GELFAND ON … NEIGHBORHOOD COUNCILS-Any rational look at how the city of Los Angeles regulates its neighborhood council system has to conclude that it does everything upside down. The whole collection of policies and procedures is based not on achieving marvelous things, but on stamping out any possibility of misdeeds, no matter how tiny. A way to fix things is available, if only the appointed boards and agencies would use a little common sense.
My previous column 5000 Wasted Hours talked about an unnecessary rule that has been imposed upon neighborhood council volunteers, resulting in thousands of hours of wasted effort. It should be repealed.
But it's just one symptom of the larger problem.
Let's consider that wider policy and what's wrong with it. In a nutshell, the city is obsessed with preventing the worst functioning neighborhood councils from getting away with anything. This leads it to another obsession, which is to pass rules that will somehow force these underperforming groups to magically become responsible, productive, happy members of the city family, holding meetings in which people come together in respectful silence to settle their differences and make Los Angeles a better place for the politicians. The whole policy is based on worrying about the worst performers, then finding a straightjacket that will keep those bad apples under control, and then fitting everyone else with that same straightjacket.
OK, so there's a little cynicism in that last paragraph, but if you've been around the system as long as I have, you will have noticed that it's a fairly good approximation to reality. Let's consider where it has taken us.
The previous column about the 5000 wasted hours refers to a policy that is supposed to force neighborhood councils to do outreach to the community. Most neighborhood councils already go to great lengths to do outreach, and we think long and hard about how best to stretch our modest funds and volunteer hours. But the current policy insists in effect that we are not mature enough to figure things out by ourselves. No, we are required to jump through this particular hoop just because.
And that "just because" is that some neighborhood council, somewhere, might be doing insufficient outreach. The policy is based on bringing an outlier into line, rather than defining a system that works for everybody.
Here's another example. Although the neighborhood councils are defined by law as being as independent as possible, the city bureaucracy keeps demanding that we have something called a grievance procedure. Most proposed iterations involve creating some system that can override any and every act, election, or even utterance that is perceived to be unfair or unkind.
This whole idea is, of course, flagrantly anti-democratic, because it involves constraints on freedom of expression that go well beyond the rules for society as a whole. Worse yet, some of the proposals include giving the BONC authority to abolish an entire neighborhood council governing board, even one that has been lawfully elected. Some of the proposals even go so far as to give this authority to the Department of Neighborhood Empowerment (DONE).
You might wonder why we would need something this totalitarian, when we already have a pretty good grievance procedure. It's called an election. Notice that the City Council does not have a system in which some other organization has the authority to kick elected members off the council. The only organization that has that power is you, the voters, and you get to exercise it at the polls. The same holds true for most other city councils, state legislatures, and of course the congress.
There is an exception to what I just said, but it involves the power of the legislative body to expel its own members, not the power of the Supreme Court or the president to kick people out of the US Senate, or the governor of California having the power to kick people out of the state Assembly.
But DONE and the BONC have repeatedly discussed the idea of gaining the power to throw recalcitrant people off of neighborhood council governing boards.
When you talk to DONE staffers, you find out pretty quickly that they don't really lust after this kind of power. It's just that they feel overburdened by having to deal with a few dysfunctional neighborhood councils. Some of these councils have been chronic problems that go back as much as a decade. They tend to get into trouble, then get out of it, and then relapse. But DONE and the BONC spend an inordinate amount of their time on dealing with dysfunctional councils, on hearing complaints from the public, and on trying to come up with a set of rules that will magically solve all of the problems.
I guess I don't believe in magic as much as the bureaucracy does (or at least pretends to believe). In all the years that the system has been in effect, I can remember one rule change that the BONC made that improved things, and that was a rule that relaxed the system rather than tightening it up. (For those of you who are dying to know, it is the rule that allows a governing board whose numbers have fallen too low to appoint enough new members to achieve the needed quorum.)
There are, even as we speak, a series of recommendations that are coming before the BONC. They include recommendations on creating the grievance system, recommendations on regulating our ability to select our governing board members, and most irritating of all, intrusive new training requirements.
As I mentioned in the previous column, there is even the notion that we should all be required to take sexual harassment training (fill in your own joke) and perhaps even hear a lecture on violence in the workplace, all based on a set of assertions that remain to be vetted adequately.
So what's the solution?
One reasonable approach is to follow the advice of retired BONC commissioner Doug Epperhart, which is that the BONC already has enough power and should not look for more. He is not alone among BONC alumni in holding this view, but it seems that every new generation of BONC commissioners includes a few who need to learn this lesson.
It's really that simple. Leave the grownups alone to participate in our neighborhood councils in a way (to quote that city rule) that is as independent as possible. Don't get all fussed up about local arguments that are, for the most part, personality clashes. And to the extent possible, imagine a policy in which neighborhood councils are encouraged to hold fair and free elections as often as possible, and covering as many board members as possible. That is the way to fix grievances, to the extent that they exist at all -- let the voters decide what is and what is not an actionable grievance, and defeat the board members who are worthy of being defeated.
What, you may ask, should the city do about the seriously dysfunctional neighborhood councils? That is a more difficult question, but I have the beginnings of an answer, and it's not as evasive as it might at first seem. That answer? It's your problem, so don't make it my problem. Let the BONC task DONE with coming up with minimally invasive approaches that leave the rest of us alone to do our work.
Perhaps one of those approaches should involve the city being more agreeable to decertifying the councils that are truly dysfunctional and have become a burden to the city. It would save hundreds of hours of staff time at DONE, and allow for the affected parts of the city to reorganize based on the lessons of the past. Another way (one of the proposals I actually agree with) is for the neighborhood councils that are way too large to subdivide into smaller, more workable groups.
I understand that there is a counterargument to the idea that the city should just go ahead and decertify councils that are demonstrably failing, as the staff time at DONE and the volunteer hours required in the rebuilding process are also substantial. But this debate is for another time and place.
(Bob Gelfand writes on culture and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 11 Issue 88
Pub: Nov 1, 2013