CommentsGELFAND’S WORLD--At the end of another year, we pause to consider what we've accomplished and what remains to be done. It's appropriate to consider that we've now completed15 years in the invention and operation of that grand experiment known as the neighborhood council system. Some of my best friends and colleagues want to write the whole experiment off as a failure. Based on what you would experience at a monthly neighborhood council meeting, you might agree with that assessment. It's not exactly biting, kicking, and scratching, but we've all seen personality clashes and occasional nastiness. Mostly, there is boredom as small items are beaten to death, while the most important issues are barely touched. Local councils are not unlike city councils or the U.S. congress in this regard.
But there is a pretty good argument that the system is now, possibly for the first time, starting to become something really useful.
Let's spend a moment remembering how today's system came about. One of the big turning points was the creation of regional and citywide alliances of neighborhood councils. The historic precedent was an organization known as the Citywide Alliance, which existed before any neighborhood councils had come into existence. It was more the plaything of city government's Board of Neighborhood Commissioners and the Department of Neighborhood Empowerment. But the Alliance, as it was known at the time, provided a forum in which participants from all over the city could meet each other and discuss their next steps. This cross-fertilization of north and south, east and west taught us that the kinds of issues that were being confronted in Reseda or Tarzana were similar to what we faced in San Pedro or Westwood.
The next step came with the formation of the Valley Alliance of Neighborhood Councils and of the Los Angeles Neighborhood Council Coalition. Then came regional groups covering broad areas of the city. Out of these efforts came the widespread understanding that solving our problems usually involves a citywide effort.
As we have reported in previous columns, the neighborhood council alliances are now in the process of creating and administering a critically important public arm of the emergency response system. In this way, thousands of residents of the L.A. area will be ready to work alongside professionals if and when a disaster hits.
We should pause and give credit to two of our citywide alliances that have led the way. The Department of Water and Power oversight group came about through a historic agreement. The Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the DWP and the neighborhood councils has resulted in an unprecedented level of awareness and understanding on our part. You can read about DWP issues every month in City Watch. The DWP MOU led a little indirectly to the creation of the ratepayers' advocate position, which is now involved in all the questions regarding your electric bills and water bills.
We should also give credit to the neighborhood council budget advocates. They meet with city officials and get the details about funding of the individual departments and of the city as a whole. The Budget Advocates organization has demonstrated the effectiveness of organizing according to the city's planning districts. They use a system in which each of the 7 districts elects 2 representatives. A total of 14 representatives seems to work well when it comes time to meet with city agency heads.
This model will probably be adopted by the new Emergency Preparedness Alliance, so that your public representatives will be able to attend monthly meetings of the city's emergency planning group.
One additional comment about disaster preparedness. In the past, the word disaster translated to Californians as a major earthquake. But in this century of global warming, it could involve hurricanes or even the spread of tropical diseases. We've seen a tiny hint of the possibilities in the form of poisonous reptiles washing ashore onto our beaches, due to the increased temperature of our local waters. Imagine twenty years of high water temperatures, by no means impossible, and think what that could entail in terms of hurricanes alone.
The public component of disaster preparedness is, in essence, all of the rest of us who don't wear badges. It is any and all of us, and our own readiness is what needs to be added to an otherwise excellent governmental disaster response network.
The second meeting of the Emergency Preparedness Alliance took place on Saturday, Dec. 19. More than 60 people returned for the second step in the creation of a group of leaders who will be involved in creating the new group.
It could be argued that this new alliance represents what is probably the first major achievement of the neighborhood council system. Yes, there have been lots of small achievements, thousands of them, but a major innovation that could potentially save hundreds or even thousands of lives is something new.
The failure of political reform
What is curious is how a neighborhood council system that was initially designed around political reform has been transmuted into an arm of city government.
Some people may consider this to be a sign of defeat, in that the neighborhood council system failed to weaken the influence of campaign funding in our city government. It's disappointing, but not surprising, considering how such reform efforts have failed almost universally. But the neighborhood council system, being the most local of all reform efforts, seemed to have the most potential. Our experience in watching neighborhood councils try to take on wealthy developers, only to be beaten back with surprising ease by the monied interests, is illustrative of the size of the problem.
At this level, we have to concede that at this 15 year anniversary of the system's beginnings, we don't have much to brag about where political reform is concerned.
Nevertheless, communication has improved
At another level, the system has at least created avenues of communication between our elected city officials and ourselves. That is of importance, because it allows some pleading, however limited, from ourselves to our elected officials. It's not a lot, but it's at least something. Down where I live, the result of our existence is that elected officials invite members of the public to participate in ad hoc advisory groups when contentious issues appear. In this sense, the neighborhood council system should be considered a modest success in bringing government closer to the people. The phrase should probably be more properly worded as bringing the people closer to the government because the major effort has been ours, but the end result is similar.
There still aren't enough of us
The big failure of our system after a decade and a half is our failure to grow. There should have been ten thousand active participants by now.
There are a couple of obvious reasons why this hasn't happened. The city government never made the effort to tell the wider public about its neighborhood council system. We have to assume that this was intentional. Elected officials simply aren't interested in giving power over to others.
In addition, there's that biting, kicking, scratching thing. People get tired of coming to meetings only to experience personal feuds that put a stop to effectiveness. The result of this feuding is, paradoxically, to create boredom among the spectators, as board members give long speeches that mainly reveal their own narcissism. There are a lot of exceptions -- smart, dedicated people who work to effect change -- but the small number of participants, particularly as candidates for board seats, works against effective councils.
We may be about to reverse this trend
Nevertheless, we may be on the verge of expanding our numbers through the neighborhood council elections. We will do this by inviting the wider public to do online voting. It's potentially revolutionary in terms of the expansion of democracy, and it will be starting here this spring among 35 neighborhood council districts. In addition, we will be able to hang banners announcing our elections on street poles, which will tell a lot of people of our existence for the first time.
In retrospect, we have to concede that the system was overly limited from the very beginning because the city Charter amendment that created it did not provide for specific powers, and only provided for a rather limited scope of discussion. Giving advice to elected officials and evaluating the effectiveness of city government agencies does not promise a road to success when it is not connected to any enforcement mechanism.
The initial political failure of our system does not have to persist. Curiously enough, the development of the system as a large-scale disaster preparedness network may provide for a higher level of political influence. That's because political influence is a function of numbers. When a few tens of thousands of people become involved, there will be political influence.
In the past, the elected officials have not provided the means for the neighborhood council system to grow. But the need to get people trained and organized in disaster preparedness is obvious, and the emergency preparedness alliance will build and grow based on its own momentum. Besides, the current generation of elected officials will be termed out soon enough, and won't feel any deleterious effects on their political careers coming from the increase in our numbers that will be a side effect of a process that makes all of us safer.
Looking back and looking forward
On December 11, 2001, the city of Los Angeles officially created its first two neighborhood councils. Within a very few years, most of the city was covered with neighborhood councils. We're now up to 96. We haven't had a huge effect on the operations of city government as yet. For example, we haven't achieved full public financing of city elections.
But there is another way of thinking about our system. Imagine it as a tool that we haven't entirely learned how to use as yet. The best analogy, possibly apocryphal, goes back to the demonstration of electromagnetic induction in 19th century England. That's the physical principle that underlies all of our electric power and electronics, even though this wasn't obvious at the time. One high ranking official asked what use this thing might be. The scientist demonstrating the phenomenon famously answered, "Of what use is a newborn baby?" It probably didn't happen precisely that way, and the line may actually have been spoken in a different place by Benjamin Franklin, but the story represents a deeper truth that we might apply to our present day attempts at organizing.
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(Bob Gelfand writes on culture and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 13 Issue 103
Pub: Dec 22, 2015
Biting, Kicking, and Scratching: LA’s Neighborhood Councils On the Doorstep of Usefulness
