Los Angeles' nearly 100 neighborhood councils should focus on advising city government about local issues while practicing more self-governance, a panel reviewing the system has recommended.
A draft report by the Neighborhood Council Review Commission, charged with assessing the city's nascent experiment with grass-roots democracy every seven years, also said the city should handle the bureaucracy that comes with operating the system so councils can better function.
"The commission looked at how the neighborhood councils can generate more participation and have a little bit less of the bureaucratic stuff that's attached to them," Raphael Sonenshein, the commission's executive director, said Saturday.
"We just want to make it an experience that is comfortable for people so they can walk into a meeting and not have a discussion about process."
A series of public workshops now being held throughout the city will fine-tune the commission's recommendations. The first workshop will be Tuesday, with the final report heading to the City Council in September.
"We want folks to come and look at these recommendations and give us feedback about what are going to be our values, and challenges that we can address in their implementation," said Altagracia Perez, the chairwoman of the 29-member commission.
Top of the list for the commissioners is how to better fit the neighborhood councils founded since 2000 within existing city structures without weakening the effectiveness of both.
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The preliminary recommendations, which came after a year of research, place the city at the helm of the councils' routine business functions.
