Northridge Community Council 5-9-03 Update |
We are sending you this E-mail as you have requested to be notified concerning Northridge Community Council events and projects affecting it.
Here is an update on what the Northridge Community Council is doing:
The council directors elected their officers at the special April 23rd meeting for a one-year term. Jane Lowenthal as President, Charles Brink as Vice President, Sandra Kardos of as Secretary, and Andy Anderson, as Treasurer.
The board chose the main topic for the May 21st meeting to be the three-year closure of the Northridge Park pool and a push to get the pool reopened as quickly as possible for the benefit of those in Northridge who use the public pools.
The Northridge council will have a booth at the Northridge Oasis Fair, which will be this Saturday, May 10th, from 10 A.M. to 6:00 p.m. It will be held on Reseda Boulevard between Nordhoff and Parthenia. We could use volunteers to spend some time meeting and greeting the people from Northridge and explaining the function of the council.
We will also have a table at the Northridge Park Fair at the end of month.
Please let your neighbors know about our meeting on May 21st concerning the pool issue.
Come to Northridge Oasis Fair to meet the business people and other groups in the community.
Please call me at 818-886-5223 or Jane Lowenthal at 818-366-5009, to volunteer to spend time at our booth at the fair.
Charles Brink
4/27/2003 Daily News Editorial
Three cheers to the charter school movement -- those folks have smoked out Los Angeles Unified Superintendent Roy Romer's real view of this effort to empower teachers and parents to help kids learn better.
Like his pals in the unions, Romer is all for the concept of charter schools -- except not in Los Angeles.
Romer was confronted last week by parents and staffers from El Camino Real High, Granada Hills High and others who want their schools to become charters. He also faced heads of schools that already converted like the Northeast Valley's Yvonne Chan and Joe Lucente who are fighting LAUSD efforts to extort a huge chunk of their state funding.
The superintendent fumed and foamed about "white students" and "upper economic groups" escaping the clutches of the LAUSD's bloated bureaucracy. He worried about getting billions of dollars more for his crash school building program and funding the massive benefits packages awarded to district employees. "If we start to pepper this geographic area with 100 conversions, I don't know how we will manage it," Romer lamented.
Exactly. If parents, teachers and principals are in charge, there would be nothing to manage. That's why so many people want their neighborhood to get a charter school.
Romer should be leading this revolution, not fighting it.
Copyright © 2003 Los Angeles Daily News Los Angeles Newspaper Group
Daily News Article Published: Sunday, April 20, 2003 - 7:03:19 AM PST
Neighborhood council bureaucrats system is tainted by corruption charges
Ever since the Van Nuys Neighborhood Council held its election back in February, the body has been plagued by allegations of scandal.
Now those allegations are starting to stick.
A League of Women Voters investigation -- commissioned by the city Department of Neighborhoods -- into the election has substantiated many of the losing candidates' charges. Some winning candidates engaged in improper electioneering, poll workers neglected to get proper identification from many voters -- and worse.
The League of Women Voters' L.A. chapter has also concluded that racial politics tainted the election by trying to advantage Latino candidates.
Worst of all, officials from the city's Department of Neighborhood Empowerment -- which is responsible for overseeing neighborhood council elections -- might have played a role in the corruption.
According to some of the disgruntled candidates, DONE staffers, most notably Rita Moreno, sided with the winning candidates and rigged the process to prevent challengers from getting a fresh hearing.
The league found enough merit to those charges to recommend a new vote, one overseen by an entirely different set of DONE staffers. That's the only way, league Executive Director Julie Rajan says, "to ensure the appearance of some integrity."
But DONE prefers to squelch criticisms that raise serious questions about the very legitimacy of the entire neighborhood council system. General Manager Greg Nelson first tried to obstruct the release of the league report, then denied that DONE had ever formally contracted with the league to make it. After that, he dismissed Rajan's verdict as "recommendations from one person."
Those recommendations, Nelson says, are now "subject to reactions from people who want to edit it, who want to add to it or subtract from it."
But what people would that be?
It took an outside organization like the league to conduct this investigation because no one in city government -- least of all at DONE -- wants neighborhood councils to be anything but be a fig leaf covering up the failures of City Hall.
Neighborhood councils were supposed to be the great deliverer of local control to L.A.'s communities. But when city officials drew up the new City Charter, they rendered the councils impotent, denying them adequate money or authority.
Then, as though to ensure that the councils would never amount to anything, they created DONE, an agency that has done its best to make sure the councils don't really do anything. Many neighborhood council activists have complained from the outset that DONE has set up rules and controls that keep many stakeholders out of the process.
The mayor and City Council have rested their case for community empowerment on these advisory neighborhood councils. If they really have any commitment to community empowerment and openness in government, they need to call DONE officials on the carpet in a public meeting and get to the bottom of this scandal
Copyright © 2003 Los Angeles Daily News Los Angeles Newspaper Group
** NOTICE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C., section 107, some material is provided without permission from the copyright owner, only for purposes of criticism, comment, scholarship and research under the "fair use" provisions of federal copyright laws. These materials may not be distributed further, except for "fair use," without permission of the copyright owner. **If you friends want to be added to our E-mail list to be notified by E-mail about meetings and issues please send an E-mail with Northridge Council as the subject. We share our e-mail list with no one. Charles Brink, Webmaster. If you want to have your name removed from the list just reply with remove as subject.Update Index
|