Los Angeles Neighborhood Councils

Los Angeles Neighborhood Councils get a D grade. They are not quit a failure. There is still the possibility that they can be made a success.

Despite all of these apparent efforts on the part of the city council I believe that the neighborhood councils were created for the purpose of quelling calls for neighborhood autonomy. Their purpose is to give neighborhood activists an outlet for their frustrations.

The city charter change in 2002 provided for advisory neighborhood councils. The city council decided to provide $50,000 per year to each council for secretarial expenses and community projects that had not been budgeted in the conventional budget allocations. There are 86 councils in the city and so the city has allocated $4.3 million to the councils each year.

The evidence to support my contentions are 1) the controls the city council has imposed on how the annual $50,000 is to be spent and 2) the rule that the neighborhood councils views are advisory and have no regulatory authority.

What goes for an accomplishment (on the neighborhood councils web site) by a neighborhood council is a meeting held by the Tarzana council that explained the rights of renters being evicted from their homes due to a condo conversion. The council was unable to stop the conversion so other than telling renters their “rights”, nothing was accomplished.

The recent pressure brought to bear by the Tujunga Sunland council denying Home Depot a permit to turn a K-Mart into one of their hardware stores shows that the neighborhood councils can impact the community. It was the same fervor that denied Walmart from taking over a store in Northridge. Clearly zoning matters can be influenced by neighborhood councils. Only by banding together and packing city council meetings can these councils be a success.

As to other accomplishments to date, there is a dearth of such information. Of the fourteen neighborhood council web sites I checked only one listed their accomplishments. That is West Los Angeles Neighborhood Council. My own neighborhood council did buy a new sound system for the senior center. Could that have cost more than $10,000? What happened to the rest of the money they received?

Has there been a major outreach to obtain greater community involvement in neighborhood councils? Well certainly not my neighborhood. The same group of people who control the chamber of commerce run the neighborhood council.

This is not representative government.