CommentsGELFAND’S WORLD--At some point, we will look back and try to rate the performance of our city’s institutions, including not only the government but the private and the volunteer sectors.
We can expect a lot of serious sounding but ultimately vacuous chatter from the news stations. Come to think of it, we should be evaluating those news stations just as critically as we evaluate government.
Interestingly, those of us at the ground level long ago developed an institution that could provide some timely, critical evaluating, if only we would allow it to do so. I’m talking here about an annual meeting hosted by neighborhood councils. It has always been referred to as The Congress, even though it hasn’t really functioned as much of a congress in the sense of what a congress really does. Instead, we have gotten together once a year in the fall, and heard lectures intended to make us better servants of the city apparatus. We were offered sessions on how you set up committees and type up minutes and kiss up to elected officials. I’m not kidding about that last one.
The Congress system still exists, and we still have a chance to do something useful with it. I’d like something a little meatier, something that will get at the root causes of the city’s problems rather than teach us how to go hat in hand to elected officials who have no interest in executing real reforms.
For example -- why is the system so corrupt, anyway? Is there anything we can do about it? That’s the sort of topic I’d like to see.
So let’s consider the annual Neighborhood Council Congress, but make the 2020 version into something that actually functions as a citywide congress, that takes a critical eye regarding our most serious long-term issues, and which honors honesty and intelligence in its presenters.
To do this, I would suggest, will require a considerable revision of the current system of self-appointed volunteer activists who have taken it upon themselves to avoid controversy, particularly any attempt to call into question the behavior of our city’s governmental agencies and elected officials.
I will admit that there is some reason to avoid antagonizing the elected officials who run the show and who vote for neighborhood council appropriations. It never seemed to be the right time to assert on behalf of the public. But something happened to crack that particular egg. Mitch Englander’s guilty plea and the associated implication of guilt for another sitting councilman is enough to burst the bubble that the city council has managed to keep inflated for a lot of years. If we are not willing to react to that happening, then what is the reason for our existence?
At a moment when the city’s neighborhood councils have not only been ignored, they have been told to cease functioning, there are some pretty serious issues that should be brought up for discussion. If the viral epidemic had not taken over the news, we should have been discussing corruption in L.A. city government. We also should be talking – even now – about the miserable way that city government has treated its councils, beginning with its Department of Neighborhood Empowerment (DONE).
Curiously enough, the Charter language that creates the neighborhood council system invites us to hold big public meetings a couple of times a year. For the past 8 years, we have been holding those meetings in the fall at the Los Angeles City Hall.
To my mind, the congresses have been more Pablum than strikingly topical -- goody-goody rather than in-your-face demonstrative. In brief, we have avoided, for the most part, the fundamental questions that need to be considered. I offer here a modest proposal for a rearrangement of the annual neighborhood council congress which will lead to serious public discussion of critical issues.
I propose that we hold consecutive sessions with seating for all neighborhood council members who wish to participate. We will probably have to move down the block in order to have an auditorium large enough to hold 500 people or more, but this should be an attainable objective.
The proposed topics for discussion:
How corrupt is Los Angeles city government?
How did the city, the county, and the state perform in response to the epidemic?
How has the Department of Neighborhood Empowerment performed?
I’ll discuss them briefly, in order.
How corrupt is our city’s government? That is a really important question, but I doubt that most of us have a good idea of the answer. Besides the established felony by Mr. Englander, there is the second councilman named in the indictment, widely believed to be councilman Huizar. Let me go out on a limb here and suggest that if there are two definably corrupt councilmen in our recent past, then there is probably another one or two or three who were aware that something was really fishy.
If even one other council member was aware of the corrupt practices, then that would be a full 20 percent of the council. It would be just as reasonable to assume that at least 5 members of the council (including the indicted one and the unindicted coconspirator) were in the know, implying that one-third of our City Council is either crooked or aware of crooked behavior.
I therefore suggest that in this year of 2020, the year that the criminal courts became involved in the behavior of the Los Angeles City Council, that we hold a serious discussion, open to all neighborhood council participants, asking that seminal question.
How did we do in response to the COVID-19 outbreak?
Notice the underlying assumption I have made here, that by sometime later this year, we will once again be able to have public meetings. That is by no means established, but we can hope, and not too unreasonably.
There’s an old saying: Things that can’t go on forever, don’t. That’s true of epidemics just as much as it’s true of losing streaks or of record sales. We have been going through the period of maximal growth of this epidemic, which is to say a time where the number of sick people has been doubling approximately twice a week.
Here’s a reminder of how quickly this whole thing came on: On the day – March 2, 2020 – that a friend of mine left western Ohio and started driving towards California, there were midwestern states and parts of the intervening plains that had no recorded cases of COVID-19. On March 6, upon arrival in Los Angeles, the numbers were still small, and still zero in several of the states along the route. As of this week, the epidemic is exploding all over the Midwest and has been going full-bore here in southern California for more than three weeks.
A dramatic, graphical way of looking at the growth can be seen here. [https://www.pbs.org/newshour/features/coronavirus/us/] You can adjust the date by using the horizontal scrolling bar at the bottom, and see how the epidemic went from almost nothing to a major catastrophe all within the month of March.
But this kind of growth can’t go on forever. There aren’t an infinite number of people to foster the spread. As the epidemic runs through the population, there is a point of diminishing returns. My guess is that when half the population have been exposed (some will become acutely ill, others will barely notice, and with some luck, only a small minority will die) the number of new cases will be falling off. Or, with a great deal of luck and skill, maybe medical science will find some treatment that reduces the number of acutely ill patients.
Television viewers have become accustomed to hearing the phrase “exponentially growing” and this time around, it is being used more or less accurately. Back in the old days before everybody carried around a laptop computer with a graphing program, it was scientific practice to graph the growth of bacteria and cultured cells using logarithmic graph paper. Since exponential growth shows up on log paper as a straight line, cells that grew like that were described as being in “log phase.”
Right now, the epidemic is in log phase, but just like a bottle of cells, it can’t go on forever.
We can look forward to a happier time, but when we get there, we ought to be looking back, evaluating how we did.
So far, what I have seen (with one exception) is pretty good when it comes to how the public are behaving. I’ve been in lines in front of markets, and nobody has misbehaved badly. The exception of course is the run on paper products. And that has been largely a minor problem that probably could have been held back by timely governmental action at the beginning. As to predicted shortages of masks, ventilators, and all the rest of what is called personal protective equipment (PPE), we shall see.
Our next and last proposed topic for discussion at the next Congress:
How has our city’s Department of Neighborhood Empowerment performed? That includes this year and over its entire history, going back twenty-some years.
One question we will want to explore is the use of the procedure now known as “exhaustive efforts.” In recent parlance, it refers to the legal ability of DONE to take over the control of a whole neighborhood council. Under EE, to use the DONE jargon, a council is not allowed to hold a meeting other than under the direct control of DONE and its staffers. As I (along with other CityWatch authors) have reported, EE has not always been a fair (or even productive) process. It’s long-since time we held an open discussion in which we look at how many (and which) councils have been cast into this regulatory dungeon, what they did or didn’t do to get there, and how good, bad, or downright pernicious were DONE’s actions during the exhaustive efforts procedures.
This discussion is basic to the rights and functions of the neighborhood council system, and is long overdue. In my view, such a session might be the beginning of either a reform of the system (necessarily carried out by the City Council) or of a legal challenge to the practice.
Another obvious question goes back to the use of exhaustive efforts: If they are still resorting to this practice after all these years, doesn’t this demonstrate the overall failure of DONE as an institution?
April Fool’s Day is Cancelled
I would have liked to contribute something like the following, but my heart isn’t in it this year: “In addition to closures of beaches, hiking trails, and bowling alleys, Governor Newsom has declared that April Fool’s Day is cancelled for this year. . . .”
It might have been half-clever. Perhaps April 1, 2021 will dawn in a brighter way.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
-cw
