MEMO TO BONC COMMISSIONERS--My comments come under the heading of 'Physician, Heal Thyself'. Right now there are somewhere around 95 Neighborhood Councils supported by DONE and BONC.
There are also less than 10 DONE field staff to actually support those Councils. As a result, it is currently a mathematical impossibility for your staff to even keep track of the existing Neighborhood Councils at all, much less handle the financial requirements that are already imposed by the City, BONC and DONE. It can take a year to retroactively decide whether or not a given financial transaction of a NC has been approved or not.
If you can't even keep track of the current Councils, if it takes 4 or 5 months to even look at proposed bylaws or to try and handle upcoming elections on a centralized basis, then why on gods earth would you attempt to impose yet another requirement that you simply can't enforce: requiring minutes.
When field staff actually do show up at a meeting, they have absolutely no idea what is going on in the Neighborhood Council beyond whatever insider gossip got them there, and have usually been dispatched by DONE to quibble about some rule or conduct that you can't enforce anyhow.
So, until the City funds the Neighborhood Councils with sufficient staff to meet the City's mandates under the Charter and the Plan, I would suggest that you recognize reality and leave well enough alone. Ask your own staff and they will readily admit that they can't even take a look at the current agendas of all the NC's, much less their Committees. It is a flat impossibility for them to monitor minutes for all the Councils.And I would point out that it's silly to require or enforce minutes when you don't even have the wherewithal to provide the Neighborhood Councils with City support staff to take the minutes in the first place.
At some point, codifying more rules that you cannot enforce, much less keep track of, renders BONC an emperor without clothes. Heck, you can't even figure out an evenhanded way to keep Neighborhood Councils in and out of "Exhaustive Efforts", whatever that means on a given day, and as for administering your "Code of Civility", give me a break.
So, before you go around adopting more rules, BONC…Heal Thyself.
(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. Tony can be reached at [email protected])-cw
CityWatch
Vol 13 Issue 85
Pub: Oct 20, 2015
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