THE CITY-I live for the day when neighborhood councils find the will to organize themselves in order to pressure city hall into adopting practices and laws that further empower the all councils.
There is enough time and energy within the neighborhood councils to do this while they tackle local development and community improvement projects.
Rather than reinvent the wheel, the yet-to-be-found leaders would probably find it easier to get support from the councils and its members if the focus were first to be on the return of old policies that benefited and respected the councils.
A good example is old policy of Mayor Jim Hahn (photo) that directly involved neighborhood councils in submitting their city budget opinions to the mayor, as is called for in the City Charter.
Hahn designed the city’s first online budget survey, and asked each neighborhood council to discuss the budget, take the survey as an organization, and submit their comments to him.
The results were printed in the mayor’s proposed budget so city hall could be held accountable for fulfilling the wishes of the councils.
His successor, Antonio Villaraigosa, didn’t have a lot of interest in reaching down to the grassroots in this way, or any other way. He thumbed his nose at the City Charter and the neighborhood councils by just opening up his online budget survey to whichever unnamed individuals wanted to log in.
His contact with the neighborhood councils was limited to a tiny cadre of “budget advocates” who also did little to reach down to the grassroots they were supposed to represent.
It would seem logical that neighborhood councils would be anxious to rally around a plan to return to the policies that gave them meaningful involvement in city government, but alas, the disinterest has been inexplicably overwhelming.
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During the Hahn administration in 2004, Mariel Garza, an editorial writer for the Los Angeles Daily News, wrote an entertaining column about the budget process. From it I borrowed the headline for my column.
When I was the general manager of the Department of Neighborhood Empowerment I posted and summarized every article written about the neighborhood council system on the department’s website. A successor, long since gone, had all the articles removed. Through the magic of the Internet, I found a link to Garcia’s column as it appeared on the DONE website.
(Greg Nelson is a former general manager of the Department of Neighborhood Empowerment, was instrumental in the creation of the LA Neighborhood Council System, served as chief of staff for former LA City Councilman Joel Wachs … and occasionally writes for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected] This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. )
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 12 Issue 81
Pub: Oct 7, 2014