GELFAND’S WORLD--I'm not going to be the one to pile on Mayor Garcetti. I'll leave that to the Times editorial board and to my colleagues at CityWatch. But his honor Eric really blew it this week. You could tell, because phone calls and emails were coming from all over town, asking me about the mayor's latest commission appointment. That appointment was a faux pas on the mayor's part, because in this case, he should have consulted with the people who will be most affected by that appointment, and he did not.
The appointment is to a city authority known as the Board of Neighborhood Commissioners, aka "the BONC." The problem is that the BONC sets rules which affect the lives of the 1700 unpaid volunteers who sit on neighborhood council boards. The BONC can be difficult for us. It can (and just did) add additional tiresome requirements involving watching boring videos and signing the equivalent of loyalty oaths. Mind you, there's no pay for doing any of these newly required chores.
So I got the emails inquiring about the mayor's appointment. Who is the new appointee? What experience does he have? Does he have any qualifications at all? Does anybody even know him?
The answers: Nobody knew him. His qualifications, as best we can tell, are minimal when it comes to overseeing a system of 96 separate organizations with combined budgets of $4 million and a city agency with a budget of $2.8 million.
It's not inconsequential. The BONC has the statutory authority to set policy for the 96 neighborhood councils. It includes 7 commissioners appointed from separate districts. I've said repeatedly that new appointees to the BONC are a problem to us volunteers, because they always seem to want to improve the system by making new rules for us to follow. I'm not complaining about the idea that there needs to be lawful order in the system. I'm complaining about the real need to repair the old rules rather than the mistake of just piling new structures on top of the old.
As I mentioned, each BONC commissioner represents a different city region. For some reason, we have been having a lot of turnover in the harbor area. The last appointee tendered his resignation recently. Unfortunately, it was largely a secret. Maybe some people knew it was coming, but I wasn't one of them. and I'm an elected board member.
I'm going to make a rather strange sounding argument here, which goes as follows: Even though the BONC is one of the least powerful commissions in the city, the mayor should open BONC appointments to public consultation, even more so than appointments to major juice commissions like those that oversee the harbor, the airport, and the DWP. It sounds a little strange when stated this way, but there is a logic to it.
Big money commissions like those that oversee the port and LAX are understood to be highly political. First of all, they regulate major industries, among the most financially powerful in the United States, and those interests expect to be represented, whether directly or indirectly. It makes sense, because what happens to shipping and air freight has an effect on jobs and the economy all over southern California. There has to be some give and take among the various factions.
In addition, appointments to these commissions are understood to involve a combination of interest balancing (for example, there is and has been a union seat on the Harbor Commission) and political payback. An appointment to one of the big money commissions is one way to reward groups that provide votes or to reward people who raise campaign funds.
The BONC, on the other hand, regulates us humble folk, the ones who volunteer for neighborhood council boards and committees. We don't have the kind of political clout that can tell a commission how to operate. We are on the other end of the stick.
We don't get paid for what we do, but we put in a lot of hours.
But there's one more thing that elected office holders should consider. There are a lot of us, and we include a lot of political activists.
In short, we carry a certain amount of political clout, just because of our numbers and because we talk to each other. We actually do a lot of talking to each other, and we do it all over town. We also talk to the public because a lot of them come to our monthly meetings.
Unfortunately, neighborhood council participants have had to do a lot of self defense against BONC actions over the years. The BONC always seems to want to put another requirement on our backs, whether it is another training session or an oath of conduct to sign. Sometimes it's merely a bit insulting as in the latter case, and sometimes it involves spending hours of our lives in some training session on some Saturday morning, starting an hour and a half after dawn.
There are potentially useful things that an intelligent BONC could do. How do you make the BONC more intelligent? I'm not talking about the ability to do differential calculus, but a working intelligence about how the system functions. One thing that would help is the appointment of people who already have experience in the neighborhood council system. We have a few of those on the current BONC. At least you can talk to them, and know that they understand your point.
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But now imagine that somebody gets appointed to the BONC who has never attended a BONC meeting, who has not served on a neighborhood council board, and has almost no experience in the system. The rest of us typically have somewhere between 2 and 15 years experience, ranging from serving on the original organizing committees to serving on the communications committee or the public safety committee. We know what the public wants of us, and we know what it takes to navigate through the system.
But this week, Mayor Garcetti appointed exactly that other person I've described above. The newly nominated commissioner explained that he is interested in public activities but has never been to a BONC meeting. He allowed as how he has attended a couple of neighborhood council meetings over the years, but he wasn't all that familiar with the council in question.
In short, we have a novice who is supposed to be representing 7 harbor area neighborhood councils, but doesn't know jack about the system.
He probably won't do a lot of harm, but that's only because he seems to be a genuinely nice person, somebody who is interested in improving our civilization. That's what I felt after talking with him. He's been involved in private organizations that work for the public good.
But for now, he's in the wrong spot. He will have to learn on the job, and if experience is any kind of guide, his training will come from us volunteer participants rather than from city agencies or from his fellow commissioners. That's because when he comes to one of our regional alliance meetings, we will be blunt with him. We can be polite if given the chance, but we will make reality clear to him. That's how we've had to do it in the past.
And yes, it's a horrible waste of time for all of us. There are hundreds of current and former neighborhood council participants in the harbor area, and out of all of those, there are at least a couple dozen who could be productive on the BONC immediately.
If the mayor or the local councilman had bothered to ask, we could have supplied a long list of meritorious potential appointees. Other areas of the city should make clear to their City Council representatives that they insist on being consulted the next time a BONC appointment comes up.
(Bob Gelfand writes on culture and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 13 Issue 69
Pub: Aug 25, 2015
