A Modest Proposal
Legally, it’s DONE’s job to be a clearinghouse of information for neighborhood councils. Practically, it should be promoting NCs’ accomplishments. Realistically, it does neither.
Thank goodness that CityWatch has been there to pick up the fumbles and advance the ball. My favorite newsletter ran a piece by Stephen Box about another successful public event organized by the Woodland Hills-Warner Center Neighborhood Council entitled “Great Streets Community Forum.” Each of its forums has attracted hundreds of stakeholders. How they do it is a best practice that other neighborhood councils would certainly like to know about.
The Daily News was so impressed that it sent a reporter to the event to cover it.
CityWatch also captured a fascinating story from the Argonaut News about the straight-talking president of the City Planning Commission, Jane Usher, who revealed some of city hall’s most coveted secrets.
While DONE’s newsletters regularly pass along messages from the mayor, such as his crackdown on water wasters, DONE isn’t sharing with us valuable NC information even after it’s printed in the newspaper. In fact, the last news article posted on its website from April 2006.
Something is terribly wrong.
Either DONE knows about these outstanding neighborhood council accomplishments and they want them to remain a secret, or it simply doesn’t know what’s going on in their backyard.
At a minimum, you would think that DONE could grab these “best practices” stories from CityWatch, send them to those on its mailing list, and post them on its website, which will be a one-stop information center for a long time, as it used to do.
-Greg Nelson
(Greg Nelson can be reached at
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CityWatch
Vol 6 Issue 70
Pub: Aug 29, 2008
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