CommentsEASTSIDER-At Lincoln Heights, the Neighborhood Congress, and BONC, DONE gives advice contrary to their own unilaterally imposed Bylaws, leaves a rudderless Congress, and evidently gives ex parte advice to some Board members contrary to issues that other Board members have raised.
Golly, where to begin. Let’s start over at the Lincoln Heights Neighborhood Council, where DONE has allowed the NC to take actions on an agenda when they did not even have a quorum!
Lincoln Heights
The LHNC Held a Special Meeting on March 11, necessitated by their having failed to formally approve some 10 monthly MERS funding documents. Under the City Clerk’s
Neighborhood Council Funding Program, if a Council does not formally approve their monthly expenditures within a reasonable time frame, the City will simply not pay.
In this case, these unapproved funding documents went all the way back to May 2020, through February 2021. Obviously, this was a big deal. Somehow the tooth fairy at DONE had magicked the system so that the LHNC could retroactively approve all these monthly documents, and (I assume) the City Clerk would then pay them.
Either that or the City Clerk would be in violation of their own funding rules if they paid out any of the expenditures. A big deal indeed.
However, there was a teeny weenie problem. As I have noted before, under the DONE Bylaws for LHNC, there is a requirement to have 14 Board members present to have a quorum and conduct business. That is out of a total of 26 Board members.
Yet on the NC’s very own Agenda Notice, they indicate that there are currently only a total of 15 Board members in Lincoln Heights. And it turns out that two Board members were absent, and another “listed” Board member, Tamika Flowers, resigned in January of this year.
Do the math: 15-3=12, not 14. And that’s not a quorum. Even assuming that all of the twelve Board members are current with DONE’s certification requirements.
Just to further the madness, one of the 15 Board members, Vincente Gonzales-Reyes, was not certified, and another member recused, meaning that of the 12 present Board members, only 10 could actually vote for any funding items.
So there was no legal quorum, and only 10 could even cast valid votes on funding if there really was a quorum, which there was not.
The actual vote counts were 10-0-0, also proving that there never was a quorum. Yet we hear nothing from DONE, and I’m reasonably sure that the City Clerk is uninterested in breaching their fiduciary duty to the City of Los Angeles by actually paying any of the MERS documents.
And in a fascinating if creepy ending, it appears that DONE staff are A-OK with this illegality. Let’s see if the people with the legal funding responsibility, the LA City Clerk, are willing to sign off on this crap.
And Then, There’s the Congress of Neighborhoods
Ever since the beginning of the NC System, there has been an annual Congress of Neighborhoods, featuring all the good things Neighborhood Councils have been doing for their communities and the City family.
It is the one time each year that the big guns come out to assure the Neighborhood Councils that they really, really care. This year’s lineup included the Mayor, his appointee, Raquel Beltran, the City Clerk (Holly Wolcott), City Attorney Mike Feuer, and City Council member Paul Koretz, as well as Controller Ron Galperin.
It also happens to be the “big one” for DONE’s General Manager who is really responsible for the event, along with the Planning Chair, this time Cindy Cleghorn.
Yet this year was remarkable for two matters -- a lack of diversity, when you consider the wonderful diverse population that makes LA so fascinating, and this time out, a truly authoritarian takeover of the Planning Committee by GM Beltran via the Chair, Cindy Cleghorn.
At the end of the meeting, where it was traditional to start the process for nominations for Planning Committee officers for the next year’s event, Cindy Cleghorn simply adjourned the meeting and that was that. No nominations for next year.
It is of note that there had already been an election for Planning Committee Officers scheduled for February 6. Further, it is inconceivable that Cindy Cleghorn acted on her own, without consulting General Manager Beltran.
The Proofs In the DONE
Let’s be clear. The General Manager of DONE is a unique position, in that it is the only Department Head who does not directly report to -- anyone. Raquel Beltran simply provides staff report to the BONC, who have no authority over her, and continues to serve at the pleasure of the Mayor, like he cares about Neighborhood Councils.
Based on recent actions, it is clear that Raquel Beltran is transforming the NC System into a personal fiefdom where Britannia sets the rules. For example, . . .
Even as I was writing this article, DONE staff member Jackie Kim wrote an email to Board member Richard Larson, asking him to somehow prove who was certified and not certified, as well as recused or not, at the March 11 LHNC Board meeting!
General Manager Raquel Beltran and Mike Fong were copied on this sophistry, as though DONE is not in fact the repository of all this data, it being allegedly a core part of their job.
And these people have the chutzpah to try and get the City Clerk of Los Angeles to sign off on all these massive irregularities and pay public funds in spite of the factual circumstances to the contrary.
It used to be, and I hope still is, the position of the City Clerk that they, as a fiduciary, will not pay out public funds absent written proof of the validity of a payment request. I hope they are listening. . .
ADDENDUM
As I was preparing this article for submission, it turns out that the hypocrisy of DONE struck again. Even as Raquel Beltran unilaterally captured the $10,000 that the Budget Advocates allocate to advertise in CityWatch, she has entered into a “partnership” with NextDoor, even as she cuts off ads to a serious news/opinion outlet.
At last count, CityWatch reaches over 2 million hits a week, and as we all know, offers all kinds of opinions, including yours truly and his sometime unkind unmasking of DONE and its deficiencies.
The reason I mention NextDoor is that there are serious allegations that they discriminate against the homeless, excluding them from the platform, as well as allowing all kinds of inopportune comments about that important segment of Neighborhood Council stakeholders.
My reporting is based on a Hat tip from Katherine Mcnenny of Skid row, where they continue to seriously track and help their significant homeless population. Here’s a portion of her follow-up email to the BONC Commissioners after their meeting last week and discussion of the NextDoor partnership:
“My comment mentioned that houseless Stakeholders are excluded entry to Nextdoor. I learned this recently from a houseless woman who is active with her local NC. She became aware of threats to her fellow houseless community members on this platform and wanted to be able to participate in the online dialogue there. However, she was not allowed in because she was not able to provide an address.”
I believe her public comments should be available as part of the BONC meeting.
The Takeaway
Read it and weep. Let’s see if the Mayor and the City Clerk will follow the rules, even as DONE wallows in chaos.
(Tony Butka is an Eastside community activist, who has served on a neighborhood council, has a background in government and is a contributor to CityWatch.) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.
