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THIS IS THE URBAN ISSUES PAGE
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IN THIS SITE
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Some links on these archived pages are not operative.
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This NONCOMMERCIAL site is a harmless hobby of George Garrigues, who has lived in the Westside Village district of Palms for 12 years. These pages have no connection with any organization.
Send him e-mail with corrections and comments.
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General Manager Greg Nelson of the city’s Department of Neighborhood Empowerment, will retire at the end of April.
 The photo at the left shows Nelson speaking at the first installation meeting of the Palms Neighborhood Council in the IMAN Center in June 2005.
"I'm proud of what we have accomplished,” he told the Los Angeles Daily News, “and I think we are at a point that it is a good time to leave and let the mayor bring in someone new. I want to go out and enjoy life while I'm still healthy."
Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said he will launch a nationwide search for a successor.
"What I want to do is make sure that this is more than an experiment and that neighborhood councils become an institutional voice at City Hall," he said. |
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Oops! Department's face is RED
Meeting time is left off the agenda, so Feb. 21 session is canceled in Lincoln Heights
Deputy city attorney leaves the room
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The official transcriber was there, the commissioners were there, the people from all parts of Los Angeles were there, General Manager Greg Nelson was there — the only thing that wasn't there were eight letters, numbers and punctuation marks printed on the agenda — so the Feb. 21 meeting of the Board of Neighborhood Commissioners had to be canceled.
At the outset of a scheduled board meeting in Lincoln Heights, Deputy City Atty. Darren Martinez announced that because the words "6:30 p.m." had been inadvertently left off the agenda, the meeting could not be held.
He said the commissioners could hear testimony from the people present but could not make any remarks or ask any questions — or, he intimated, do anything except breathe and grow older.
That led Commissioner Tsilah Burman to demand to see the rules.
It was all in the Brown Act, Martinez responded — the state's open-meetings law.
When Burman kept on talking, Martinez took tight hold of his microphone and said, This is Deputy City Atty. Darren Martinez. Let the record show I am leaving the room.
He gathered up his papers and strode out.
A sobered group of commissioners looked on blankly and then, after a sotto voce discussion, went on with the session, although it officially was not a meeting.
Several activists from East Los Angeles talked to the commissioners about what had been happening in their neck of the city, but there was no business transacted, and after a while everybody went home. |
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An ugly day in Hancock Park
Neighborhood election left a bad taste;
it certainly wasn't kosher
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A bitter quarrel between Orthodox and non-Orthodox Jews resulted in the biggest turnout of any of the city's neighborhood council elections in June 2005, but accusations flew over the way the votes were cast and who was allowed to vote. An article in the March 3, 2006, Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles laid the whole sordid affair out for all to see.
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| [Editor's Note: These are excerpts from a lengthy article by Julie Gruenbaum Fax, education editor of the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles. Click here to read the complete article.]
Dr. Warren Lent is sure he knows why he was treated with such contempi and hostility that day last June. It was the kippah [Jewish skullcap] he wore on his head.
He had come to vote in neighborhood council elections at a jam-packed fire station in Hancock Park. Amid the tension and confusion, an angry poll worker repeatedly accused Lent, a soft-spoken surgeon, of trying to vote twice. . . .
More proof, to Rosenberg's mind, that the upscale neighborhood of Hancock Park was out to get Orthodox Jews.
On the other side, non-Orthodox residents were just as disgusted by what they say they saw on Election Day — fake membership cards, line jumping and all manner of deception by Orthodox Jews trying to secure as many votes as they could. Yet more evidence that this group of Orthodox Jews is willing to bend — no, break — the rules to get what they want.
What both sides wanted was control of the local neighborhood council, a relatively new city institution meant to bring grass-roots voices into city policymaking, an ideal that hardly seems worth fighting over in other parts of town. . . .
On that day in June, the vast majority of Orthodox Jews, as well as unsuspecting local residents who came out to vote, were caught in the middle, stunned. . . .
Such a divisive confrontation was not what city planners had in mind when officials developed — and voters approved — the formation of neighborhood councils as part of the 1999 City Charter. The idea was to develop grassroots civic involvement, giving residents,
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businesses and neighborhood groups actual influence — but not outright voting power on city matters that affect them. Today, there are 88 neighborhood councils, with influence over issues such as zoning, traffic patterns, utility rates, taxes and general decisions about the character of a neighborhood. . . .
After several months of negotiations, the newly named Greater Wilshire Neighborhood Council was formed, with . . . an unwieldy 56 board members — 28 from each side.
At a hearing in December 2003, the city certified the Greater Wilshire Neighborhood Council. But before doing so, the city lopped off a section that jutted out of the Council's linear borders south of Olympic Boulevard, saying the small area, . . . was not organically part of a territory that was already too big. . . .
The hype and propaganda worked, bringing out a record 1,200 voters on Wednesday, June 15, 2005, who cast a combined 29,000 ballots, higher than any other council elections since the city founded the Neighborhood Council system, which generally does allow for multiple ballots per person. [Not in Palms; the city did not allow multiple ballots in the spring 2005 election.]
But rather than being a triumph of grass-roots activism, the turnout signaled the extent to which fear and suspicion had taken over.
By all accounts, the fire station on Wilshire Boulevard and Van Ness Avenue — the single polling place for the day — was a madhouse, with poll workers overwhelmed by the turnout, and voters and volunteers equally befuddled by the Department of Neighborhood Empowerment's impenetrable election procedures.
According to the city's exorbitantly inclusive rules, voters were allowed to define themselves as stakeholders in up to 19 categories.
That meant that on Election Day, voters — many of whom did not live or work in the area – stood on line with fistfuls of ballots. . . .
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