Department of Neighborhood Empowerment
Newsletter

August 30, 2003

Re: Draft of Neighborhood Council Office Space Guidelines

Happy Labor Day!

Speaking of labor, the Office of the City Attorney, the Department of General Services, and the Department of Neighborhood Empowerment have been hard at work to develop a brand new process through which Neighborhood Councils will be able to acquire or lease office space.

The Funding Program took a long time to develop because we didn’t want to make Neighborhood Councils go through what city departments have to go through to spend money. Similarly, we didn’t want Neighborhood Councils to spend six months to a year, as city departments must do, to lease office space. This has resulted in a significant effort that asks city government to do something it has never done. In fact, we couldn’t find any parallels to it in the world. In this case, we literally had to invent the wheel.

As we do so often, we are asking the Neighborhood Councils to join us in helping to shape these guidelines before they are presented to the City Council. To develop such a program without the knowledge and experience of the Neighborhood Council leaders would be foolish. However, there is some urgency attached to this matter. Ask the Neighborhood Councils. Once we know when the Education and Neighborhoods Committee will be scheduling this matter, we’ll have a clearer timetable.

The draft guidelines are 13 pages. They will be available on our home page after midnight tonight. Look for the document entitled “Draft Guidelines for NC Office Space.”

[or at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ASNCAlert/files/DONE%20/ ]

Please respond to Claudia Dunn at cdunn@mailbox.lacity.org.

If you see something that you don’t think should be in the report, or if you feel that we overlooked something, we want to know before we send the report to the City Council.

At the same time that we’re preparing these guidelines, we will be doing the two other parts of the process. We will be preparing a template or standardized lease that we hope will allow the vast majority of the leases to be processed very quickly. And we will be preparing the proper documents that will require City Council approval in order to create this new, streamlined leasing procedure for Neighborhood Councils.

Thanks for your patience.

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Greg Nelson

213 / 485-1360
866 / LA HELPS toll-free
213 / 485-4608 fax
done@mailbox.lacity.org email