CommentsGELFAND’S WORLD--I’ll just refer to her as Sheryl, because she has a right to retain as much dignity as the jackals in city government have left her. And they are not trying to leave her much.
A brief introduction to the topic and how Sheryl enters the story:
Neighborhood councils in the city of Los Angeles are required to keep and publish minutes of their board meetings. It is an important aspect of what we do. We are also required to communicate our expenditures to the city in a timely manner and to fill out reports. Over the years, we have tried various methods, ranging from having elected board members take on extra work (and sometimes doing a poor job of it).
More recently, we developed a system that works well. Briefly, we have been using some of the money the city provides us (totaling $42,000 per year) and paying a couple of people to (a) do the audio recording of our meetings and (b) take notes during our meetings and provide the written version of the minutes in a timely manner. It’s that phrase about “a timely manner” and the fact that the minutes have to be accurate that has been a problem historically and has now been solved.
The beginnings of our new system began with a person who does such things for a living – she took minutes and provided them in electronic form. After a couple of years, she found that her side business was taking up too much of her time. She introduced us to Sheryl, who has been a godsend in terms of getting the job done. We have somebody we can trust to be there when we commence a meeting and somebody we trust to deliver the formal written documents when we need them. This isn’t as simple as it sounds, because the agenda packet created for each meeting can be 30 pages long, and full of all sorts of ancillary documents that the board and the public will want to see during our deliberations.
In addition, we turfed our bookkeeping to Sheryl because the routine paying of bills, once handled through DONE, has been moved to the office of the City Clerk, and that office has (a) developed its own system which we had to learn and (b) complicated things beyond belief. We get it done with Sheryl’s assistance, but it takes time and knowledge.
In this too, Sheryl has been a useful adjunct to the operations of our neighborhood council.
I should also add that when the funding for neighborhood councils was introduced under Mayor Jim Hahn and DONE General Manager Greg Nelson, it was for exactly these types of expenditures – renting an office, paying a note-taker, buying the necessary equipment – that sort of thing.
I need to give disclosure here – I am a voting member of my neighborhood council board, and also a sometime participant in our harbor area neighborhood council regional alliance. In both organizations, I have been involved in making the decision to hire Sheryl as our scribe and bookkeeper.
One other technicality requires a brief explanation. Since there are 99 neighborhood councils in the city of Los Angeles and one Department of Neighborhood Empowerment (DONE) which the city Charter has created to assist those neighborhood councils, it is impractical for either DONE or the individual councils to hire such staff directly. Instead, the city outsources the staffing to agencies such as Lloyd Staffing and Apple1. So technically, my neighborhood council instructed DONE and one of these private agencies to provide us Sheryl’s services. She has been paid by the agency, and the agency is paid by the city.
DONE goes off the rails, maybe
And then something truly weird happened. Sheryl was told by her agency that she no longer was allowed to work for the neighborhood council system. The agency she had been dealing with hasn’t really explained what’s going on. According to Sheryl, they let it slip that DONE is behind her being blackballed.
In conversation, Sheryl claims that she has never actually been told the details of what she is alleged to have done (or not done) that would result in the blackballing.
There are rumors. We hear that one or more people from one of the neighborhood councils complained about Sheryl. This is possible, since a system as widespread as the neighborhood council system is going to have differences of opinion. Over the past 18 years that I have participated, I notice that some of my colleagues like to spout opinions about the rules and the law as if they are fact, whereas they are often dead wrong. In this case, we may conjecture that Sheryl was engaging in the normal course of her duties in conjunction with the OK of the neighborhood council president and the office of the City Clerk, but ran afoul of somebody who either didn’t like her or disagreed with some procedure she was using.
But we don’t really know, because DONE won’t tell us – we, the public – about why they are doing what they are doing.
Several neighborhood councils in the harbor area have discussed the situation openly. For the most part, we would like to continue using Sheryl’s services. I am not aware of any specific complaints about her work product, although I have asked repeatedly.
Now here is where it gets ugly:
According to Sheryl, the DONE staffers will not tell her what she is accused of having done. When she asks the staffing agencies, they simply tell her that they can’t pay her for city work anymore, and imply that DONE is behind the new policy.
When people such as yours truly ask DONE staff members and the General Manager at public meetings whether or not they have informed Cheryl of the charges against her, we get the following response: They will not say what they have told her (or not told her) in order to preserve confidentiality. I asked this question directly of a high ranking DONE staffer and of the General Manager, and got that same response.
So, in a situation where it might be proper to refrain from telling the public about as yet unproved allegations, where is the propriety in keeping the accused person in the dark?
Remember that for us, the public, we have only two sources. Sheryl explains repeatedly that she has not been informed of the charges made against her, or by whom. DONE refuses to say whether they have told her anything, or if they did tell her anything, what it was.
In the absence of a response by DONE as to these items, we have Sheryl’s word on the one side and Nothing on the other side.
I should also add that over the several years that I have known and worked with Sheryl, I have found her to be credible. I strongly suspect that she is being honest here, and that she ran afoul of some murky internal DONE matter – perhaps the internal politics of an agency with a brand new General Manager and old-timers jockeying for promotions.
One other matter, perhaps the most severe when it comes to the city: By communicating (both implicitly and explicitly) that Sheryl has done some sort of “bad thing,” the city staff members at DONE have opened the city of Los Angeles to a ruinous lawsuit. You can’t smear someone’s name and reputation and expect that there will be no repercussions. Sheryl has already suffered loss of reputation and loss of income, since several neighborhood councils have been told officially by DONE that they will not be able to continue with her services after March.
From the standpoint of my own neighborhood council, we are in the following bind: We have been satisfied with Sheryl’s work and would like to continue to use her services. We have no direct knowledge of any complaint against her (since DONE won’t tell us) and we therefore have no knowledge of – if there is any truth to it – whether there would be any reason at all for us to cancel her services. Most of us don’t believe that there would be any such reason.
To be blunt, most of us don’t believe that Sheryl has done anything wrong. We haven’t heard from those who have accused her (presumably one or more neighborhood council board members from somewhere else in the city), we haven’t heard from the office of the City Clerk, and as mentioned above, we can’t get a straight answer from DONE.
For Sheryl, the term Kafkaesque fits. Allow me to quote from the Wikipedia article on Kafka’s The Trial: “One of his best known works, it tells the story of Josef K., a man arrested and prosecuted by a remote, inaccessible authority, with the nature of his crime revealed neither to him nor to the reader.”
And that is precisely the story we have so far when it comes to Sheryl. We have a city agency that smugly hides behind the term “confidentiality” to deny us critical information that we need to make decisions in our own sphere, and it seems to be using the same excuse for its refusal to communicate with Sheryl.
There is a murky sort of implication that DONE is trying to protect Sheryl’s accusers. From what, other than public ridicule, is not explained. For how long is also not explained. I should point out that this is the second time in recent months that I have reported on a case where DONE is hiding behind anonymous accusations to inflict its decisions on a neighborhood council board. The previous incident was the case where Central San Pedro Neighborhood Council was told that it should not remove its president because she had filed a complaint against some person or persons on their board. DONE was not willing to give any specifics at that time as to who is being accused, or of what.
The similarities are clear and ominous.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
-cw
