By Greg Nelson

It’s 10 a.m.  Do you know where your City Councilmember is?
Is it unreasonable to ask City Council members to show up for work?  For the second meeting in a row, and for the umpteenth time, the chair of the Education and Neighborhoods Committee (Richard Alarcon) sat alone and went through the agenda.  Without explanation, the other two members (Janice Hahn and Jose Huizar) were absent.  

I could be the oddball on this one, but since they are the highest paid council members in the nation, with the largest staff budgets, and the most staff members, showing up seems like a minimum requirement.  When Neighborhood Councils have trouble getting a quorum, everyone at City Hall gets all bent out of shape.

Let’s keep track of who shows up for work.
An expectation of a Neighborhood Council is that it will hold elected officials accountable.  Even if there weren’t Neighborhood Councils, you would think that the City Council members would want to show the voters and taxpayers that they are hard workers.  There was a time when you could walk into the City Clerk’s office and view attendance records, but no more.  I can’t think of another workplace where attendance isn’t kept.  

Maybe some Neighborhood Councils will adopt motions asking the City Council to change its procedures and once again direct the City Clerk to keep track of who comes to work.  Let’s see if any Council member will introduce that motion, or give a good reason for not doing so.  

Preparing for emergencies.
Now that Carol Baker Tharp is the new DONE general manager my blood pressure dropped 20 points and I felt comfortable enough to take off for a week and visit the Florida Keys for the first time.  Every local had a hurricane story.  The one consistent part of each story was that everyone knows what to do in the event of a disaster.  With a single 100-mile-long road that connects all parts of the Keys, a plan of when and where to go is a necessity.

Los Angeles started working on just such a system but I haven’t heard anything about it during the last year.  It’s a perfect project for the Neighborhood Councils.  Even if the plan  only identified the gathering spots within walking distance of everyone’s home or business, it could save lives and provide Neighborhood Councils with an incredible outreach tool.  

How about requiring the builders of public storage facilities, big box stores, and large housing projects to maintain stockpiles of emergency supplies and be one of the designated meeting spots?  

Use it or lose it, but use it wisely.
For the time being, Neighborhood Councils dodged a bullet that would have taken unspent money from them a year earlier than expected.

Neighborhood Councils would be wise to heed this as a wake up call.  City Hall has a problem understanding why anyone they give money to would want to take the time to spend it carefully.

Ask your DONE Project Coordinator about the best practices of other Neighborhood Councils.  Since each Neighborhood Council is required to communicate regularly with its stakeholders, Coastal San Pedro is willing to tell you how its budget can easily pay for three four-page newsletters a year for its stakeholders.

Sun Valley, Arleta, Pacoima, Foothill Trails, Sunland-Tujunga, Mid Town North Hollywood, Greater Valley Glen, and Valley Village pooled money to purchase cameras that, when fitted on police patrol cars, are able to read more than 5,000 license plates a day, dump it into a database, and find stolen cars.  

Now they’re working on supporting the Police Department’s Volunteer Surveillance Team through which folks spend the night “making the rounds” and reporting suspicious activity or crimes in progress. (Greg Nelson participated in the birth and development of the LA Neighborhood Council system and most recently 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 _