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Department of Neighborhood Empowerment
Newsletter
November
2, 2004
Re: Financial Disclosure Ordinance is Coming. Web Site Enhancements
- Old News Articles. Funding Program Help Nears.
FINANCIAL DISCLOSURE
ORDINANCE IS COMING.
When we left
off, the Office of the City Attorney did some creative lawyering
and determined that it might be possible to exempt Neighborhood
Council board members from filing the Form 700 disclosure forms.
Click
here to see that 15-page report (pdf format).
As the legal
advice stated, those things that constitute a financial conflict
of interest under the state’s Political Reform Act would still
apply. The issue is whether or not board members have to fill out
the form, or self-declare when a conflict arises.
The City Council’s
Education and Neighborhood’s Committee asked the Office of
the City Attorney to draft an ordinance in order to permit this
to happen. The City Attorney is hard at work on completing this
task. At the same time, city staff is starting to develop a simplified
form (like Form 700) that Neighborhood Council governing boards
could adopt if they wished to impose a filing requirement on themselves.
We are also
developing training classes and materials so that every board member
clearly understands what constitutes a financial conflict of interest.
In the meantime, we urge you to refer
to pages 1 and 2 of the Ethics Handbook for Neighborhood Council
Governing Board Members (pdf format). It was prepared by
the City Ethics Commission and provided to you in your binder when
you were installed.
As soon as the
proposed ordinance is ready to be made public, we will notify you.
In the meantime, you might want to be prepared to put this item
on the agenda for your November meeting just in case you and it
are ready to go.
Language that
you might want to use: “Discussion and possible action on the
proposed ordinance to exempt neighborhood council governing board
members from the Political Reform Act filing requirements.”
For the acronym dependent among us, that’s the POTENCGBMFTPRAFR.
WEB SITE ENHANCEMENT
– NEWS ARTICLES
You already
know that our Web site tries hard to keep up with and post all
newspaper articles that refer to Neighborhood Councils.
We’re now going back to the good old days and posting articles
that were printed during the time before the department was created.
We’ve posted quite a few articles going back to the time when
the two Charter reform commissions were meeting and discussing what
this Neighborhood Council system should look like. These articles
complement the vast collection of reports that we produced since
1996 by City staff, and by the staffs of the two commissions. Those
can be found in the Reference
Library section of our Web site. Both of these areas help
answer those questions that begin with the words, “What in
the world were they thinking when …….?”
FUNDING PROGRAM
HELP IS ON THE WAY
When the Neighborhood
Council Funding Program was started, city experts recommended that
we needed three accountants to keep up with everything and ensure
that Neighborhood Councils get their money in a timely fashion.
Then the hiring freeze hit, and we’ve only had one accountant
since the beginning.
But wait! There’s
good news. Last week the City Council’s Personnel Committee
approved a recommendation from the City Administrative Officer (CAO)
that we finally be allowed the other two positions. We’re waiting
for that recommendation to appear on the City Council agenda for
final approval.
If all that
our one accountant did was to review the quarterly receipts that
each Neighborhood Council must submit, and if there were no problems
with any of them, it would take her over 400 working days to complete
her work. But there aren’t that many working days in a year,
and this isn’t the only thing she does. She also processes
100 check requests a week.
The CAO has
concluded that we have enough money in salary savings to fill these
positions and still be fiscally responsible during these tough times.
It didn’t take much to convince them of the workload problems.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Greg Nelson
gnelson@mailbox.lacity.org
866 / LA HELPS
213 / 485-1360
213 / 485-4608 fax
done@mailbox.lacity.org
email
www.lacityneighborhoods.com
website
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