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GELFAND’S WORLD - During this period in which a few members of the public engage in their own political firestorm over the real firestorms, I thought I would offer a small tidbit of what it is like to deal with one small department of L.A. City government. I've mentioned the Department of Neighborhood Empowerment (DONE) before. It is the city agency that deals with neighborhood councils.
Neighborhood councils were originally self-organized and self-governed, with minimal oversight by the city. Over the years, the city has tried to develop more rigorous regulation of the system, which hasn't worked very well. As one of my colleagues described it, it is bureaucrats trying to design a democracy.
Anyway, the result of the system developing in its sort of ad hoc manner is that neighborhood councils do things differently and some of them -- to put it delicately -- go rogue. It's not necessarily a bad rogue sort of situation, but they can become insensitive to the rights and interests of the public.
Sometimes they even violate their own rules.
We now speak of the Central San Pedro Neighborhood Council (CeSPNC). I do not live in their district but have been involved in a nonprofit which has offices there and has functioned for a dozen years or so. This makes me a stakeholder according to the city's rules. The CeSPNC also covers the downtown area of San Pedro, which means that most of us San Pedro residents have some interest in how the city government serves that area (not too well is the answer).
Anyway, I sometimes attend CeSPNC board meetings. It is of one such board meeting that I speak.
The board meeting was actually agendized as a "Special" board meeting. This is sort of midway between a regular board meeting and and "Emergency" board meeting. The latter is the kind of meeting that a city council would have right after the big earthquake. A special meeting allows the board to meet on one day's notice rather than the ordinarily required 3 days. There are some legal limits to what you can do in a special board meeting.
Well, this meeting was set up to announce that the board would, sometime in its future, hold another meeting to censure one of its board members. I will simply refer to that person as Matt. He is part of one faction on the board, in a board which has two factions which are often in disagreement with each other.
There is one more thing you have to know about this "censure" thing. Under ordinary Roberts Rules, to censure somebody is simply to make clear your disagreement and displeasure with some act or statement. It has no other meaning besides that.
However, the Board of Neighborhood Commissioners (BONC) -- the small, appointed panel which has say over neighborhood council policy -- decided to push a system by which board members could be kicked off their boards. The BONC decided to put one safeguard in place, and that safeguard is that before removing somebody from a board, the board has to censure that individual a full month in advance.
The idea seems to be that the censure process would be a wake-up call to the individual. There is one other requirement, which is that at least 3 board members sign a form calling for censure.
The rule is that the censure process is to be agendized for a regular board meeting at least 30 days later. This is to give the accused person a chance to consider a defense (or perhaps to repent of his sins and choose to behave differently).
But CeSPNC didn't follow that procedure. Instead, it scheduled the Special meeting in order to announce that there would be a later (properly agendized) censure meeting, but at this special meeting the CeSPNC could get a better count on who would be supporting the censure.
There are so many things wrong with this approach that one begins to run out of fingers, but CeSPNc took it a step further. During the special meeting, board members were allowed to speak (at length) about why Matt should be censured. In other words, the special meeting became a censure meeting. The only thing that was left out was the board holding a vote to censure.
As a witness to this event, I was both amazed and outraged. The government (of which CeSPNC is a part) should obey its own rules, and in this case those rules include the bylaws of CeSPNC and the policy enacted by the BONC.
Everything about what CeSPNC did was in violation of those bylaws, because the rights of the accused include that 30-day period in which no censure discussion or action can take place.
I therefore filed what is known in the system as a "Grievance." This is a method by which any person can file an official complaint with DONE over a rights violation in the expectation that the problem will be set straight. I filed on November 22, 2024. According to the rules and policies as stated by DONE, it is supposed to consider my Grievance filing and get back to me within 7 working days.
They never replied to me by email or phone, and repeated searches of the DONE website failed to show any action. Only by accident, a few days ago, did I find that my Grievance had been acted on. The website claims that the decision had been made back in December, but I am somewhat skeptical as to when it actually occurred. In any case, I now have their response, and it is definitely a boggler.
Remember that my Grievance filing alleged that the CeSPNC had violated its own bylaws and had violated policies adopted by the city through its BONC. The DONE response takes note of those accusations:
"Your grievance alleges:
"Allegations that the Central San Pedro Neighborhood Council violated the following: Neighborhood Council Bylaw; Any other City code, executive directive, rule or regulation applicable to Neighborhood Councils; Department Policy; Board of Neighborhood Commissioners Policy"
So far, so good. But then:
"RESPONSE: Pursuant to Sec. 22.818. Neighborhood Council Grievances Ordinance
"the Grievance process is, in general authorized to address alleged violations of the Neighborhood Councils. While your Grievance alleged violations by the Central San Pedro Neighborhood Council, it’s important to clarify that your Grievance mentioned an alleged violation of State Law, which is not an appropriate matter to be resolved under the Neighborhood Council Grievance Process. As such, Grievance #483 will not be processed by the department and is closed."
Let's translate the above paragraph into English. It agrees that violations of the bylaws are alleged, which should by itself be enough to send the Grievance to the next step. It also agrees that violations of Board of Neighborhood Commissioners policy are alleged. This should be enough to move the Grievance to the next step.
But then we get the following comment, which has to be quoted directly to show it in its full glory:
"it’s important to clarify that your Grievance mentioned an alleged violation of State Law, which is not an appropriate matter to be resolved under the Neighborhood Council Grievance Process. As such, Grievance #483 will not be processed by the department and is closed."
So let's get this straight. If the CsSPNC violates its own bylaws, it can be the subject of a grievance. If the CeSPNC violated BONC policy, it can be the subject of a grievance. But if, in addition, CeSPNC is alleged (however indirectly) to maybe have violated any state law, then it cannot be the subject of a grievance.
The obligate conclusion is that any neighborhood council that wants to engage in conduct which it could be called on needs merely to make sure that it violates some state law, and then -- at least according to current DONE doctrine -- it will be immune.
This does seem a little crazy, but that is what the decision says.
One additional note: The decision does not disclose the name or identity of the person (or committee) that decided. This is important because I have made two attempts to reach somebody at DONE who could either explain the decision or offer to reconsider. I told the whole story to one very patient gentleman the other day, and I emailed the General Manager on the day of this writing. So far, nobody has replied to me from DONE.
Proposal: Since DONE seems to spend a lot of expensive salaried hours to create nonsense such as shown here, it seems obvious that DONE hours and funding can and should be cut substantially. At a moment when people are talking about fire trucks sitting unrepaired, it should be obvious that a cut of, say, $2 million from the DONE budget would make sense in the mayor's next budget proposal.
Addendum: Millions of Dollars for the Trump inauguration
Somehow, the owners of many of America's largest corporations, newspapers, and online businesses have been persuaded to pony up a million dollars apiece to the Trump inauguration fund. This is now already the most corrupt presidential administration in history, and it hasn't even started yet.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
