. They wouldn't spend month after month deciding how to parcel out their pitiful $37,000 stipend in $800 increments. They would do what we originally foresaw neighborhood councils doing when we created the original organizing committees in 2001. They would grapple with serious land use questions, argue over City Council votes, and probably meet once a week instead of once a month.
They would become what we should have become originally.
Here's another tidbit that I mentioned in a previous column [http://www.citywatchla.com/recent-posts-lead-stories/5664-neighborhood-councils-more-than-pretend-power]. Suppose a few of us decided to put the next electric rate increase on the ballot for the voters to decide. The name for this process is the referendum. We will discuss how many (actually, how few) petition signatures it takes to create a referendum.
And then there's the nuclear option, aka the recall petition. It's not a trifle, but it can be hugely effective, and it doesn't require all that many signatures on a petition.
And also from that previous column, the unifying tactic for really getting things done: Use the neighborhood councils as the nucleus to form outside organizations that bring a large numbers of people to the political process. We will hear a story about how this worked beautifully in San Pedro, in the Congress session on Thinking outside the box.
We have a few other weighty ideas to consider. For example, if you want to play the system by its own rules and you have time enough and patience, there is a way. And Jack Humphreville will tell you the secret of how to do it.
And then for the ultimate turbo charged discussion, we will have the founder, Greg Nelson. This part is going to be good.
Let's take a moment to say thanks to Cindy Cleghorn. A couple of years ago, she brought a radical proposal to the Los Angeles Neighborhood Council Coalition. She suggested that we organize and plan the annual neighborhood council congress. DONE had been doing it, but found they had neither staff enough nor money to do the job. We figured that by doing the organizing ourselves, we could make the discussions a little more meaty. We would have a congress that is less like a trade show (as the earlier ones seemed), and more a serious discussion of what ails us.
Last year, we got involved in the process for choosing DONE's new General Manager, and that was just one of many weighty discussions. Cindy reminds me that we have a couple of new programs that will be of interest. One is a workshop on Email communication and etiquette skills. The bad jokes just write themselves on a topic like this, but I think we all agree that it is an important subject. We also have a program on How to deal with adult bullying, an equally important subject.
(Bob Gelfand is a co-founder of the Coastal San Pedro Neighborhood Council as well as the Los Angeles Neighborhood Council Coalition. He created the Bylaws Task Force and chaired the Elections Task Force. He currently writes mostly about culture for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 11 Issue 77
Pub: Sept 24, 2013
