Northridge Neighborhood Council |
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July 22, 2003
Portion of the Appeal of Northridge Neighborhood Council against BONC.
The five DONE representatives
Of these five, one was to start after the certification hearing and should not have been counted. He has never officially come to any of our meetings.
1. Megan Jones was briefly our representative when our group started. She was well liked and very helpful. DONE transferred her from our council over our objections.
2. David Larkin initially was of little help to us, as he was a new arrival from England and knew little about the US political structure or Los Angeles politics. He attempted to run our meetings until he was dissuaded from that activity. After he became familiar with the way the councils ran, he became helpful to us and was fired by DONE.
3. Scott Buritt was an enemy from the start. He boasted during the secession debate that the Valley would never win and that our council would never be certified, because our people weren’t designated by Councilman Bernson to lead the community, and that DONE had already made up their mind to destroy our group and break up our area into other councils.
He only attended a few meetings and then disappeared to set up competitive councils. He set up the Porter Ranch Council, he picked the people in concert with the local councilman, did the outreach, and even testified that it was "his" council. Porter Ranch was approved in record time with almost no questions asked by BONC, even though their outreach was miniscule compared to the Northridge outreach.
For the last few months he has been selecting the "right people" to organize a new Northridge council, while saying that we are "the wrong people" to represent Northridge.
4. Mathew Fitzgerald came to our June 2003 meeting and announced that it was not only his first meeting, but his last, and that Rolando Cuevas would be our new representative after the certification hearing. He upset the entire board when he stood up and told us that we had done no outreach in our 2 ½ years since we organized, had submitted no stakeholder signatures in our original application and had made no revisions to our bylaws, all of which were untrue.
5. Rolando Cuevas came to our June meeting with Mathew to be introduced as our new rep, to start as of the certification meeting. He attended the certification meeting, and afterward sounded as though he was going to help us with our appeal and outreach, since DONE had previously refused to assist us. He was to find out the appeal process for us. We have not seen him since that night.
DONE’s so-called help has either been fired or transferred when they were useful, or like Scott, were assigned to damage our council, and refused to provide any assistance with outreach what-so-ever. Other councils received continuing support with copying and mailing and advise on how to improve their outreach. We received nothing since David Larkin was fired. For DONE to spin a lie that they made an extra-ordinary effort to help us, based on the above history, is a joke.