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GELFAND’S WORLD - In the previous column, I mentioned a panel discussion that has now been held (Saturday afternoon) at the L.A. Neighborhood Council Congress. Our session was dedicated to discussing the plan to update the city’s Charter. Much came out of that discussion, including a simple suggestion that would solve many of the current problems and which would be supported wholeheartedly by a large number of neighborhood council participants. For now, I’m calling it the Ellis proposal, and I will discuss it further below.
As you may remember, the Charter is equivalent to the city’s constitution. It defines the structure of the government – a mayor, a City Council, and various commissions -- and further defines how elections are carried out. It gives the mayor authority to appoint and fire members of commissions, and provides additional information about how city departments and agencies function and get staffed.
Our panel discussion mostly concentrated on 3 broad topics: How to get the city’s budget and finances in order, what sort of reorganization might be useful for city commissions, and what changes neighborhood council participants would like to see made. I will briefly summarize what a couple of speakers had to say about their topics, and mainly concentrate on the neighborhood council discussion, which was interesting, as much as anything else, for the way the audience responded.
Jack Humphreville is well known to readers of this site for his expertise on budgetary and fiscal matters. He has written extensively on how unwieldy (and frankly dangerous) the current system is. As a member of the neighborhood council Budget Advocates, he has detailed a list of recommendations that the Advocates have suggested be put into Charter modifications. These include the recommendations made by Rick Cole and others, as well as their own thoughts. You can read Jack’s full argument in his CityWatch columns.
Briefly, the city’s budget is out of control and needs to be fixed. This will involve a series of changes that bring the City of Los Angeles more in line with rational, accepted business and financial practice, and would necessarily involve multi-year planning. The big change would involve the requirement that the city not agree to expensive new labor agreements without being prepared for the consequences.
Nick Patsaouras is a legend in the history of L.A. city government, mainly for his leadership in the transportation sector. He is also the author of the recent work The Making of Modern Los Angeles, which includes a lot of direct and personal accounts of the people who made modern Los Angeles what it is.
Patsaouras spoke in what must be characterized as a strongly outspoken way about the current system in which politicians are overly beholden to the donors who pay for their election campaigns. He was rather pessimistic about what we can do to modify the system in a positive way as long as the corruption in the system is allowed to stay. When asked directly for one change he would make “if you had a magic wand,” he answered that the Board of Public Works commissioners should not be paid.
Before going into the neighborhood council related discussion, I will take note of an observation I made at the end of the program. This session was different from so much else at the Congress in that the panelists and the audience were all quite serious, they were critical of what currently exists, and saw themselves as attempting to find a better path. As such, the session was, to my mind, the adult approach to a neighborhood council congress. You might, with only slight sarcasm, explain that in our session, there were no pom poms in sight.
Now a little about the discussion on neighborhood councils, which was led by me and by my colleague, attorney Greg Ellis.
The first finding that was of interest was that pretty much all of the people attending the meeting were negative about the way we are treated by the city department. This includes the city department and the commission that are supposedly in existence to assist us. When I opened with the slightly argumentative assertion that neighborhood council participants are mistreated by those in authority, there was a murmur of assent that covered the entire room. A little later, when I presented a set of suggestions coming from Greg and me, there was little dissent. For example, I suggested that the Board of Neighborhood Commissioners should either be modified or abolished, because it (a) has a lot of power over us but (b) is appointed by the mayor with the agreement of the City Council, so it serves their interests rather than our own. Greg concurred with my initial suggestion with the further comment that we would be better off simply abolishing the commission rather than try to rebuild it into one that would be unique among all other city commissions.
I also suggested that something ought to be done about the Department of Neighborhood Empowerment (DONE) because it has little positive to add to what neighborhood councils do, but instead has become the neighborhood council police and supreme court. My proposal that DONE be abolished was met with relatively quiet agreement – there appeared to be a strong consensus that people were tired of having to deal with the DONE bureaucracy and hoped that DONE would either behave better or simply go away. DONE has one similarity to BONC in that the General Manager is appointed by the mayor and confirmed by the City Council, while a number of DONE staffers are developed in a similar way. Being appointed by the mayor and subject to removal, they serve her interests, whether or not they can at some point serve ours.
The reason that BONC and DONE need to be reformed or abolished is based on the original purpose for having neighborhood councils. We are supposed to be the independent ears and eyes of the community – a place where neighbors can come together and discuss their mutual concerns without being censored by elected officials – and most everything these agencies have done serves to limit this ability to hear our neighbors and ourselves to speak freely and openly.
Now to the interesting part.
A while back, the Los Angeles Neighborhood Council Coalition developed a document of its own, calling for the city to guarantee certain rights and liberties for all neighborhood council participants. We refer to that document as the Declaration. Among other things, the right of each neighborhood council to establish its own Bylaws was demanded. This may seem a little strange to the new reader, but you should understand that the city agencies mentioned above have written new rules which they then shoved down our throats by inserting them into our bylaws without our permission.
Another liberty we asked for in the Declaration is that neighborhood councils are to be the sole determiners of any action to censure or remove a neighborhood council board member from their ranks. In recent years, the city has taken upon itself this power, something which is subject to misapplication and which violates the principle of neighborhood council independence which was so important to us as we created and designed our councils.
After a discussion of what went into the document, panelist Greg Ellis made the following suggestion: The document should be incorporated into the Charter. As he explained, this has legal implications that would serve all of us well. This is, I think, the most important contribution of this session, and should be endorsed and supported by all of us as we watch the Charter review process continue.
In addition to the proposal to incorporate guarantees of neighborhood council liberty and independence into any Charter modifications, there was one other suggestion (also coming from Greg) that summarized a lot of discussion we have been having, going back to the earliest days of 2002. Simply put, there should be a better definition placed into the Charter as to the rights, powers, and authority of neighborhood councils. Interestingly, City Councilman Tim McOsker was in attendance, and when invited to comment on the above matters, he supported the idea of adding defined powers over land use to neighborhood councils.
There was more that we discussed including additional suggestions and proposals. I will discuss them in future CityWatch pieces. For the moment, I will simply summarize that a packed room full of many neighborhood council participants and leaders were almost unanimously critical of the current government structure and, by show of hands, agreed with the most important suggestions, which we have discussed above.
I should also like to thank Charter Commissioner Carla Fuentes, who joined us and explained the specifics of what the Commission is actually doing while answering questions from the audience.
I will be discussing another idea in a future piece, namely that those of us who will be most affected by Charter changes should form a Shadow Charter Commission, much as British political parties form shadow cabinets. I suspect that the Shadow Commission would consider issues (particularly regarding neighborhood council governance) that the current Commission won’t. In particular, a shadow body would be able to represent the interests of the people who live in our 99 neighborhood council districts, as opposed to the interests of those who hold high office in the city government.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
