RETHINKING LA - One of the great benefits of getting involved in Neighborhood Councils is that participants learn how City Hall works, or in some cases, how it doesn’t work.
Typically, a community member’s first experience at a Neighborhood Council meeting will include an introduction to speaker’s cards, agendas, parliamentary procedure, and a host of other bewildering traditions that mimic the process at City Hall, at the County Board of Supervisors, at the Metro, at SCAG, and at Sacramento.
In many ways, just learning to overcome the obstacles to participation are what prepare Neighborhood Councilmembers to become effective advocates, skilled in navigating the complicated process of governance that sometimes even trips up our City Council, keeping the City Attorney busy clarifying the law that governs the business of the people.
Neighborhood Council advocates quickly find themselves learning to navigate procedural requirements that include ethics standards, conflict of interest rules, posting requirements, codes of civility, and standing rules that vary from Committee to Commission to Council.
Along the way, advocates must learn to master the hierarchy of law that starts with the Constitution of the United States and then adds the Constitution of the State of California, eventually meandering through state law and local law to the City Charter and the Municipal Code to neighborhood council bylaws and standing rules and eventually Robert’s Rules of Order.
Whew!
That process alone will typically test the mettle of even the most passionate community advocate but those who stay with it are typically well versed in the machinations of our government.
Unfortunately, along the way some advocates learn the bad as well as the good and some of City Hall’s negative traditions get replicated, turning up in neighborhood councils as an example of all that is wrong with City Hall.
For example, City Hall has a knack for creating false dichotomies, setting up false choices that pit one party against another rather than pursuing long term win-win solutions.
Who can forget the City Council’s budget drama that offered the public an opportunity to choose between public safety and public libraries?
Over the last few years, the City of LA has offered the public so many of these false dichotomies that the public has begun to accept the lose-lose proposals as effective governance. It’s not.
It’s a complete failure to commit to systemic solutions that fulfill our Great City mandate.
It’s also a bad example for our Neighborhood Councils as is evidenced by the recent actions of a boardmember who asked his neighborhood council to reconsider their prior outreach award to the Independent Shakespeare Company in order to use the money to save the local schools.
There are many things wrong with this scenario, not the least of which is the irony of taking money from a group that conducts an educational program in the community in order to give it to local schools so that they can engage in...that’s right...physical fitness programming, but it also normalizes the folly of this lose-lose scenario, City Hall’s false budget dichotomy.
It also allows local advocates to take the low road, as if $5,000 will fix the LAUSD and balance their budget and it is a strategy learned by watching our City Council in action.
If the local school advocate was serious about supporting local schools, he would rally local support and go after serious funding that would actually make a dent in local physical fitness programming for local schools.
For example, the City of LA is notorious for underapplying for Safe Routes to School funds, money that would provide up to $1 million for infrastructural improvements and $500 K for education, encouragement, and enforcement support.
Perhaps it’s time for the Neighborhood Councils to turn the tables, as a Silver Lake’s Budget Advocate has proposed, and to focus on win-win proposals that commit to the big picture rather than budget triage that has departments and programs scavenging for scraps at the expense of the City of LA as a whole.
Perhaps it’s time to stop squabbling over the $45 K that Neighborhood Council controls, money which should be used to fulfill the City Charter mandate to engage the community, not balance the budgets of other departments, other agencies, and other authorities.
Perhaps it’s time for Neighborhood Councils to revel in their significance as community organizers and to lead the charge on pursuing private, state, and federal funding sources, a win-win proposal that would set a great example for City Hall.
(Stephen Box is a grassroots advocate and writes for CityWatch. He can be reached at: [email protected]. You can also find him on Twitter and on Facebook.) Photo Credit: la.streetsblog.org.
–cw
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CityWatch
Vol 10 Issue 30
Pub: Apr 13, 2012