North East Central Alliance of Los Angeles Neighborhood Councils. It's a new group comprised of representatives of the Neighborhood Councils from the central and northeast areas. A meeting was held last night and City Controller Wendy Greuel was a guest speaker who gave a very informative presentation on the functions of her office and some of the activities already in progress when she took office last month, and a few things being planned. (See http://necala.ning.com/ for information about the organization.)
Ms. Greuel acknowledges that the office has been called the "watchdog" for the city, but noted that there's also the regular tasks of the office, including handling payroll for the city. One surprising comment she made was that there was only one person, a woman, who was handling the payroll duties. There was not a lot of time to detail that one out but I hope they all take care of her to keep the paychecks on time for their sakes.
From Ms. Greuel: On a different but large impact level was the fact that there will have to be personnel reductions in the city. So far the city has not done that, if you noticed among all the ideas of the mayor to balance the budget- a 30-year leasing out of parking rights for a lump sum payment, having the zoo taken over by privatization, and so on.
From another source, the actual number of persons laid off will be only a handful. (The ironic thing in the Mayor's "shared sacrifice" slogan he's used in preaching about the desperate conditions in finance that the city occupies is that city jobs holders have not be hit yet, and the layoffs, firings, closures of facilities and negative effects of the economic downturn have only been happening in the PRIVATE sector- there is yet the threatened city layoffs to occur.)
Controller Greuel said that every day that there's no action is another day of more expenses being created. At the rate of current activities, she gave out some numbers where at some point in the future, the funding obligations for the city retirement pensions will be a few billion dollars of a budget of only a few more billion. Some changes will have to happen to keep things working, possibly change in the retirement benefits but all those details were more than what this meeting was about.
The real fact of the matter here is that the Neighborhood Councils, composed of volunteer members, formed at a time that there was some strong notions of Valley secession from the City of Los Angeles, creating the body of citizen involvement for the neighborhoods to convey their concerns to city hall. The idea, again, was to give a voice to people and groups who felt slighted.
Let me tell you that the current level of evolution of this system still leaves a lot of this "voice" idea very much something that is raised to deaf ears. The city council is the power broker in the city and the Neighborhood Councils exist as a service arm of the city, in part, and as a means of delivering concerns of an area's residents to the city hall through the council members. It is only "ADVISORY" and the wishes and concerns of NCs can and have been ignored in many cases by the CMs.
THe COALITION exists as a way to create some clout, putting together all the little mice gathering to demonstrate some strength where being stepped on was easily done before in the roles of NC entities and the members individually.
There still is a lot to be done to generate more strength in the organization but it has more of an opportunity to shape things as a collective body than the singular NCs, should they wnat to make waves. All in all, it's something that gets the CMs attention at least for now, where single NCs are only segments of the city, with many different styles found among this city-wide body of volunteers. In fairness, I have to say that not all NCs are ignored but that depends on the CM and the response any particular NC wants.
From my experience, there still is a lot of information that doesn't come to our NC from the CMs office even though "we" (the NCs and it's stakeholders, i.e., usually residents and business owners in each area) are supposed to be somewhat "sharing" or "partnering" (to some level, at least), with the Council Member for the Neighborhood Council in his or her district. We mostly find out through "the grapevine" and the news media, including the Los Angeles Times. Where's the "sharing" of information by the CMs and the City, generally? Still a long way to go to get consistent recognition of any appropriate worthiness, in my view. The Coaltion approach is a co-existing way to move things and I'm all for it.
Among the several matters discussed in the meeting on Wednesday evening, the most interesting of all was the discussion from the new City Controller. So far the impression I received from Controller Greul's visit was positive one. Of course, she's a politician and there's always that trust issue present to some degree, depending on the partcular politician and his or her track record, but Ms. Greuel seemed to have significantly less "boilerplate" items in her presentation than, for example, her benefactor, the Mayor, let's say. I hope that she keeps true to what I understood during the campaign that she would operate with independent judgment and be swayed by the Mayor's agenda. So far, there's some hope and a dose of reality with her in that office. Let's hope it lasts.
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