JANE LOWENTHAL: Good evening, ladies and gentlemen and fellow commissioners. I'm Jane Lowenthal, an elected (inaudible) committee member, a state library commissioner -- our board oversees the 8,000 libraries in the state of California --

and an elected member of the Northridge Neighborhood Council. In addition to this, I offer credentials of 25 years of professional mediation and arbitration experience.

I mention this, ladies and gentlemen, because in this profession we care about and honor rules and regulations. And I suggest that if we don't do that as a city commission, if we don't do that on our boards, then the people's faith in their government is going to be hindered.

What has happened here in Northridge, in this general vicinity of Northridge and in North Hills and in Porter Ranch, is that the role that DONE has established is that from the time a group

-- for example, Northridge, who was one of the earliest applicants for certification -- from the time that one group applies, they have a certain amount of days -- I believe it's 20 -- for a mandatory mediation to be held based on disputes on boundaries.

Now, because Northridge applied as a town hall, which was not in the -- which was not approvable by BONC and/or DONE, our bylaws have been in transition, is probably the best way to put it, and have been moving toward us getting certified a different set of rules. However, BONC's rules still have not changed.

Your rules still require boundary disputes heard within a short period of time. Thus, it is not actually technically legal for you to be having a certification hearing for either the North Hills group or for Porter Ranch, which probably will come up very soon in the future.

An interesting thing about Porter Ranch, my having been a 23-year resident of Porter Ranch, is I started working on getting Porter Ranch started over 18 months ago only to find that DONE wanted to carve out not only North Hills but Porter Ranch out of the Northridge district of its 80,000-person population. And so now DONE has assigned a staff member to go ahead and get Porter Ranch going, again, in violation of your own rules.

I have no -- in closing, I have absolutely no problem with any other groups carving out districts within Northridge. Northridge has 83,000 residents. That is larger than some counties across the United States, which, ironically, we have a state budget for the library, by the way, larger than the whole budget for Arizona, their representative told me. So we are large, there's no question. In the food thing, we are supersized.

We have no problem with this being cut out. We have problems with the rules being changed to not protect the innocent. So I ask, please, that you keep to the rules, that you ask for another hearing at another time, that Northridge's hearing is as quickly as you possibly can reset.

We have changed the rules, taken out our statements about town halls. We have done everything that has been asked by DONE.

Thank you very much, and I appreciate your assistance.

Later in the meeting

JANE LOWENTHAL: Mr. Christopher, let me just tell you, it was incorrectly stated before. Let me just tell you that Northridge turned in their stuff in December, so it should have been to you guys already. So if you can please put that on the record, we should have handled that.

COMMISSIONER CHRISTOPHER: You are, Jane, out of order.

JANE LOWENTHAL: No, I'm Jane Lowenthal.

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