|
LA Charter: Train the Commissioners and Managers |
|
|
Empowerment Report
By Greg Nelson
If the Department of Neighborhood Empowerment were required to evaluate itself against what city regulations require it to do, it would have to receive an incomplete in at least one area.
The department must “arrange community empowerment education for top level City officials, including elected officials and commissioners.”
The department might have been able to get away with scheduling a cursory learning session, and reporting that, darn the luck, nobody showed up. But that hasn’t even happened. DONE needs to design a meaningful way to meet this requirement.
The drafters of the regulations added this mandate because of the experience in other cities where elected officials and bureaucrats had adverse knee-jerk reactions to the involvement of the public in their work.
Many electeds feel that standing for election every four years is about all the public accountability they needed. And the many city professionals cringe at the thought of attending more evening meetings and not just having to hear from the public, but to actually deliberate with people who don’t have their skills and knowledge.
Dr. Archon Fung is an Associate Professor of Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. He has devoted a large portion of his academic life to studying, and based upon what he learned, promoting civic participation, public deliberation, and transparency in government -- the fundamental beliefs upon which our neighborhood council system was conceived.
Some of findings by Fung and other scholars are:
1. Period elections are not an adequate means through which to make government more responsive and accountable.
2. People will participate more in government (the primary goal of our neighborhood council system) if they are given the opportunity, and very importantly, the motive. i.e., if their efforts will produce a valuable result, they will forgo other enjoyments.
3. The current system in which members of the public are spectators should be replaced by one in which constituents and professional politicians and bureaucrats are active partners.
Another fascinating finding by Fung was contained within his exhaustive study of how Chicago involved the public in improving the schools and promoting community policing.
Before these new efforts began, the experts -- the principals, teachers, and police officers – objected to idea of public participation in how they did their jobs.
Later, a survey of principals dispelled two fears. It showed that 58% of them agreed, and only 20% disagreed, that the lay participants contributed to academic improvements. And 87% said that community members never pressured them to spend money inappropriately.
The police officers went into their program feeling quite pessimistic about how the public viewed them, and fearing that the experiment would jeopardize police autonomy.
Two years later, 74% of the officers agreed that they should work with the public to try and solve problems in their beat.
At the start, 70% of them predicted that community groups would make more unreasonable demands on the police, but later that number dropped significantly.
DONE still has a project ahead of it to bring other service delivery departments to this level of enlightenment, and to embrace the value of deliberating with the public from Day One of each major project.
Although some members of the Board of Neighborhood Commissioners have suggested that neighborhood council leaders be required to attend as many as eight different classes on various subjects, no specific training sessions have yet been developed for the commissioners.
Being taught about the Brown Act is not the same as understanding the principles of participatory and deliberative democracy. If the commissioners had training they would understand that it isn’t adequate to give neighborhood councils three or four days notice so they can travel across town to speak for two minutes on an important decision the commission is about to make.
Next week we’ll examine more of the work of Dr. Fung and his scholarly friends, and reveal some cutting edge ways that the city and neighborhood councils can meet the goal of promoting greater public participation in government. (Greg Nelson participated in the birth and development of the LA Neighborhood Council system and served as the General Manager of the Department of Neighborhood Empowerment. Nelson now provides news and issues analysis to CityWatch.) You can reach Greg Nelson at
This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it
◘
CityWatch
Vol 6 Issue 50
Pub: 6-20-08
|
