City Putting Authoritarian Squeeze on LA’s Neighborhood Councils

GELFAND’S WORLD--On Tuesday night, close to a hundred spectators were witness to the culmination of a trend in which city government is figuratively grabbing the neighborhood council system by the throat and shaking it into submission. Superficially, it involved enforcement of a principle that neighborhood council participants understand the laws under which they function. But in reality, it signified a policy by city government that the same voters who select neighborhood council boards are in effect children whose decisions are not to be taken seriously. 

On that Tuesday night, the Central San Pedro Neighborhood Council was preparing to hold its monthly board meeting. The room was packed with locals who came to speak. But a few minutes before the start of the meeting, several board members received an email from the Department of Neighborhood Empowerment (DONE), the city agency with oversight over the neighborhood council system. 

In what was to longtime participants an unprecedented act, DONE informed the Central SP board that several of its members were out of compliance with a particular requirement. The email from DONE's staff member Thomas Soong referred to a section of the neighborhood council's bylaws which call for suspension of any board member who fails to complete the state-prescribed ethics training within 12 months of joining the board, or within 12 months of the previous certification expiring. 

Soong's email includes the following language: 

"I will be at the meeting tonight. But in reviewing your bylaws it states that those that have a "lapse of prior ethic training certification" ... "shall be suspended from the Board until such time as they come into compliance with the ethics training requirement. Currently, five are not up-to-date with your Ethics training and therefore cannot be a part of tonight's meeting. If you do have proof you have taken the ethics certification, please send it to me before tonight's meeting." 

Apparently at least 2 of those 5 were in compliance, even under DONE standards, because their names were absent from the discussion of Soong's memo once the meeting started. 

Perhaps Mr Soong should have read the council's bylaws more carefully, because this is what they actually say: 

"All board members must take ethics and funding training prior to making motions and voting on funding related matters.  Members of the governing board shall, within the first twelve (12) months following their s/election or appointment or at the lapse of prior ethics training certification, complete and provide evidence of their completion of ethics training as required by the City of Los Angeles for Neighborhood Council Board members. Board members who do not complete such training as required shall be suspended from the Board until such time as they come into compliance with the ethics training requirement." 

Curiously, the DONE website shows that the 3 board members who were singled out for suspension had plenty of time remaining on their 12 months. Here are the dates in which each board member's ethics certification expired: 

June 24, 2015

June 10, 2015

July 3, 2015 

Putting it bluntly, the email from DONE states that several board members are out of compliance and ineligible to participate -- this based on the bylaws -- and yet all 3 are obviously in compliance according to DONE's own website and the plain reading of the bylaws language. 

There is a policy issue here that needs to be addressed by DONE: Any action by a DONE staff member that violates the rights of board members to serve on a board requires substantial vetting and oversight. If nothing else, DONE staff members need to be correct on the facts before going off half-cocked. 

There is a bigger principle here. The City Charter language envisions a neighborhood council system that is as independent as possible, and is designed to increase public participation in city government. This is a vision for a system of political entities that represent the residents of their neighborhoods. The critical issue is that we, the residents of our neighborhoods, should have the right to evaluate the qualifications of neighborhood council board candidates. 

Instead, city policy has now put a paid bureaucracy above the voters when it comes to deciding on neighborhood council board member qualifications. 

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In more than a decade of neighborhood council participation, I had never seen such an act as happened Tuesday night. It was, to use that slightly cliche'd term, a watershed event. The idea of a robust democratic process seems foreign to our city's leaders. 

The result of Tuesday's action by DONE was that three of the most experienced board members, the people who are the institutional memory of the council, were publicly insulted and instructed to miss the meeting. Of the three, one had time to bring in a copy of her own certification and present it to the board, which reacted by accepting her into their midst. 

By the way, the city has created rules of its own regarding ethics training, but the timeframe for completion of training and board eligibility is not explained in DONE's own communications. You can find a summary of the rules on the DONE website.  [http://empowerla.org/boardmembers/] The rules are clear that compliance involves a multi-part process which ends with communicating your certification to DONE. But you will also notice that DONE's website fails to instruct us in the deadline for compliance. It merely informs us that elected board members are required to complete training in ethics, funding, and behavior. The BONC has passed its own set of rules, but it’s not clear from looking at the DONE website what the actual details are. 

Tuesday night's action by DONE also represents the expansion of a power grab by the Board of Neighborhood Commissioners (BONC) that has been going on for at least five years. I can remember testifying to the BONC that they should not have power to remove governing board members. That was way back in the days that Al Abrams was BONC president. One BONC commissioner was adamant in her disagreement with my views, and liked telling me so. 

The broader disagreement is essentially one of philosophy. We who were early organizers and founders generally viewed neighborhood councils as political organizations that served to tell government and elected officials when they were wrong. That is the peoples' lobby view of the neighborhood council. The alternate view, embraced by numerous people in city government, is that neighborhood councils represent, at best, an available force of volunteers who will join in neighborhood cleanups and the like. 

In the former view, we are self-respecting citizens who collect and channel public opinion so as to counter the enormous power of wealth. The peoples' lobby has to represent the people, and the single defining principle of fair representation is the right of the people to choose their own representatives through the ballot. 

When DONE or any other government agency attempts to interfere with that principle, the defining function of the neighborhood council system is violated. 

Well, violated it was the other night, as people with combined service in excess of two decades were rudely told that they could not, for at least that one night, represent their constituents. 

The city seems to be accepting of neighborhood councils as long as we are sufficiently docile. We get to join the street cleanups and are actually encouraged to participate in disaster preparedness. But our ability to define our own purposes and to write our own agendas is being squeezed, bit by bit.

There was one element of high irony in this week's action by DONE. As I previously reported, another San Pedro area neighborhood council grievously violated the state's open meeting act back in March. Following a contentious board meeting in which an orchestrated walkout destroyed the quorum, most of the remaining board members gathered in the parking lot and had a long discussion about what they would do next. This was a serious violation of the Ralph M. Brown Act. 

That illegal meeting was witnessed by the same DONE staff member who sent the email to Central San Pedro Neighborhood Council on Tuesday night. He didn't do anything about the prior, more serious violation of state law. I suspect that he was only trying to help, by encouraging people to communicate with each other, but that was effectively the encouragement to break state law. 

Apparently it is OK for DONE to be complicit in violations of state law under some circumstances, but it's equally OK to come down hard on technicalities that aren't even state law violations. 

A loss to our community 

The passing of Frank Wada is a shock to many of us. Frank was an old friend, and participated in the creation of the Los Angeles Neighborhood Council Coalition from its very beginning. He was active in numerous projects and contributed greatly to the wider neighborhood that is Los Angeles. He will be missed. 

(Bob Gelfand writes on culture and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected]) 

-cw

 

 

CityWatch

Vol 13 Issue 92

Pub: Nov 13, 2015