Comments
GELFAND’S WORLD - Just a few days ago, I reminded you that killer storms -- the kind that were only supposed to happen once in a hundred years -- could arrive in pairs within any three-week period of hurricane season. It was supposed to be the sort of theoretical point that should have come up in the presidential debates. But as of Monday morning, one-time tropical storm Milton had grown from a category 1 hurricane to a category 5 just overnight. The storm hunters had a term for super-fast growth, as in "rapid intensification" -- but now they have to invent a newer term for something that has gone beyond that. By the end of this week, Florida will likely have endured two category 3 hurricanes (or stronger) within a month-long period. The rapid intensification of these hurricanes is clearly due to the high temperature of the waters in the Gulf of Mexico.
So let's repeat the question to Donald Trump, Gov. Ron DeSantis, and their political cronies: Do you still say that global warming is a hoax?
Same question to the Fox Weather channel: I've been listening to you over the past two weeks, and I have yet to hear any one of your reporters use the term "global warming." Does the station have a policy that handcuffs its reporters so that they are not allowed to speak the obvious?
And one other political point that will be of importance in the weeks and years ahead: Trump and his supporters have been criticizing the federal response to Helene, even though it has been successive Republican administrations who dropped the ball on disaster funding. Remember George W. Bush and the way he screwed up Fema prior to Katrina?
But now, searching for something, anything to pin on the Biden administration, Trump accuses them of doing a less than stellar job as the flood waters are still draining. So here's my question to the victims of Helene and possible victims of Milton: When your life and livelihood depend on the actions of multiple governments, don't you think it is important that the response be honest and rational, and not be based on narrow political advantage? Yet there was Sen. Tom Cotton on Meet the Press Sunday night, repeating the lies about the Fema response.
Changing the subject. On a more mundane level, but important to the City of Los Angeles, what is the future of our neighborhood council system? What changes do we foresee in the neighborhood council system as the City Council takes up Charter modification?
I had a conversation with a friend from another part of the city over the weekend, and that question came up. We focused the discussion on the following topic: If you were going to meet with an influential member of the City Council, what advice would you give, or what changes would you ask for? I promised to come up with a single paragraph, so this exercise will of necessity be limited, but I find that it is possible to get part of the way. So here goes.
The City Charter language that created the neighborhood council system foresaw a largely independent collection of local bodies. They were to be locally designed and locally managed. Their governing boards are supposed to represent the concerns and interests of local residents. Over the nearly 25 years of neighborhood council existence, the city government has become more and more controlling, instituting rules and regulations and lately imposing training requirements on all board members. The best advice I can give the city government -- really a plea -- is just to go away and leave us alone. Cut the training requirement to the bare minimum that serves to protect the city from liability and serves to protect board members from physical harm. Get rid of the training in ideology that currently exists, which is to say the latest requirements for training in bias (mislabeled as "implicit" bias) and in gender and identity issues. These are starkly political issues which reflect a particular ideological and political point of view and are not appropriate to impose on unpaid elected officials who make up the neighborhood council boards. The city might usefully engage in a discussion of what the proper function of neighborhood councils ought to be. My answer would be that the councils serve to improve our city government. We need to come to a more explicit agreement over the purpose and function of neighborhood councils before we tinker with the wording in the city Charter.
OK. That was that. Let me offer an additional word or two of explanation.
Ever since the passage of the Charter amendment of 1999 -- the one that established the neighborhood council system -- there has been tension over the place each neighborhood council participant holds in our city government. Even now, after nearly a quarter of a century, the City Attorney's office continues to fumble with the question of whether a council participant is supposed to be (or intended to be) a sort of unpaid employee of the city (and therefore subject to controls and training requirements) or is an unpaid elected official who answers to his local constituency. From the beginning, those of us who founded neighborhood councils viewed it as the latter. The city department overseeing the formation of the councils seemed to see things the same way. There was no training requirement until one City Attorney decided that a state law requiring ethics training should be applied to us. Over the years, the city and its departments have expanded their grip on us, to the extent that the work requirements have become a serious impediment to recruitment of new participants.
If the City Council is willing to open its discussion of Charter modification to neighborhood council participants, many of us would be eager to offer our input. If not, we may find ourselves in direct opposition to anything that the City Council puts on the ballot. Here are two more suggestions I would make regarding the balance of power between the city government and our neighborhood councils:
The first is obvious and straightforward. If the city government intends to impose training requirements on board members, we should be able to negotiate with the city in the same way that the municipal unions do. If you expect me to waste my time doing training in your latest pet ideology, then let's have a payment schedule. I notice that members of the City Council are paid roughly two hundred thousand dollars a year, so paying neighborhood council members at the same hourly rate would be a reasonable rule.
There is good reason to consider abolishing the Department of Neighborhood Empowerment (which oversees the councils) because it no longer has much useful function and what it does, it does not do well. In addition, the Board of Neighborhood Commissioners -- its purpose, function, and existence -- should be reviewed and reconsidered. Right now, it mainly serves to create new rules and bureaucratic requirements that serve little useful purpose. A slightly more aggressive approach, but one that would be most useful in reforming the BONC, would be to create a system by which neighborhood councils and their participants could vote to remove commissioners from the BONC. A not unreasonable compromise would be to allow neighborhood councils to nominate BONC members for removal, with some final decision left to the mayor.
OK. You get the drift. What we are talking about is the balance of power between a couple of city agencies (DONE and BONC) and the lawfully elected representatives who make up the governing boards of the 99 neighborhood councils. Right now, the city government has skewed the balance way too far on the side of the city's bureaucrats.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected].)
