GELFAND ON … LA’S NC SYSTEM-Put a bunch of people together who don't really believe in democracy and give them a little too much power and what do you have? In this story, it’s the Board of Neighborhood Commissioners, aka the BONC. I think of them as Son of Dracula, because they are the monster that keeps coming back. Maybe it's Freddy Krueger to the modern audience. Formally, BONC is the group charged with creating overall policy for the Los Angeles neighborhood council system, but not with day to day administrative authority. In practice, they are like children given their first taste of power, and they abuse it predictably.
The context of this story is a recent meeting of a Harbor Area Coalition of Neighborhood Councils. The cast of characters included a newly appointed BONC commissioner and a couple of staff members from the Department of Neighborhood Empowerment (DONE), the city agency that does have administrative authority.
Here's the gist of my argument: The City Charter decrees that there be a BONC, but doesn't really give it much to do except preside over the creation of neighborhood councils. They also have a vaguely defined role in making overall policy, but there is always tension between their idea of policy goals and DONE's idea of making things work on a day to day basis.
So there is a problem because the law demands that a BONC exist, but doesn't give it much to do. New commissioners come onto the BONC all dewy eyed and fired up. Worse yet, they are eager to help us.
This is a problem because most of us don't want their help. That's because their idea of help invariably involves putting additional burdens on us. These are burdens which don't actually help us to do the job that we ourselves want to do. They are burdens like the current proposal to make us take training in sexual harassment and training about violence in the workplace.
My neighborhood council is interested in getting priceless public land along the coast returned to public use. We don't need coaching in how to love and respect each other. We just need to be left alone long enough to get the job done. If we can do it, it will benefit the public enormously.
Here's another kind of help I would appreciate getting. Getting the word out to four million Angelenos that neighborhood councils exist would really be useful, but apparently this is beyond the understanding of BONC members..
There's another problem. BONC meetings are routinely visited by a small but vocal group of people who are more than eager to help them to help us. The chronic visitors are overrepresented by what I call the authoritarian mindset. Their proposed fix for most things is to create a new rule and to invent power to enforce that new rule. They are also big on mandatory training for all of us unpaid volunteer participants in the neighborhood council system.
What is the biggest problem that the authoritarians identify? In a word, it's the existence of vigorous debate. The next most common problem they identify is the fact that people they don't like get elected to neighborhood council boards. At least that's what used to be the most common complaint.
Wednesday night's performance by a newly appointed BONC commissioner at our regional alliance was consistent with all of these notions. He made clear he wanted to help. He talked about the recent BONC retreat and recited some of the priorities that seem to have been agreed upon. He even brought us a written summary.
Here's the punch line. One of the priorities mentioned by this commissioner was the idea of making neighborhood council bylaws more uniform.
When we heard this remark, my colleague Doug Epperhart and I were in serious danger of bursting into flames. I mean, this is the topic that we negotiated with the city several years ago, leading to a settlement that was supported by DONE, by the BONC, and by members of the City Council. The settlement involved hundreds of hours of work by neighborhood council participants and by DONE staff. It was something that was decided, settled, and accomplished long ago.
So there we were, as this brand new commissioner brought up the subject of bylaws unification as if it were some wonderful new idea that we should all jump on. In point of fact, it was more like a contagious disease that comes and goes in 3 or 4 year cycles. Apparently this is the new cycle.
Worse yet, when we explained to him just how ignorant his remarks had been, and what the actual history of the situation was, his response was to criticize our manner of response. He referred in particular to the use of swear words (I think he may have been referring to me, but it could have been one or two other people). Apparently it's OK for him to say ignorant things, but to respond appropriately -- even with irritation and anger -- is something that the authoritarians seek to stomp out at any cost.
On internet forums, remarks similar to this BONC commissioner's are referred to by a negative label: "concern trolling." The label refers to critiques that focus on style rather than substance. In this case, the critique was in regard to the way we all expressed ourselves, but the real, underlying agenda is in regard to the substance of what we said. Unfortunately, this is essentially par for the course when appointed BONC commissioners are confronted with logical analysis of what they are proposing.
And of course the real cost is to freedom of expression by us, the participants.
I'm not averse to the teaching of manners and diplomacy. I could probably use a little myself. But it can't be the first principle in a democratic system. The first principle has to be freedom of inquiry. To those of us who really believe in democracy and freedom of expression, threats to those principles are what set us off worst. That's when the debate turns vigorous, which in turn leads to attempts to stifle debate.
It seems like each new generation of BONC commissioners starts out by looking for ways to help us ignorant peasants, and almost immediately proceeds to the process of proposing rules and mandated training. Worse yet, the kind of training they propose is not the kind of training that would make us more effective, or even more courteous. That's because when an administrative body does not itself believe in the principles of local democracy and freedom of expression, it comes up with ideas that are counterproductive.
What we get is what Richard Feynman referred to as a cargo cult, that is, a system that superficially looks like the real thing, but is not the real thing. In our case, the real thing would be government structures that served to enable local democratic deliberations without constantly throwing wrenches into our gears.
Here's one other example of the dysfunction on the BONC. As CityWatch readers may remember, many of us have been calling for the BONC to rescind its rule that requires 5 separate postings of each announcement for each and every committee and board meeting held by a neighborhood council. I referred to it as the 5000 wasted hours.
Apparently the BONC was finally willing to vote that rule out of existence and to replace it with the rule that is actually required by state law. But there is a problem. They apparently couldn't just replace a bad rule with a good one. No. They insisted on staying that decision until they can figure out how to make another rule that will punish any neighborhood council that doesn't obey the new rule.
Apparently the state law and an established legal system for enforcing stakeholder rights wasn't enough for them. Apparently the soon-to-come establishment of a citywide grievance system wasn't enough for them. Apparently they couldn't agree amongst themselves what would be good enough for them, so they kicked this particular can down the road once again.
It was not an auspicious start.
(Bob Gelfand writes on culture and politics for City Watch. He can be reached at [email protected]t)
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 12 Issue 11
Pub: Feb 7, 2014