Northridge Community Council 7-15-03 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 the agenda
A. "Doing Business In Northridge" & The BID (Business Improvement District) with Speaker: Sam Rotner, Chairman Northridge BID and Northridge Business members & Advisors
B. The Reopening Of the Northridge Pool
C. Safety & Security; Speaker LAPD Sr. Lead Officers Graham & Bishop
D. Troy Boswell Wild Life Officer, LA City Animal Services : "Urban Wildlife and the Suburban Neighborhood."
E. Introducing a Business new to Northridge: Helping Hands for Seniors
F. Update on certification process and appeal.
G All Northridge stakeholders are invited to submit agenda items, bylaw amendments or comments.
Even though DONE and other political correct "leaders" tried to kill us we are still here. DONE assumed we would go away without a ripple.
A lead editorial, a political cartoon and three Stories in the Daily News and one in the LA Times shows will are still making our point of promoting community input. The NNC voted in a special meeting last Friday through its elected directors, unanimously voted to appeal.
http://www.dailynews.com/Stories/0,1413,200~20951~1512297,00.html
7-15-03 It's time to investigate and overhaul the city's neighborhood council system
The brouhaha surrounding Northridge's would-be neighborhood council is a reminder of all that's wrong with Los Angeles city officials' faint-hearted attempt at empowering communities.
Not that reminders were necessary.
Ever since voters approved City Charter reform in 1999, the City Hall crowd has done its best to gut the neighborhood council system. It has dragged its feet on creating the councils and stingily resisted sharing money or authority with them.
The system has been broken since its very inception, and, with the fiasco in Northridge, the problems become all the harder for city leaders to deny. At the beginning of the month, the city's Board of Neighborhood Commissioners voted to reject the would-be council's application for certification -- the first rejection after more than 70 approvals.
The Northridge petitioners claim the rejection was politically motivated, and it's hard to blame them for thinking that way. Northridge has long been a hotbed of San Fernando Valley political activism, which the group pushing for the neighborhood council vividly reflects. Its leaders are the sort of people most disdained at City Hall -- people who are more interested in fighting the city's political establishment than in joining it.
It's impossible to know whether politics alone kept them from getting their council, but politics surely had something to do with it.
It doesn't help that, in rejecting Northridge's application, the Board of Neighborhood Commissioners' cited largely subjective criteria. The board claims that the Northridge group didn't reach out enough to the local community or cooperate sufficiently with the city's Department of Neighborhood Empowerment.
But exactly how much and what kind of community outreach is enough? And what, precisely, does "cooperating" with the Department of Neighborhood Empowerment require?
Absent clear guidelines and criteria, it's easy for political considerations to corrupt the neighborhood council formation process.
That certainly appears to the case with the Department of Neighborhood Empowerment in this and other cases.
In Van Nuys, residents claim the city department not only botched neighborhood council elections, but also took sides.
In Northridge, the department tried to block local leaders from conducting meetings in a town hall format, even though "local control" should, at the very least, mean that local councils control their own meetings.
Rather than empowering neighborhoods, the department keeps getting in their way. And even when neighborhood councils do get off the ground, their power is only symbolic.
This is not the local control that voters bargained for when they approved charter reform. It is, to be sure, what city leaders had in mind.
They wanted neighborhood councils to serve them, not the public. But the public deserves better, and the new breed of City Council members who have taken office since then ought to provide it.
The Northridge controversy gives them the perfect opportunity.
In granting the community its requested appeal, the Los Angeles City Council could launch a larger investigation into all that ails the neighborhood council system. If the City Council members are sincere about empowering communities, they'll do just that.
http://www.dailynews.com/Stories/0,1413,200~20954~1511369,00.html
By James Nash Staff Writer
7-13-03 NORTHRIDGE -- One is a neighborhood activist who frequently needles City Hall over its failure to fix the Northridge swimming pool. Another is a stalwart San Fernando Valley secessionist who unsuccessfully ran for a Los Angeles City Council seat this year. And another is a homeowner whose speech is peppered with salty language and who admits his politics "are to the right of Attila the Hun."
The three -- Jane Lowenthal, Walter Prince and Charles Brink, respectively -- are leaders in the formation of the Northridge Neighborhood Council.
And, say city officials and some of their neighbors, they are exactly the wrong people for the job.
On July 1, the would-be Northridge Neighborhood Council became the first of the more than 70 advisory panels in Los Angeles to be rejected in its bid for official status. The Board of Neighborhood Commissioners, which has certified 74 neighborhood councils from San Pedro to Chatsworth, voted unanimously not to certify Northridge.
In a special meeting Friday night, the organizers of the Northridge Neighborhood Council voted to appeal the decision to deny their certification to the Los Angeles City Council. They said they hope at least to stimulate a debate over what they consider heavy-handed meddling by the city department that oversees neighborhood councils.
"I am delighted that the Northridge Neighborhood Council, through its elected directors, unanimously voted for this appeal, and in the community's best interest we hope the L.A. City Council will help us resolve our differences," said Lowenthal, president of the unofficial Northridge Neighborhood Council.
Leaders of the Northridge group say City Hall is punishing them for speaking out on issues -- from the shut swimming pool to the quality of city services in their community. They say the city wants to impanel neighborhood councils that are pawns for City Council members.
"The thing they don't like about Northridge is that we want to be a voice for the people, not a voice for City Hall," said Brink, the vice president of the Northridge Neighborhood Council in formation. "They don't want us to ask why the hell the pool isn't open or why it takes 12 minutes to get a cop out here."
http://www.dailynews.com/Stories/0,1413,200~20954~1489376,00.html
By James Nash Staff Writer
7-1-03 NORTHRIDGE -- Los Angeles City officials Tuesday recommended against certifying an advisory neighborhood council to represent 60,000 people in Northridge.
The Department of Neighborhood Empowerment recommendation not to certify the Northridge Neighborhood Council drew protests from organizers of the 2-year-old advisory panel.
The Board of Neighborhood Commissioners, an appointed group that decides whether to certify advisory neighborhood councils, considered the issue late Tuesday.
Greg Nelson, general manager of the Department of Neighborhood Empowerment, said the Northridge advisory group has been in disarray and that its leadership has refused to work with his staff members to organize the neighborhood council. "We doubt that there is enough leadership left to even have an election," Nelson said.
Neighborhood councils that are not certified cannot draw from $50,000 in city funds allocated per council, nor do they have an official role in advising City Council members on local issues.
In its report, the Department of Neighborhood Empowerment said organizers of the Northridge group failed to communicate with residents, employees and property owners in Northridge.
In addition, DONE objected to the organizers' demand that voters in the election for neighborhood council leaders sign up a day before the election.
In the election for the Van Nuys Neighborhood Council, activists beckoned people off the street to vote for their favored candidates -- prompting a challenge from rival candidates who called the election undemocratic.
In Northridge, several of the neighborhood council founders fumed at the reasons DONE cited for rejecting the group's certification.
"This is really the death knell of neighborhood councils if they continue down this path," said Charles Brink, one of the organizers.
http://www.dailynews.com/Stories/0,1413,200%257E20951%257E1504771,00.html?search=filter
7-10-03 City Hall keeps finding more money for city employees
Amazingly, at a time when the mayor says Los Angeles can't afford streetlights and members of the City Council say we can't afford more cops, all have agreed to give the city's architects and engineers a retroactive, 13 percent pay raise.
Their excuse? They had no choice.
"We were faced with the prospect of an unfair labor charge, and that would end up costing the city more," explained Councilman Bernard Parks, who had earlier sought to delay the deal. "I was convinced that the city wouldn't have stood much of a chance with it so it's better to approve this now."
Parks has a point: City architects and engineers had been working without a contract for two years. But whose fault is that?
If council members were worried the absence of a contract would result in an unfair labor charge, they should have pressured negotiators to complete a contract, or at least made sure the delay wasn't the city's fault, months if not two years earlier.
Instead, they let the process bog down, ultimately putting the public at risk. Then they rolled over and took a deal the taxpayers can't afford.
Once again, the public employees of Los Angeles -- the highest-paid municipal workers in the nation -- get to see their paychecks rise, while the rest of us watch our services decline and our tax bills soar.
http://www.dailynews.com/Stories/0,1413,200~20954~1487861,00.html
By Mariel Garza Staff Writer
7-1-03 The time it takes Los Angeles police to respond to emergency calls has jumped by an average of one minute citywide this year with San Fernando Valley getting the slowest response at 11.2 minutes, according to a city report issued Monday.
Response times have risen sharply since 2000, with much of the increase coming since Mayor James Hahn successfully pushed for a shortened three-day or four-day workweek for officers.
According to figures in the city administrative officer’s new report on the impact, of the flexible work schedule, the average response time to emergency calls citywide has shot up about 30 percent – from eight minutes to 10.7 minutes since 2000.
The Valley, which long as had the slowest police responses because fewer officers per 1,000 residents cover a large territory, remains at the bottom, but response in the rest of the city is slipping near that level. The Valley wait has increased from 9.8 minutes to 11.2 minutes since 2001, while it has risen from less than 8.6 minutes to 10.5 minutes in the rest of the city.
The minute-a-year increase in response times has sparked concerns among some city officials and residents. “A minute does matter…That’s 10 minutes over 10 years,” said Polly Ward, a neighborhood council board member in Studio City.
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