GELFAND ON POLITICS-Our Los Angeles neighborhood council system is actually quite useful and has done some wonderful things, but there is one big task yet to accomplish -- hardly anybody knows they exist, and we have to change that. Luckily, we have a window of opportunity in which we can make the system more vital, influential, and useful.
It's really quite strange that the City of Los Angeles spends 6 million dollars on the system every year, but acts as if neighborhood councils are strangers to city government. Some elected officials have demagogued about our weaknesses in the past, and some jump on every chance to impose additional work requirements on our 1,700 unpaid volunteers.
One of the biggest complaints has been that we don't do enough outreach to the communities we represent. To borrow an old line, this causes my irony meter to overheat. If the city fathers were at all interested in the people knowing about neighborhood councils, they long since would have arranged to tell the whole city about neighborhood councils, including how to join one. That they have not done. And, that tells you a lot.
Still, part of this problem is our own fault. The city provides us yearly budgets which have, in recent years, been on the order of $37,000 per council. Theoretically, we probably could have pooled some of our money, taken out radio ads and bought space on bus benches, and out of that approach, people would have become used to the notion of a neighborhood council system. Instead, we have engaged in public outreach in a piecemeal way, 95 neighborhood councils largely going their own way.
If each neighborhood council were to allocate $1000 to a common advertising fund, we could buy a lot of radio spots. Some of our volunteers could add to the mix by creating public service announcements to go on television.
Unfortunately, the system as originally created was not strong on the idea of neighborhood councils working together. Some of us figured out early on that we had to do so in order to survive, but it was not universal. If you are one of the three different neighborhood councils in San Pedro, you figure out very soon that if you want to engage with the Port of Los Angeles or the City Council office, it really helps to take on a unified front.
They figured out how to work together on local political issues, but they've not really been good at forging citywide agreements to tell the whole city how to get involved.
They can now thankfully bring this era to an end, if a few pieces fall into place.
As in so many other things, the seeds for the new era were planted in some of our regional and citywide coalitions such as the Los Angeles Neighborhood Council Coalition (LANCC). Let me tell you the story.
A few years ago, the city was (as usual) broke, and the Department of Neighborhood Empowerment (DONE) had to cancel its plans to host the yearly citywide meeting for all neighborhood council members. What had been known as the Congress of Neighborhoods was no more. The cost -- typically in the many tens of thousands of dollars, was too high.
Then one of our activist volunteers by the name of Cindy Cleghorn got up at a LANCC meeting and suggested that perhaps we might create and run our own congress. One thing I can say for LANCC is that we are pretty good at hearing somebody volunteer to do a job and immediately saying Yes to it. I don't know if Cindy was exactly intent on volunteering for what turned out to be an enormous job, but we immediately nominated her to chair the process and (several seconds later) voted unanimously to appoint her.
Out of this initial moment came two major achievements. The first was, of course, the reestablishment of the Congress of Neighborhood Councils. The very act of our volunteering seemed to spur the city to go a little further than originally planned -- we got a lot of help, including the use of the City Hall for a whole Saturday each year, and a tradition was created.
The other achievement seemed a little more subtle at the time, but it created a precedent that we ought to make use of. It takes a few sentences to explain. The Congress was funded out of our neighborhood council funds. This may sound straightforward to most of you reading this, but let me assure you that spending your taxpayers' money is not the easiest thing for a neighborhood council to do. We have a lot of i's to dot and t's to cross before we can spend a cent.
The people at DONE and the Board of Neighborhood Commissioners (BONC) did something to make our lives easier. They created what is essentially a bank account for us, so that any neighborhood council that wants to donate say, $250 to the costs of the congress has simply to pass a motion to that effect and communicate the vote to DONE. Then DONE does the detail work of subtracting that amount from our account and putting it into the congress account.
It seems so simple. But it has made it extraordinarily easier to do the yearly congress. The city extended the original idea to include the neighborhood council Budget Advocates. The second account funds the annual Budget Day at City Hall.
You should be able to see where this is going. The management at DONE and some of the veterans of the BONC have heard our pleas and are willing to work with us on doing a citywide program of neighborhood council outreach. If DONE is willing to create a third account, this one for citywide outreach projects, and if the BONC is willing to do a bit of a stretch on an otherwise tendentious political issue, we can be home free. DONE officials tell us that they are already working on trying to get this accomplished.
Here's the whole proposal, which involves a bit of a twist.
As readers of this column may recall, the BONC has been wrestling over a different subject, namely whether neighborhood councils should be required to do a lot of paper postings of meeting announcements. State law requires a single agenda posting for any meeting of any legislative body (yes, neighborhood councils fit into that category) but the BONC has had a policy requiring 5 postings for every board meeting and the same number for committee meetings. It doesn't really make a lot of sense, but the old guard have been holding out.
With a substantial turnover in BONC membership, it now looks like there are enough votes to overturn the 5-postings policy. One suggested alternative is that every neighborhood council would be required to submit a yearly outreach plan. This is not by itself an onerous task, since we all do some kind of outreach pretty much all the time. The idea here is that doing lots of postings of neighborhood council agendas is not really all that effective as outreach, and we could replace the old policy with a more useful one.
One such approach would be to give every neighborhood council credit for part of its outreach requirement if it were to do one simple thing. If it were to appropriate something like 3 percent of its annual stipend to a citywide fund, that would satisfy its citywide responsibilities. That's around a thousand dollars out of the $37,000 total. This leaves plenty of money for other expenses and for neighborhood level grant funding.
There are numerous advantages to developing a citywide advertising campaign designed to tell the residents of Los Angeles that the neighborhood councils exist and how easy it is to find one. The primary advantage is that neighborhood councils need to bring in more participants in order to function as they were originally intended. If we can quadruple the number of people attending meetings -- really not all that difficult a goal -- then we will be that much more effective.
As the neighborhood councils increase the numbers of participants, it will also accomplish another goal, which is to build their political influence proportionately. The more people in support of any particular idea, the more the elected officials have to listen. It's just as true when it comes to neighborhood councils as when it is homeowners associations or chambers of commerce.
Other cities have neighborhood council systems, but none are as widespread, numerous, or diverse as our own Los Angeles councils. It's time that our neighborhood council system be made as well known to our own residents as the other cities' councils are in theirs.
(Bob Gelfand writes on culture and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected]) –cw
CityWatch
Vol 12 Issue 2
Pub: Jan 7, 2014
