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Funding Cuts of as Much as a Third could Quiet Your NC Voice: Use It or Lose It! |
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Neighborhood Councils Alert !
By Greg Nelson
Friday, May 16, the City Council will devote its meeting to hear from the public regarding the mayor’s proposed budget for the new fiscal year.
 It is very important that the voices of neighborhood councils, their
board members, and stakeholders be heard before or during this
hearing. If you cannot attend in person (the meeting starts at 10
a.m.), you should send your e-mail message to the City Council
President Eric Garcetti at
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and to
your own council member(s) asking them to read your message aloud at
the meeting. Tell them that you want them to help let your voice be
heard.
Don’t forget that each neighborhood council gets three City Hall parking passes that you can use. You will need to find out who in your neighborhood council has the passes.
At risk is the $50,000 that each neighborhood council receives through the Neighborhood Council Funding Program. The Council’s Budget and Finance Committee has been seriously discussing reducing that amount. No specific numbers have been discussed during the meetings, but there are reports that the cut could be as high as one-third.
No one from the neighborhoods has yet spoken at any of the committee meetings. If the silence continues, it’s fair to assume that the council members could look at the neighborhood council funds as easy prey to be had for the taking.
If you choose to speak out, here are some points you could make:
1. Due to previous and currently planned reductions in DONE’s operating budget, neighborhood councils will have to use more of their $50,000 to pay for election outreach, training, the Congress of Neighborhoods, and possibly other expenses.
2. In adopting the current Neighborhood Council Funding Program, the City Council agreed that it would allow neighborhood councils to “rollover” unused funds for three years as long as the unused amount doesn’t exceed $100,000. This was designed to avoid forcing neighborhood councils to spend money needlessly and foolishly at the end of each year to avoid losing the money. To change this rule in the middle of the game, without discussing it with the neighborhood councils, would be acting in bad faith. Imagine how a city employee’s union would react to such an action.
3. No one has surveyed each neighborhood council to find out why some of them have large amounts of unspent money. There may be good reasons. Some may be banking money waiting for the City Attorney to draft the ordinance that would implement the proposal made by Councilman Dennis Zine in 2004 to allow neighborhood councils to grant some of their funds to nonprofit community organizations. If you have an answer regarding your neighborhood council, it would be helpful to include it.
4. The Neighborhood Council Funding Program began as an experiment. Before significant changes are made, such as reducing the amount of allocated money, DONE should conduct a thorough analysis of the program along with the neighborhood councils, and report the findings to the mayor and City Council.
5. The mayor felt that the $50,000 allocation should not be reduced.
6. The Plan for a Citywide System of Neighborhood Council requires that "money be provided in the budget each year for certified Neighborhood Councils for costs related to the functions, operations, and duties of being a certified Neighborhood Council ..." "[That shall] include, but are not limited to, meeting and office space, office equipment, computers, supplies, and communications, such as the costs associated with newsletters, postage, or printing written materials." The Charter requires that NCs have "a system through which the neighborhood council will communicate with
stakeholders on a regular basis. The idea of allocating $50,000 to the neighborhood councils was to reduce the amount of additional bureaucracy that DONE would need to meet this requirement.
7. Neighborhood councils need more help from DONE in understanding the best ways to use this money, and how to generate outside income such as applying for grants.
8. Neighborhood councils will bi- and multi-lingual translation needs are required to spend a disproportionate amount of their funds on this critical need. Cuts would be especially severe on them.
Deep cuts could quiet … at the least, lower the volume on … the voices of LA’s neighborhoods. Now’s the time. Use yours or, lose it. (Greg Nelson writes for CityWatch. He can be reached at:
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)
To send an e-mail message to any City Council member, follow this format: Councilmember.[lastname]@lacity.org. It would also be helpful if you would send a copy of your message to DONE’s Interim General Manager BongHwan Kim at
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He needs to have your messages with him during the private discussions that he has with the council members. See letter template here. _
CityWatch
Vol 6 Issue 39
Pub: 5-13, 2008
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