Neighborhood Council "Leadership Academy" Presented at Glassell Park Tuesday Night; But Where Are All The NC People for Outeach and Elections?

Last night in Glassell Park, a Leadership Academy training session was held for neighborhood councils ("NCs") hosted by "EmpowermentLA" (aka "Dept. of Neighborhood Empowerment").  These are free to all to attend but designed mainly for NC boards to be able to do the best job possible with outreach and all else that NCs are supposed to do. There are 95 certified

The Glassell Park Community/Senior Center is a good local location but the Northeast region NCs tend to be no-shows for general and citywide activities (and too many very local ones, as well) as I have observed over at least the past 5 years.  Eagle Rock NC is the one I am most familiar with from serving on the board. Until the election last year, you did not find board members attending events that were outside of Eagle Rock or that were not coinciding with the monthly board meeting.  Even events held in Eagle Rock had few or none of the board members present, not including myself as present which is what I became accustomed to experiencing.

The current board, with the newly elected 14 members, has a few more persons that have shown up at some meetings other than ERNC-held meetings.    Most of these new members, however, and the few old ones, have not ventured any further from Eagle Rock than happened last term.

Last night's meeting had a relatively low turnout of NC board stakeholders or board members from the Northeast area considering (a.) the site was local, and (b.) that the material was designed to get more effective activity in the community with examples of other NCs hosting a disaster preparedness/CERT fair, jointly sponsored by numerous NC at a local LAFD station that had good support in the planning and a good attendance on the event day.

Election for NCs are coming in Spring 2014, so early election outreach training was included which covered a lot for NC to use in order to promote and to encourage candidates to register, among other things.  The presentation on how to reach people had a lot of new approaches for social media to be used in outreach and building connections to the public with information sharing.  The more traditional methods of communication, namely direct mail and other printed matter, were included, but with evolving methods of selecting the target audience with assorted sorting available that could be tailored as appropriate to the material.

The Leadership Academy training is a useful resource so that the many tools for accomplishing the tasks.  An NC thereby would not have to waste time and energy by having to start from scratch and re-inventing, or, in some cases, just discovering, the wheel.

Unfortunately, the low participation rate in overall training opportunities like this one and for many others will still not produce the improved results to the levels that are expected.  An NC and its board, not having any participants at all, leaves them missing opportunities to maximize results of the limited time any NC has to apply to activities, as well as not finding things that might very well get more results by applying what's been presented.

What's most valuable in the training being offered is having an exposure to many more choices and opportunities to  use as needed which have been used before, "tested," if you will, so that these tools will be used with a better certainty of effectiveness than simply having an NC going it alone, absent the shared experiences available here.

So, like lots of training and information sessions with the NC system, a lots of the persons and groups that could benefit or be fully informed very easily by many assorted activities will work without the assistance, and as I see it, work at a level well below what could very simply be realized for a relatively small investment of time.

And that's the way the system is, as many NCs seem to have a collective and/or individual view that no other assistance is needed and all is fine.  Unfortunately, the choice should be considered with and end to providing your stakeholders with the best service possible in place of what board members consider as personal goals and agendas that are their priorities.

Neighborhood Councils Elections- Already Been A Year Since All The Commotion In The Northeast Region.

Today is Monday, October 28, 2013 and last post here was a full year ago with the Neighborhood Council elections in the Northeast regions.

The short answer for what happened was that there were about 800 votes cast in the NC election in ERNC's case, with 2 "slates" of candidates present that were in opposition.

It was the "Eagle Rock Neighbors" slate, if I recall the name correctly, and the former "Green Slate," later renamed as "The Progressive Slate" getting the majority of voting activity.

It broke down to be about a concern over "outsiders" voting in the election under the qualification of the "factual basis" category.   The Progressive Slate, having first chosen the name of The Green Slate, created the controversy which centered on the Medical Marijuana Dispensaries that proliferated in the area.  The Green Slate had a general idea of accepting the MMDs as useful for the medically needy persons that were able to benefit from the herb.

The problem in Eagle Rock was that, aside from the many MMDs present, the customers often made themselves less than welcome in many instances by smoking their purchases in their cars, often on adjacent side streets, and this was day or night, accompanied  by other annoying behavior.

In many cases, it looked as if there was more "recreational" than "medically needy" customers, and these were the ones that were responsible for the annoying or offensive  behavior.

So, even with the change to the Progressive Slate name, the idea of a group of candidates supporting the "offending" element that the MMDs represented, and to see that slate as being the victors in the election was too much to accept by many of the ER residents and established opponents to the uncontrolled MMDs in operation.

There were five candidates for president and most of the other offices had more than one person running.  There was a candidate forum that had about 2/3 of the candidates show up to speak, with the views on the MMDs being very much a central concern of the small audience that heard them.

The responses by the candidates were generally in agreement that there needed to be some order and regulation set up to control what was turning out to be a lot of rogue operations; setting up shop without any approvals of any sort from the city government.   Additionally, part of the Neighbors Slate momentum was derived from the fears of the NC being taken over by outsiders to the neighborhood.  The truth was that practically all of the candidates were residents of Eagle Rock, or satisfied the qualification of "working" here, as was the case for Mr. Posada, Principal of Eagle Rock Elementary, who ran successfully for "Public Safety Director."

The "fear" part of the perceived "outsiders" could be traced simply to the announcement early in the candidate recruitment period of a Green Slate candidate who was a solid supporter of the marijuana dispensaries. His short item of interest, placed in the monthly Boulevard Sentinel, carried the news that the customers of the MMDs, being eligible to vote by reason of being consumers or shoppers in the area, would be a source of hundreds or more votes. I think he even said it could be potentially in the thousands.

And that was all that was needed to mobilize the opposition to keep that from happening.  Our last Neighborhood Council election two years before that was visited by less than a hundred voters in total, so the dimensions envisioned by that Green Slate candidate seemed to be a huge threat to the opposition.

So what happened just a short time before the election day was that the City Attorney's office issued an opinion that concluded that the MMD customers were not eligible to vote as planned due to the nature of the MMDs, operating in an illicit manner of some sort or another, but that business would not be legal for customers to use as a basis for voter eligibility.   It was an opinion and not a ruling of any tribunal, and resistance was voiced to the questioned level of authority that the opinion carried.

So as far as the election results turned out, the two slates had their Presidential candidates collect over 300 votes each, while there remaining 3 other candidates for the office pulled in votes something like 45, 55 and 65, or roughly that sort of spread, with me fitting in the middle of these other two, one a fellow ERNC board member and the other, essentially an unknown who said he recently sold some software endeavor for three million dollars and espoused views based his own economic models that I saw as purely social theory but untested locally and likely to remain that way.

OUTCOME
There were two from the Progressive Slate that were successful in this election.  Overall, it was about 14 or 15 new people gaining a seat on the Board that had 18 or 19 total seat. there were 3 members re-elected and the past president was retained by default, as the "Immediate Past President."

So this new board has been in place since November 2013 (make that "2012"), with most of them from my recollection, not having attended any NC meetings and thus being new to the process and the rules.  The two members coming from the Progressive Slate have turned out to be relatively active board members, venturing outside the geographic boundaries of the neighborhood for other meetings, a marked contrast from what earlier versions of the ERNC demonstrated.

It would be very difficult to even recall those original hopes and fears that drove so many to vote in the ERNC election last year.     The question for the next election will be whether those high numbers of voters was any indication a continued interest of the neighborhood in supporting NC candidates or a response simply to "intruders" and some threatened takeover notion.

2014 NC ELECTIONS
The two year election term is coming to an end in Spring 2014 when the city's NCs will be going through the elections over the course of 3 months.