In all the commotion at City Hall, I haven't been able to stay current with all the news that you can find about City Hall politics and other local operations. The story in the current edition is useful to see just how critical the City budget has become, to the extent that even the Neighborhood Councils are facing the City Council's decision on funding and other changes.
"89 Neighborhood Councils Face the Knife - City Council pauses over plan to slash budgets of groups who criticize it." By Sophia Kercher, Thursday, Feb 11 2010. L.A. Weekly. http://www.laweekly.com/2010-02-11/news/89-neighborhood-councils-face-the-knife/
The Neighborhood Councils ("NCs") were authorized by the L.A. voters around 1999 and that changed the City Charter. The NCs became an authorized part of the city govenment by that action and the city council may not eliminate them although they control the funding that is only required to be "reasonable," giving the City Council a lot of latitude in that funding decision. With that small but important control, they now want to further reduce the funding of the NCs that are comprised of elected and appointed volunteer members. It's now a mandate of the City Charter and that means the City Council is not able to dismantle it.
There is a city wide NC election period now in progress, with NCs of the same "Regions" holding their elections on the same day for all NCs in that region.
The Northeast area is "Region G" and has NCs from Eagle Rock to Lincoln Heights, from El Sereno to Elysian Valley, and many others within the area. These all will be having an election on Thursday, April 29th. Now the future of the system is uncertain as the funding is proposed at a 50% cut of the current $45,000.00 yearly allocation. And that allocation was cut last year by 10% from the initial $50,000 yearly budget.
There are now 90 certified NCs operating and the news showed some examples of that was done by a man convicted of robbery- twice- and he was the treasurer of an urban NC with access to fund. Another bit of spending was questioned in a couple of other NC, and the documentation more than the subjects funded were the problems. The rest of the NCs had kept up the money management reports and were not problem. This bad publicity is making it easier for City Council to come down on the NC system with budget cuts and other changes like cutting the city Neighborhood Empowerment department staff in half by removing 17 positions. (As for that dept., the CMs CAN make a lot of changes to it), and the CMs want to merge it with another department that will have the effect of dissolving it.
The L.A. Weekly story fills in the story with more information and this budget crisis may help the CMs who are against the NC program to cut it down and hurt it's effectiveness. They don't want anyone looking over their shoulder or butting in to the business they do- and you can't blame them with the lousy job shown overall. Some CMs are good with the NC system, but others just are hostile.
One final note here. The City Clerk was given the power to conduct this year's NC elections instead of the Dept of Neighborhood Empowerment ("DONE"). Its costing a few million dollars and many in the NCs think DONE would have been better at the job and cheaper, too. Some suspect that the job was transferred to give City Clerk's office more work and budget funds in an off-election year. In other words, to keep them funded well, at the same time as work is assigned that justifies their existence. It's could be just that, I don't know. City manipulation is not always detectable from the outside.
For now, the decisions are being considered and contacting the CM for your district and any others you can do, too, by telephone calls or any other means, would be useful.
It looks like the city council is intent on selling city assets and that's another objection to add to that call to say "No" to selling parking meters and parking lots, the Zoo, golf courses and other assets that can generate revenue if operated properly
Time is running out.
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