CommentsGELFAND’S WORLD--Los Angeles city government functions in a strange way. We have the usual departments like Water and Power and Recreation & Parks, but each is overseen by something called a commission.
If DWP wants to build a new power plant or raise your rates, the commission says yes or no. This is in contrast with other places where the mayor or the city council can do such things on their own.
At one time, this was thought of as a reform. The commissioners -- appointed by the mayor and ratified by the City Council -- were supposed to bring citizen input into the functioning of government. Not only that, but the residents of the city can attend commission meetings and comment on their acts and decisions. It's supposed to provide some transparency to what would otherwise be distant and opaque.
When government reform groups worked on creating a system of neighborhood councils, they seem to have reached down and pulled up the standard blueprint that already existed. They decided that the neighborhood council system would also have a commission which they called the Board of Neighborhood Commissioners (the BONC).
The problem is that the BONC is not really a commission in the sense that the Harbor Commission or the DWP commission are. Those commissions have direct authority over city departments and that authority involves a lot of tangible things like building buildings, paving roads, and providing food for the animals in the zoo. Real commissions give orders that affect spending and departmental behavior.
The problem with creating the BONC is that neighborhood council members are not city employees to be ordered around by administrators. We are supposed to be independent of the bureaucracy so that we can do our job of talking back to government.
The system of neighborhood councils was created in an attempt to provide citizen input and oversight to government as a whole. As a neighborhood council participant, I don't work for the city, I am not answerable to the boss (there isn't a boss), and I have the right, written into the Charter, to give advice and to review the quality of services provided by city departments. It is wrong for the city to create a commission that can interfere with my Charter-given right to fight city hall.
But we have the BONC, a board of seven members appointed by the mayor. Over the past 17 years that our neighborhood councils have been in existence, I have come to view the BONC as the major danger to neighborhood council rights and independence. We'll get to why that is below.
Inventing the System
You can skip this part if you're already familiar with the early history.
Back in 1999, the voters of Los Angeles passed a city Charter amendment that provided for the system of neighborhood councils. The new section, Chapter 9, provided for the creation of a city agency known as the Department of Neighborhood Empowerment (DONE) which would run day-to-day operations dedicated to assisting the councils. In addition, the BONC would have ultimate legal authority over creating each new council as a legally recognized entity through the process referred to as certification.
So far so good. If you want there to be neighborhood councils, there needs to be some legally recognized method for bringing them into existence. Since the city was inviting us regular folks to create and organize our own neighborhood councils, there had to be some way of determining that we were dotting the i's that the new law required. For example, neighborhood councils don't use the system, common among nonprofits, of having the board of directors vote on its own membership -- the so-called self-perpetuating board. Instead, we have systems -- different from one council to the next -- in which the residents of our districts get to vote on who sits on the board.
The BONC was charged with reviewing applications to form neighborhood councils. If your application was deemed to be in compliance with Charter requirements and city ordinances, then the BONC would certify you as a new neighborhood council. In addition, the law gives the BONC the legal right to take away your certification if you fail to follow the law or fail to carry out the expected functions of a neighborhood council. For example, if your council fails to meet for a year, signifying that you have unofficially gone out of existence, the BONC can remove you and allow for the creation of a replacement neighborhood council.
How Things Got Off Track
In addition, the BONC was given some authority to set overall policy. The Charter language is ambiguous and self-contradictory, suggesting that the section was written in haste or perhaps subject to one too many political compromises. The Charter says that neighborhood councils are to be as independent as possible, yet the BONC has, over the years, tried to interfere with our rights and independence.
For example, the most recent meeting of the BONC considered several agenda items that would potentially reduce neighborhood council autonomy. One such item involved the BONC regulating the neighborhood council regional alliances. For example, the harbor area has an alliance where members of six or seven neighborhood councils get together once a month to compare notes. It's frankly none of the city's business how we conduct our inquiries, or whether the harbor alliance exists at all. BONC members in their discussion chose to refer the question to the City Attorney as to whether they have any authority over the alliances. The implication seems to be that -- depending on what the City Attorney says -- they may come back to this question and potentially start to set rules.
Worse yet, the BONC wants to consider imposing a new rule that would automatically be placed in all of our bylaws, creating the power within a neighborhood council to throw unpopular members off of its elected board. I should point out that my neighborhood council organizing group discussed and debated this very subject over an 18 month period back in 2000-2001, and affirmatively chose to leave such language out of our bylaws. We agreed that decisions regarding board membership belong to the voters, and not to some subset of board members. We reasoned that under a rule requiring a two-thirds vote to remove a board member, a faction that controlled 12 votes on my board could remove an entire competing faction which only had 6 votes. Now we are faced with finding such a rule stuck into our bylaws, despite the fact that we won't have the right to vote it up or down. Nor will our residents have the right to provide their own input.
Over the years, we have seen many such attempts by the BONC trying to "help" us. One year, a few BONC commissioners suggested that there ought to be uniform bylaws that would be imposed on all neighborhood councils. This met with nearly unanimous disapproval among neighborhood council participants, but it took several weeks of discussion to work out a negotiated settlement.
Here's what I've seen over the years. New people get appointed to the BONC from time to time. They all want to help. They come in with concerns and try to get creative. In practice, they hear from constituents, identify some perceived problem, and try to write a new rule to solve that problem. It could be anything from gender imbalance to unruly audiences. Harsh language has been a perennial topic. In each case, we have faced a new set of rules that are supposed to balance our independence with the desire to make us into more perfect board members. It generally doesn't work, because such rules inherently reduce the authority of the voters to choose board members or reduce the power of the board to make its own decisions.
And this is where the need for a moratorium on the BONC becomes obvious.
You begin to wonder -- at what point will a BONC decide that it has got it right? At what point will the BONC decide to leave us alone to go on about our business? The answer is obvious: Never.
Every new BONC member tries to improve on the system, but such "improvements" involve making new rules that we are supposed to follow, creating a new form to fill out, or worst of all, trying to impose some new training requirement where board members are supposed to attend some class (typically in downtown Los Angeles) where we will be taught about the increasingly arcane financial reporting requirements.
It's time to put a halt to such shenanigans. It would require a Charter amendment to abolish the BONC, something that neighborhood councils should start to ask for from their City Council representatives. Eventually, we may develop the political momentum to achieve this goal, although it is probably a two or three year project. In the meanwhile, we ought to demand a moratorium on any further attempts by the BONC to interfere with neighborhood council autonomy, function, or independence. Neighborhood council participants have the right to work on useful projects of their own choosing, and to be left alone by the know-it-alls on the BONC.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
-cw
