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GELFAND’S WORLD - This is aimed mainly at our city’s neighborhood council participants, who I see as victims of an irrational system. It may also be considered as a wider message about how our Los Angeles city government works.
The central observation I want to make is that no sane and rational person would design our city’s neighborhood council system the way it presently operates. The city’s current Charter Reform effort offers us an opportunity to communicate what changes need to be made. In order to decide what they should be, we really should be thinking about what a neighborhood council system might be and might be doing. Then, and only then, will we be able to offer a rational proposal. In this discussion, I offer a few observations about the system and the logical changes that ought to be made.
The effort involves designing the neighborhood council (nc) system in a way which adequately serves the public interest while avoiding the mistakes that currently exist.
One question that we should ask about the existence of a neighborhood council system is Why? In other words, what is the reason for having such a system at all? The historical basis was centered around the Valley Secession movement. The system was essentially a way of offering a teensy little bit of influence to people who felt alienated from their city government. The nc system was a bone that was tossed to the secessionists and to people who were thinking about voting for secession.
The nc system, as envisioned originally, was a group of independent bodies that chose their own representatives, determined their own agendas, and basically served to allow people from the neighborhood to come together and talk about their mutual concerns. They would serve as a conduit to the City Council representative and also serve as a warning system regarding problems of particular concern.
The nc’s are not given much power. They are merely invited to offer advice to the city government and to comment on anything that affects their neighborhood. But even in this limited authority, we’ve seen the city government try to meddle, as discussed in previous columns. Therefore, any advice that nc’s offer about Charter reform should include a return to this level of autonomy. We need to be free to comment on any issue that affects us, and to communicate our views to any and every level of government or the private sector. This, after all, is our central purpose.
What mistakes currently exist within the system, and what can we do about them?
For the most part, the mistakes are all involved with giving too much power to city bureaucrats over a system – and its participants – who ought to be working freely and independently. There should be strict limits on what kind of training, and how much of it, the city can require of any neighborhood council participant. Neighborhood council participants should have the right to negotiate over any and every requirement that the system attempts to foist upon us. Every other person involved in city government has some such right, ranging from municipal unions to professional associations. Only neighborhood council participants are denied such rights. This is one of the more critical issues that we face, yet it is ignored by higher levels of government.
The city should finally give in and admit that some level of freedom of speech still holds, even in the City of Los Angeles. The BONC has been wrestling with what it calls the Code of Conduct for years, because it can’t rationalize taking away someone’s right to speak bluntly with somebody else’s desire to avoid being insulted. What the city has been unwilling to do is to trust us to work through our own differences, even when the result is unappealing to some participants.
Finally, the city should understand that Charter-guaranteed diversity in neighborhood council participation has to include intellectual and religious diversity, and not just ethnic and sexual diversity. This failure is most evident in the way that the city is trying to force ideological indoctrination in the form of training mandates. It’s time for a negotiated settlement over these and other stresses.
In a recent neighborhood council congress, one of my colleagues suggested that a Declaration of Rights (that one of my colleagues wrote) be included in the Charter as one of the suggested Charter amendments. The declared rights include the autonomy of each neighborhood council to defend the intellectual rights of its own members, to determine the manner of its own elections, and to be the lone organization with the right to discipline any of its members. That declaration undercuts the current approach taken by BONC and the city’s administrators, who basically treat nc participants like unruly fourth graders. The counterargument to BONC policies is simple: I am running out of fingers (at least on one hand) for counting the number of Los Angeles City Council representatives who have been indicted or are currently under investigation. If I add other scandals such as the Nury Martinez tape, I’m well into the second hand.
Let’s consider the BONC as a test case for this analysis. The original Charter language establishes a Board of Neighborhood Commissioners (BONC) which has two sorts of authority. The first is to establish neighborhood councils by vote. The second is to provide overall policy guidance. There is an additional power, which is to abolish a neighborhood council if there are extreme conditions which make this necessary, but it has rarely been used over the entire quarter century of our existence.
The problem with the BONC is that it fails to follow the original vision of the founders, which was to provide for independent neighborhood groups who determined their own path and destiny. Since the BONC members are appointed by the mayor (and appointments must be ratified by vote of the City Council), the BONC is about as non-independent of the bureaucracy as it is possible to be. They basically serve the mayor, and over the years this propensity has shown itself, and not to the better.
The BONC should either be abolished or turned into an elected body – perhaps a body which is chosen by action of neighborhood councils themselves. But simply abolishing this organization would suffice. Everything it does could be replaced easily enough, including the creation of a limited organization which serves solely to create and abolish neighborhood councils should there ever be conditions which demand it.
There is one more organization which needs to be looked at. It is called the Department of Neighborhood Empowerment. It was created in the 1999 Charter amendment process. The DONE is a city department which is supposed to assist neighborhood councils in our operations and in putting on a neighborhood council congress. In its current form and function, the DONE functions more as the nc police department then as a helpful servant. It keeps track of every nc board member in terms of required trainings, and denies the right to vote at board meetings to those who it deems to have run afoul of its rules. This is exactly contrary to the original vision of the neighborhood councils as independent bodies which are chosen by election (in other words, letting the people decide who can vote on an nc board, and what the qualifications are).
It is possible that the DONE is offering some useful assistance to somebody at some level, but I’m not seeing it. What I am seeing is the occasional presence at a board meeting of somebody from DONE who tries to find some point of procedure to be critical about.
It goes on, but I’m going to stop here. Generations of City Councils, the Board of Neighborhood Commissioners, and mayors have added layer upon layer of rules and demands that get in the way of people doing what neighborhood council participants are supposed to do. There is a simple way of summarizing the problem, which goes like this:
Neighborhood Councils are supposed to tell the city government what we are thinking. Instead, the city tries to tell us what to think.
Some of the problem lies in the wording of the Charter itself. For example, do CityWatch readers know that a convicted rapist fresh out of prison can be elected to a neighborhood council board and can vote during its deliberations? This is the result of the last round of Charter reform, which tried to create a system in which any Los Angeles resident (and even some non-residents) can be elected to a neighborhood council.
There is much more to be said about this point, but in practice it creates a system in which election of neighborhood council board members has become increasingly cumbersome, to the extent that some board seat elections get less than half a dozen votes in total.
Meanwhile, the city boards and commissions and agencies and elected officials continually try to fix things and in so doing, make things worse. The buildup in the number of rules is analogous to the original formulation of Parkinson’s Law, which explained why the number of employees in any government agency expands year after year, even when the original purpose has long since expired. The BONC and DONE are constrained in their hiring, so they make rules. There is little or no reason to retain BONC and DONE under a newly reformed Charter.
There is lots more to say, and I hope to say it at some future time here in CityWatch. In the meanwhile, consider a newly revamped neighborhood council system which has the freedom to function as it should.
And one other thing. There is some suggestion that neighborhood councils be given some real power. For example, they might have some authority (perhaps Veto authority) over zoning changes. It is worth thinking about.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
