Ethics Rules Attacked, Defended at City Hearings
Of citywide interest . . .

by George Garrigues

EDITOR'S NOTE: This article is reprinted with permission from The Westmar Sun.

June 2004

Los Angeles is still wrestling with a requirement that neighborhood council officials fill out conflict-of-interest forms and otherwise abide by the state Political Reform Act of 1974.

The City Council’s education and neighborhoods committee on June 1 received a city attorney's letter outlining the problems with the current policy and suggesting ways to fix them.

One solution would be for the city to adopt an ordinance allowing directors of neighborhood councils to skip filling out the forms but still require them to excuse themselves from any vote that might constitute a conflict of interest.

The matter will come before the same City Council committee on June 15, 2004.

Some neighborhood council leaders have attacked the requirement as unnecessary bureaucracy.Yet two directors from the Glassell Park Neighborhood Council said they favor use of the form — or a simplified version — in order to keep board members honest.

And a city official said in February that eight people of 1,200 serving on local council boards had resigned because they did not want to fill out the lengthy disclosure, known as Form 700.

David Voss, president of the Westchester-LAX-Marina Del Rey Chamber of Commerce and a member of the governing board of the Westchester-Playa Del Rey Neighborhood Council, told a L.A. City Council committee on Feb. 3, 2004, of the “chilling effect” of making board members disclose their holdings or relations with other people that might affect their vote.

“It has now become a full-time job to be a participant on a neighborhood council,” he said. He criticized “ivory towers talking hypothetically about what might happen or telling us, as I am absolutely incredulous to hear told to you today, that only eight people out of 1,200 have resigned.”

It’s “far off the mark from the real world,” he heatedly told the council’s education and neighborhoods committee. “This is critical. You are going to kill your neighborhood councils, and I don’t believe I can overstate that enough.”

But four months later — on June 1 — Alisa Smith and Helene Schpak of the Glassell Park community council appeared before the same committee to give an opposite viewpoint.

“This empty process is ripe for opportunists to take advantage of, and I am one myself,” said Smith. “The issue is being open and honest about it and excusing oneself at appropriate times. I think our board deserves to know the financial interests of ourselves in order to conduct our business with fairness.”

She gave two examples of problems she said were faced in Glassell Park:

“The first is a board member who announces to any who asks that he is a land-use consultant when actually he works for developers seeking relief from city ordinances. His firm also designs and builds in our community and he also owns multiresidential property. None of this is bad unto itself; however, he suggests and supports efforts to undermine city ordinances without disclosing his financial gains for doing this.” Smith said there had been no way to tell if board members had been “paid by McDonald's” to keep a new restaurant in that chain from opening in Glassell Park.

“We had our suspicions, of course,” she said. “But suspicions do not breed that air of honesty and respect we need for our neighborhood council system to work fairly."

Schpak, chair of the Glassell Park Neighborhood Council, said a requirement of a “non-discretionary means of disclosure” would work toward including, not excluding, more people on the Board of Directors.

“That way,“ she said, “no one would be suspicious just because a developer wants to be on the board,“ noting that “we would all be on the same playing field here.”

At the February meeting, Voss blasted an e-mail sent out by a Department of Neighborhood Empowerment official stating that neighborhood council directors would have to fill out a conflict-of-interest document, Form 700.

“No intent to chill?” he asked. “You did chill, and don’t tell me otherwise!” The requirement for the form was withdrawn while the city attorney‘s office studied the matter.

Council member Dennis P. Zine, who was a member of one of the city commissions that helped draw up the plan to establish neighborhood councils, expressed his frustration, too:

“It’s so far off the mark what we envisioned as charter commissioners . . . and it’s distressing to see that at this stage what the neighborhoods have to go through,” he said in February. “How do we fix this? How do we get it back on the track? . . . We seem to be going backward in creating more bureaucracy.”

General manager Greg Nelson of the Department of Neighborhood Empowerment said some councils had experimented with the idea of having a small group of board members empowered to make contracts and recommendations so the larger group would not have to fill out the forms.

But Council Member Janet Hahn disagreed.

“The idea of 50,000 people in a neighborhood being reduced to three people who are willing to fill out the form and they’re the ones who are going to make the decision, I don’t think that’s the direction we want to go in,” she said in February.

“I’m still open to the idea of pursuing any kind of tweaking of the state legislation. I would rather go that route . . . I am opposed to moving in the direction of having less people making decisions on how money should be spent.”

She said that neighborhood councils will have the authority to place statements directly on City Council agendas, so that turns them into lobbying groups that have to abide by the ethics laws of the state.

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