If LA Can’t Lead, at Least It Should Follow

The hope was that city hall would embrace the public’s demand that they be allowed to be more involved in how decisions were being made, and in monitoring the behavior of those who made them.

 

Yet city hall has failed to seize the opportunity to lead as the nation’s champion of participatory democracy.  It’s not too late for city hall to kick it in gear, but at this point it would heartwarming if city hall just followed the lead of others.

 

Gotta love those Scots! 

 

As part a Scottish Constitutional Convention a little over 15 years ago, the Public Petitions Committee was created in Parliament.

  

The committee serves a process through which any member of the public can lodge a petition and have the substance considered in public session.  Evidence is heard, investigations may be conducted, conclusions are presented to the Scottish Government, and a response is guaranteed.

 

Ten Downing Street has an e-petition process, but the petitions can languish unless a minister decides to pick up the issue.

 

In Scotland, half of the petitions come from individuals, a quarter from community councils, and the rest from organizations.

 

Contrast that with the recent attempt by neighborhood councils to be allowed to generate an official City Council file, realizing full well that it may never be discussed.  

 

After years of stalling, the City Council agreed to only allow this radical and dangerous change if three neighborhood council boards (approximately 60 people) signed onto each “petition,” and if they all filled out extensive paperwork revealing their financial and property interests.  I think providing DNA samples and a passing a Homeland Security background check was almost included.

 

While Los Angeles’ City Council was doing what it could to silence the public’s voice, Scotland is working to expand the public’s knowledge of the public petition process because, as the committee clerk explained it, “The citizen has a right to engage parliament in issues that affect him or her, and that may highlight important issues long before they would get on the radar of Members of Parliament.”

 

Writing at www.pbs.org, Mark Glaser suggested that there be a community hub with all the information aggregated in one online source and pushed out to people through libraries, meetings, and other media sources.

 

Glaser arrived at his conclusion after studying the 600+ comments received by PBS Engage after it passed on questions from the Knight Commission on the Information Need of Communities in a Democracy. 

 

The commission’s sole concern was to determine the information needs of people in local communities, and how society can serve those needs.

 

Using Glaser’s work, a few solutions for Los Angeles include:

 

1.  Governmental agencies need to publish their information online.  Washington, D.C. provides excellent data feeds on its website.

2.  Neighborhoods need a system through which they can share news and discuss issues.

 

3.  Governmental decisions, especially those involving the creation of new laws, should be made as transparently as possible with information published online.

 

4.  Create new “meetspaces” both online and in face-to-face meetings.  Governments should create websites and blogs where discussions can take place.

 

5.  Teach the public and neighborhood councils how to use the new electronic communication technologies.  There are 2,300 computers in L.A. city’s libraries that can be used free by the public. 

 

But the burden of doing this shouldn’t fall solely on neighborhood councils.  This is the very thing that city hall should be doing.  The role of the neighborhood councils should be to hound them until it’s done.

 

A good starting place would be the Department of Neighborhood Empowerment that is required by law to be a clearinghouse of information for neighborhood councils.  That doesn’t mean information that the department feels the councils should have, but the information that the councils want.  

 

(Greg Nelson participated in the birth and development of the LA Neighborhood Council system and served as the General Manager of the Department of Neighborhood Empowerment. Nelson now provides news and issues analysis to CityWatch. You can reach Greg Nelson at [email protected].) ◘

 

CityWatch

Vol 7 Issue 37

Pub: May 8, 2009