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Department of Neighborhood Empowerment
Newsletter
December
10, 2004
Re: Legal Advice Letter Released Regarding Neighborhood Council
Database/Mailing List Privacy and the Public Records Act.
Check our home
page under the News Flashes section to find the recent advice letter
from the Office of the City Attorney. It’s 12 pages, but contains
some long-awaited advice regarding which information within a Neighborhood
Council’s database or mailing list can be private, and which
is considered a public record. Later today we’ll move it to
its permanent home in the website: Reference Library>Legal Advice.
You may have
noticed that at various meetings, such as those of the Board of
Neighborhood Commissioners, we have forms that allow people to give
us their contact information if they wish to be sent our newsletters.
Using a large, bold font at the top, we have printed this language:
| Information
from this list will be used for a citywide communication network
and database, including Internet capability, and made available
to the public.
La informacion en esta lista sera usada para una base de
datos y red de comunicacion de toda la cuidad, incluyendo para
capacidad de Internet, y se hara disponible al publico. |
This legal advice
question was presented to the City Attorney some time ago, and a
few Neighborhood Council leaders became rather impatient while awaiting
an answer. My response to them then, and it will be the same when
it arises again, is if they insist upon an immediate answer it may
not be the one they want. Therefore, it’s best to give the
attorneys time to adequately research the matter. It’s probably
wise for follow the new creed of major league baseball umpires:
Regardless of how much time it takes, get it right.
The need for
to give some issues this level of careful consideration is because
much of what we all trying to accomplish has never been done before.
Existing laws were created without any realization that there would
be this new creature in town called Neighborhood Councils –
legally city entities, but being designed to be as independent from
City Hall as possible. We are still defining and giving clarity
to how Neighborhood Councils fit into the system, and that’s
the fun of it.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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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