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GELFAND’S WORLD - This Saturday, September 27, 2025, we will once again have the annual Neighborhood Council Congress. This is the gathering in which all neighborhood council participants plus anyone else with an interest will come together at the L.A. City Hall to talk, hear presentations, chat over coffee, and basically renew our citywide relationships. Analogous to that old line from Charles Dickens, it will be the best of events, it will be the worst of events. Well, not the worst, but some stark differences of opinion are starting to show between the organizing in-group and a bunch of experienced neighborhood council participants who have decided not to make the effort to attend. Let’s start with the good parts.
First: the location, timing, and scope of the event: The Los Angeles City Hall was made famous back in the 1950s by the Jack Webb television show called Dragnet. The show began with a view of the City Hall and a voice-over: “This is the city -- Los Angeles, California.” Even for cynical old-timers, it’s kind of cool to approach the City Hall tower and then to walk around inside, realizing that millions upon millions of people would recognize the location. If you go online and register for the Congress, you will be provided directions for finding the entrance to the underground parking lot. We will begin with snacks and coffee at the crack of dawn (well, 8 AM or thereabouts) and finish late in the afternoon.
Over the course of the day, there are three sessions for workshops, with 7 different workshops in each of the sessions. Breaking up the day, there will be an opening event, a lunch break, and a closing session.
One disclaimer: I participated somewhat in the planning sessions that determined which programs were accepted for presentation. I got one accepted – the session on proposed City Charter changes – and other proposals of mine were rejected by the planners.
The session on the proposed Charter changes is important because the process is central to the future of Los Angeles government. Of paramount importance, will we end up with a larger City Council – perhaps 29 members – instead of the clearly inadequate group of 15 that currently is the law? And of course the Charter amendment process is clearly dangerous to the freedom of neighborhood council participants, considering how the city treats us at the moment. Just to remind you, city employees have unions and bargaining units and on-the-job protections. Neighborhood council participants have none of the above.
And also of paramount importance, we need to talk about the way that the current city budget process impoverishes city government. Notice how we are always in a budget crisis? It could have been prevented, and we will be there to talk about it.
The Charter Amendment session will take place at 2 PM, right after lunch.
Now for the rest of the meetings: Without doing detailed descriptions of the workshops, let me provide you a table of contents, as it were, for some of those sessions. Please note that Session 1 begins right after the opening ceremonies. Session 2 is later in the morning. Session 3 begins after lunch, at 2 PM.
Session 1
Civil Rights enforcement in Los Angeles
How would you change the city’s budget?
Pure water Los Angeles
The LA Story Project (Department of Cultural Affairs)
Session 2
Demystifying LASAN trash fees (This is the sanitation department.)
Hot Legal Topics for Neighborhood Councils (Office of the City Attorney)
Planning 101 for neighborhood councils
Upcoming changes to the NC funding program (City Clerk’s office)
Zero Waste events in LA (Sustainability Alliance)
Session 3
Are you ready for the next disaster in the City of Angels? (Emergency Management Department)
Finding ethics violations with public data (Jamie York)
Know your rights: Protecting immigrant communities in Los Angeles (office of Councilman Hugo Soto-Martinez)
Planning for regional housing needs (Southern California Association of Governments)
Proposition 36 and the future of public safety in Los Angeles (Nathan Hochman, L.A. County District Attorney)
Upcoming Changes to the LA Charter: Threat or Opportunity? (Nick Patsaouras, Jack Humphreville, Greg Ellis, and your author)
You can get a more detailed description of each session by going to the Congress website linked above.
Now, as to my difference of opinion with the Congress planning group. It starts and ends with the need to fund the day’s events. It used to be that the city’s Department of Neighborhood Empowerment (DONE) would plan, fund, and run an annual event, but about a dozen years ago, it told us that it was out of money and would no longer run an annual congress. Neighborhood council participants stepped up and agreed to run the event ourselves, and it’s been that way ever since. The problem is that the costs come to more than fifty thousand dollars by the time you pay for food, City Hall rental fees, furniture rentals, and so on. Organizers tend to go to DONE and the Department of Water and Power for donations, while individual neighborhood councils are asked to donate to the fund. Many of them do.
This year, the organizers put out a special appeal, which you can find on their website. Basically, it asks sponsors to put up $10,000 donations, for which they can have their own workshop session. Lesser donors, at the $5000 level, get a speaking slot at the opening or closing ceremony. The problem for the rest of us is that when one-third of the workshop times are rented out to the big donors, that makes the competition to get a workshop slot all the harder.
A few months ago, I asked the planning group to allow me to do a morning session on the training requirements for neighborhood council board members. I’ve written extensively about this issue, and many of my friends and colleagues agree that it is a serious issue. Bluntly speaking, it involves the city demanding more than four thousand man and woman hours of our time. And remember, we had no say in the decision. I’ve pointed out that the required training in Implicit Bias is scientific nonsense, while the required training in gender goes against a recent Supreme Court decision.
I even had a fairly distinguished group of current and former city employees willing to join in the discussion so we could have all sides represented. We could have had a productive discussion about what sort of training could be really useful and how we could offer it on a voluntary basis to those who would be best served by it.
No luck. The planners said no. Actually they said no repeatedly.
And what did they say Yes to? Well, there is that session that will be run by the Department of Cultural Affairs. Now it may be that the LA Story Project is of interest, and I’m sure that in good hands it could make for some decent history, but the NC Congress is supposed to be about our needs and interests, and I would suggest that the abuse and bullying of neighborhood council board members by city officials is a more meaty item.
And then there is that session on Demystifying trash fees. Allow me to remind you that the City Council voted to give monopolies to trash hauling companies just a few years ago, and this took away the ability of apartment owners to negotiate fees in a free market. I don’t know what the LASAN is going to talk about exactly, but I have a pretty substantial feeling that representatives of the agency are not going to confess that things would be different if only there were a little capitalist competition allowed.
You may also have noticed that there is a pretty substantial representation by city agencies in the sum total of workshop sessions. At a meeting which is supposed to be about and by neighborhood council participants and those few agencies which directly work with us (DONE and the City Clerk come to mind), the squandering of limited workshop time for what are essentially advertisements seems to me to be a bad decision.
By the way, this process is no secret. The offer to trade speaking time and workshop time for donations is featured up front on the Congress website.
Addendum
Lots of stuff is going on at the national level. Us old curmudgeons and skeptics tend to think that it is just a lot of distraction from the president’s Epstein problem and the increasingly grim economic forecast. Did Donald Trump take advantage (at whatever level) of underage females? Are we headed for a recession that will pick up during the next election year of 2026?
The Jimmy Kimmel event was a prime distraction, but it seems to be rebounding against the president. Even Ted Cruz warned of the consequences. The problem for Ted wasn’t that this action by a federal agency (the FCC) was a direct violation of freedom of speech, but that the Democrats might do the same thing to Republicans if ever they get power. Not exactly Ted’s finest hour, but I’ll take the partial win on this one. At least he was against it.
My view is that Democrats should be shouting to the rooftops that all of the attacks on our civilization by red state representatives and by the president will be reversed and that there will be other consequences. Give ‘em a little Newsom – you know, that bit about fighting fire with fire.
And lastly, the president and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are apparently going to start messing with the science on autism. Rumor hath it that they will try to implicate Tylenol taken during pregnancy. Not so curiously, the science goes directly opposite (you have to read section 5 about the sibling study done in Sweden to understand the lack of causality), but real science never seemed to bother Donald Trump. But it may serve as one more distraction for a president who needs to distract even as he himself acts more distracted.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
