GELFAND ON … NEIGHBORHOOD DEMOCRACY-The neighborhood council movement is suffering what is, in essence, a religious schism, although one of the two sides fails to understand its cult like underpinnings. The first side is evangelical in its utterances, dull witted in its thinking, and rigid to a fault. The other side is me. Well, me and a few thousand others, I'd like to think.
I've told part of this story before. There is an issue that will most likely be coming up at the next meeting of the Board of Neighborhood Commissioners (aka the BONC). It's partly a real world problem and partly a symbol of everything that has been wrong with the BONC system over the years. In brief, the argument is whether 1,500 neighborhood council board members will be saddled with unnecessary, useless work in posting committee agendas, to the tune of perhaps 20,000 postings a year.
At a deeper level, the schism involves this disagreement: Shall the neighborhood councils be independent entities that exist by right of the City Charter, that choose their own interests and agendas, and determine their own destinies? Or shall the neighborhood councils be held in childlike thrall, the support arm of the local City Council representatives? In the latter model, the highest function of the neighborhood council is to root for what our elected officials do, join in volunteer cleanup campaigns, and give feedback to the electeds as long as it doesn't cut too deeply.
In its philosophical and intellectual roots, the latter, cultlike view is deeply authoritarian. It postulates that for every concern, there must be a rule, and for every rule, there has to be a system in place to enforce it. In the past, members of the BONC have gone so far as to ask for the power to remove neighborhood council board members from their positions if we failed to jump through their hoops. That viewpoint is also contemptuous of the idea of free elections because it is contemptuous of the idea that the voters get to pick our neighborhood council board members rather than the BONC.
I'm obviously a member of the first school, and have been so since before there were any officially certified neighborhood councils. It was obvious to me at the beginning (circa 2000-1) that the Charter language that created our system was intended to give us ordinary people a chance to have a say in the way government is run. And in order to have our say, we need the right to be independent and to decide which topics we want to talk about.
If you, like me, believe that there ought to be a venue for us ordinary folk to have our say, then you will probably also agree that the city should avoid making things more difficult for us as we try to accomplish our goals. That point, in a nutshell, is the root of the present discussion and has also been the core issue over the course of half a dozen years of argument and occasional turmoil.
The City Council or the mayor can throw wrenches into our gears if we look like we might be getting too influential. We've seen it several times before. The first Villaraigosa term was the worst. Villaraigosa put in an acting General Manager of the Department of Neighborhood Empowerment whose main function, it would seem, was to make our lives and work as difficult as possible. Most of us interpreted this as the mayor trying to take us down a couple of pegs. It worked pretty well until even the City Council got tired of it all.
In recent years, the system has tossed up roadblocks, but in a more subtle way. The recent proposal to require that every one of us take sexual harassment training is just the most recent of those irritants. The hypocrisy of this notion, coming from a City Council in which fully thirteen percent of the members are embroiled one way or another in sexual harassment allegations, is almost too funny to imagine. But once again, the humor will be lost on those of us who will receive an email ordering us to report to some training center to learn what we already know.
And by the way, there is a significant level of truth to the assertion that underlying this proposed training is the idea that some forms of speech shouldn't be protected. To argue that some thoughts should be forbidden, as opposed to banning actual harassment, is a very different thing, and the city fathers don't seem to be making that distinction very well.
So where are we in this eleventh or twelfth year of the schism? The BONC has just welcomed a collection of new appointees. At a recent meeting, the new board took up an old issue. As one of my longtime colleagues pointed out, this proposal is so obvious that it's hard even to argue the point because the opposition arguments are so lame.
In essence, it's an argument over the misuse of a not unreasonable principle. The Ralph M. Brown Act was passed decades ago and is an established element of California law. It requires, among other things, that agendas for meetings be posted publicly.
The purpose couldn't be clearer. As residents of California and of our cities, we have a right to know what the City Council or your local neighborhood council are going to vote on.
The law is very clear as to the purpose and as to the mechanics. A notice has to be posted at least 72 hours in advance, in a place where the public can find it and read it.
For several years, the BONC has required that all neighborhood council governing board and committee meeting agendas be posted in not just one, but in at least 5 places. As I have written previously, this is a huge waste of our volunteer time, and it is a waste of gasoline and city streets. Still, the proponents of this rule argue in essence that doing a lot of postings of the same materials is useful as a method of publicizing the neighborhood councils and their meetings.
Think about that for a moment. The statutory justification for the rules laid down in the Brown Act involve the public's right to know. The Board of Harbor Commissioners (a hugely more powerful organization than the entire group of 95 neighborhood councils combined) is not required to post its agendas in multiple places. The City Council likewise.
No, it's only us unpaid neighborhood council volunteers who are supposed to drive to 5 different locations that are, in most districts, completely ignored.
But still the proponents of this rule continue to defend it on the grounds that it is allegedly a useful tool for a place like Venice. When we ask why they don't just do all those postings on their own and leave places like San Pedro (where the postings are a waste of time and energy) alone, they simply repeat their earlier arguments.
Greg Nelson, the originator of many elements of the neighborhood council system, is known for his argument that "one size doesn't fit all." That's all we're saying, but it has so far fallen on deaf ears.
In a recent meeting, the BONC narrowly defeated a motion to rescind the rule requiring 5 postings for every committee and board meeting, and replace that requirement with the state's own requirement of one posting. The motion was entirely reasonable, and long overdue.
The BONC has a chance to reconsider its ill advised vote at the next meeting, which is scheduled for November 5th in the harbor area. We who have done the work, driven those extra miles, and basically wasted a lot of our time, ask the people of Los Angeles to remove this burden.
At the beginning of this discussion, I referred to our disagreement as a schism. I think it's a fair enough term, because it represents a deep disagreement over the way we think about ourselves. I think of my neighborhood council as adults who have adult concerns about the community and about the way the LA city government functions.
By contrast, the city government and its agencies seem to want to treat us, more and more, like difficult children. They almost sound like stern parents who like to recite the line that children want and need authority and structure in their lives. Apparently the BONC and the other city agencies think that they can parent us, and the way they intend to do that is to make more and more rules.
Enough. Pass the motion.
(Bob Gelfand writes on culture and politics for City Watch. He can be reached at [email protected])
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 11 Issue 87
Pub: Oct 29, 2013