LACP.org
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DONE Newsletter
from the desk of Greg Nelson

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Department of Neighborhood Empowerment
Newsletter

January 2, 2004

To:
  Neighborhood Council Leaders
From:
  Greg Nelson, General Manager, DONE
E-mail:
  gnelson@mailbox.lacity.org

Happy New Year!

We have all accomplished a great deal during the last year, and best news is that there are plenty of challenges and hard work in store for us during the new year. That’s bad news for those who expected this whole thing to be easy, and great news for those who relish the opportunity to be part of building the nation’s pre-eminent example of neighborhood empowerment.

Personally, my number one goal is to ensure that you are proud of being a part of this effort.

We've certified a total of 81 Neighborhood Councils. 51 of them during 2003. There were 51 Neighborhood Council elections held during 2003, and 66 Neighborhood Councils now have elected boards.

Our best guess is that we will need 16 more Neighborhood Councils before the entire city is covered by a Neighborhood Council.

Clearly, we will be spending lots of time in 2004 helping Neighborhood Councils with their first and second elections.

We've been busy trying to change the way government functions by creating special rules and programs for Neighborhood Councils. Unfortunately, our program began without any Neighborhood Council-specific systems in place. Therefore, Neighborhood Councils have had to begin under rules that treated them as if they were departments because those were the only rules that existed. Given the fact that departments aren’t totally happy with the system as it applies to them, it was clear that many people would not want to participate in Neighborhood Councils if they were treated like departments and smothered in paperwork. Creating these special systems continues to be a priority of the City Council and Mayor. We must all remember that departmental staff gets paid to produce paperwork. Neighborhood Council leaders are doing this after work, after family, and for free.

NEIGHBORHOOD COUNCIL FUNDING PROGRAM

First was the Neighborhood Council Funding Program, which established a special process through which Neighborhood Councils could get and spend their $50,000. Early in 2004, you can expect that our first status report on the funding program will be presented to the Board of Neighborhood Commissioners and the City Council, and it may produce changes to the program.

HIRING STAFF

Second, arrangements were made for Neighborhood Councils to hire staff through the city's contract with a temporary employment agency. The new year is expected to bring us procedures through which Neighborhood Councils will be able to enter into contracts for more permanent staff and help.

OFFICE SPACE PLAN

Third, the Office Space Procedure plan was approved by the City Council on December 2. An ordinance is being drafted, and it needs the City Council's approval to finalize the new process which will shorten the amount of time that it will take Neighborhood Councils to lease or occupy office space from a best-case 4-6 months to 30-45 days.

THREE STATE LAWS

Next, you the City Council may begin dealing with three state laws that the Neighborhood Councils feel treat them unfairly. Those are the Brown Act, the Political Reform Act (the “conflict of interest law”), and the Public Records Act. Some Neighborhood Councils argue that these laws were written without any consideration being given to the idea that entities like our Neighborhood Councils could exist. Therefore, they argue that the rules that apply to city council members may not allow Neighborhood Councils to achieve their City Charter goal of promoting public participation.

Councilman LaBonge has submitted a motion regarding the Brown Act, and Councilman Dennis Zine, during a recent committee meeting, expressed his concerns about the Political Reform Act. 2004 will bring continued discussions about whether or not it’s possible for Los Angeles to develop its own version of these three laws that better achieves the goals of the laws without treating the Neighborhood Council leaders the same as people who vote on contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

CONGRESS OF NEIGHBORHOODS

Our two Congress of Neighborhoods events were very successful. The one on April 5, 2003 attracted over 1,000 NC leaders, and offered 47 workshops. The second, on November 1, 2003 was turned into a half-day session, and attracted over 600 Neighborhood Council leaders. The Empowerment Academy was launched on November 1, and early 2004 will see the refinement of the Academy as an on-going training event throughout the year. That may, in turn, allow the Congresses to take on a new look. Expect that additional focus group meetings will be held in early 2004 to involve the Neighborhood Council leaders in the shaping of the next Congress.

PARTNERSHIP WITH CORO

A contract was signed with Coro at the end of 2003. Using their own funds, Coro used their leadership program to produce Neighborhood Council applications in five different parts of the city, and they conducted a special leadership training program for current Neighborhood Council leaders in Council District 10. They have just completed their training program in Panorama City, and now they will focus on another part of the city while playing a significant role in the maturation of the Empowerment Academy. (Details to be announced shortly.)

COMMUNITY IMPACT STATEMENT

The Community Impact Statement system was developed. Using fax or e-mail, Neighborhood Councils can have their official positions printed on the agendas of the City Council and its committees. It’s probably safe to say that this has never been done before anywhere in the nation. In 2004, you can expect that commissions will follow BONC’s lead, and make this same offer to the Neighborhood Councils.

EARLY NOTIFICATION

Neighborhood Council leaders and city staff joined together to present 16 recommendations to the City Council to improve the city's early notification system. They are working their way through the committee system and to the City Council. Half went through the Education and Neighborhoods Committee to the Rules and Elections Committee. The other half remain in the E&N Committee. The recommendations stress the need for the City to abide by the City Charter requirement that Neighborhood Councils be notified as soon as possible about new items that enter into the City’s system.

CLOSING THE DIGITAL DIVIDE

Our department continues to offer free computers to all Neighborhood Councils. This done so that eventually our department, and other governmental agencies, can communicate quickly and electronically with each Neighborhood Council. In a system of this size, a backbone of electronic communication is essential. In 2004, you can expect that we will be working more closely with the Neighborhood Councils to show them the advantages of, and ensure that they have the ability to, communicate quickly with their board members, and to abide by the City Charter requirement that they communicate regularly with their stakeholders.

BUDGET DAY / CITY BUDGET

Neighborhood Councils participated in the first Mayor’s Budget Day, and in the budget prioritizing meetings that followed. For the first time, the Mayor invited the Neighborhood Councils to have the same access to him as the departments do in the development of the city budget. Within the last couple of weeks, the system for developing the city budget proposal has changed dramatically. Expect that the role of the Neighborhood Councils in this new process will be announced in the next couple of weeks.

CABLE TELEVISION ACCESS

Channel 35, the city's cable station, has offered to cablecast Neighborhood Council programming, and notices of Neighborhood Council meetings at a regular time during their broadcast schedule, and to produce nine half-hour shows about the Neighborhood Council system. The Department will continue to solicit your program ideas. It is possible that the initial shows, at least, will highlight the accomplishments of Neighborhood Councils as long as the accomplishments are of interest to the general public. Time is getting short.

PUTTING NEIGHBORHOOD AGENDAS ON THE ENS

The City offered to make Neighborhood Council agendas available to the public by subscription through the Early Notification System just like the City Council agendas. We hope that Neighborhood Councils will take advantage of this offer.

Expect the new year to produce the public database of neighborhood organizations that the Charter requires us to provide. Presently, we have most of the Neighborhood Council board members in a database, and that information is provided to people upon request. But that’s time consuming. The public database will make all that information available to people on the Internet. They can sort and filter the names, and produce lists, labels, or e-mail addresses just as we can do now. Then we will embark on the time-consuming task of adding other neighborhood groups into the public database. This will make it easier for people to contact each other without relying too heavily on the Department.

DELIBERATIVE DEMOCRACY

Our department began practicing “deliberative democracy” even before the city’s burglar alarm controversy underscored the importance of involving Neighborhood Councils in the development of new laws and policies. Expect that in 2004 we will continue to lead the way by involving Neighborhood Council leaders in the shaping of our most important laws and policies. And in the process, we will be changing city government from one that governs from the top down, into one that governs from the bottom up.

ELECTION PROCEDURES

In 2004, we will be working hard to finish the election procedures, deciding which ones should be enacted as citywide rules or laws, and which ones should be recommendations. In the same way that the election procedures are the product of our experience in elections, we will be providing Neighborhood Councils with the benefit of our experiences in helping Neighborhood Councils develop their bylaws.

DONATIONS ORDINANCE

A donations ordinance will be presented to the City Council in early 2004. It will prescribe the process through which our department and each Neighborhood Council can receive, account for, and use the donations they receive.

CITYWIDE ISSUES

At the last Congress, we saw a huge number of people gather together to discuss how Neighborhood Councils can join together and begin flexing their collective muscle on citywide issues. I expect that this effort will evolve nicely in 2004. It will probably begin with an issue that is thrust upon people, and which motivates people to join together. And it will likely start with one or two people who take the effort to mobilize the others.

WHEN GOING GETS TOUGH ….

And the Department did all and more this while experiencing about a 20% vacancy factor all throughout the year due to the hiring freeze, and while absorbing the same budget cuts as the other departments.

CITY BUDGET CRISIS

The City’s budget crisis is a serious one. Adding new positions, which the Mayor suggested be done in the current budget, isn’t even a remote thought. No one can be certain when we’ll be able to fill any of our 13 vacancies. The key to easing the pain of the state budget crisis is the proposed multi-billion bond issue. If approved by the voters in March, it will take a while to prepare the bonds for sale on the market where they will be sold incrementally. That takes us to the end of fiscal year.

In the meantime, the City has to prepare for the worst. The Mayor’s office has asked departments to prioritize its functions in a way that has never been done. At the end of January, each department will be given an opportunity to meet with special teams consisting of our deputy mayor, the CAO, and the mayor’s budget team, and we’ll present our priorities to them. The team will them go off and run that list against the amount of money that our department will be allocated. And certainly nobody has any idea what will happen to the mayor’s proposed budget when it reaches the City Council.

The Mayor and the City Council have told the departments to prepare for layoffs and/or furloughs because solving the problem through voluntary vacancies may not do the trick.

Our goal is to lessen the impact of all this on the Neighborhood Councils. We do continue to ask for your understanding. This is not business as usual. Departments that had been able to attend your meetings and special events may not be able to attend with the same regularity. The staff of the Department of Neighborhood Empowerment is governed by the federal Fair Labor Standards Act and various Memorandums of Understanding with employee unions. What little overtime money we started the year with is long gone. The amount of “comp time” that an employee can accumulate is capped. Often we have to force employees to take time off in order to stay within the law.

Expect that we will be paying more attention to how each employee uses their time to ensure that the highest priorities are given attention.

REORGANIZATION / FISCAL CRISIS STYLE

Expect that early 2004 will bring a reorganization of the entire department to take into account the realities of the budget crisis. Even if the crisis hadn’t created this need, we would be been reorganizing anyway to help us better deal with our shift from a heavy concentration on organizing and certification to the business of empowerment.

CAN’T WE ALL GET ALONG?


Ultimately, it’s all about people. As we interact with each other, as we feel frustration in not being able to accomplish as much as we’d like as quickly as we like, we have to remember that the whole idea of the Neighborhood Council system is to bring together people who will likely disagree with each other. If the Neighborhood Council boards truly represent the diversity of their areas, we will see people from different backgrounds, different values, different political and social beliefs, and different wants and needs, sitting as peers and trying to get along for the sake of their neighborhood. The system expects that the leaders of the Neighborhood Councils will be the ones who teach the stakeholders. Expect that the new year will give us an opportunity to provide our staff and the Neighborhood Councils with the additional training all agree is needed.

And in 2004, you will see an increased effort to improve our relationships with the Neighborhood Councils. We will ensure that our answers are consistent, accurate, and known to all. We will give everyone an answer, and explain the reasons for those answers. As the best friend of Neighborhood Councils in City Hall, we will be their partners, and advise them how to get done whatever it is that they want to do.

LOOKING AHEAD

Again, I wish you a happy, productive, and fulfilling new year. By this time next year, I hope that we will all be able to look back and know that we’ve done something that nobody else in the world has been able to do. And that we’ve done something that many people said couldn’t be done.

Happy New Year!

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Greg Nelson


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

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