What Would You Do With Fifty Thousand Dollars?
The Mar Vista Community Council had $49,498 in its city account on October 28, but scarcely a thought has the Board of Directors given to what to do with the money — other than to pay some admittedly necessary administrative bills.
Even though Mayor Hahn has warned of a $187 million budget shortfall next year, it's not likely that the more than 75 neighborhood councils will take a direct hit, Greg Nelson, director of the Department of Neighborhood Empowerment, said at a meeting of the councils' delegates in the Convention Center on Nov. 1.
He said he told Mayor Hahn (jokingly, of course) that he would prefer to put his office in a trailer and work without a staff rather than cut the city's allocation of $50,000 year to the councils.
But let's be honest: If neighborhood councils get the reputation of wasting public funds, the whole shootin' match could be up for cancellation by the voters.
Oh, here's a correction to the first paragraph: Secretary Amy Lawrence did put forth a suggestion at the Oct. 28 Board meeting that a "small donation" be given to a local teen-age organization called Computers for Kids, which she read about in the Los Angeles Times.
A good step in the right direction, but too tiny and too spur-of-the moment.
If the Community Council is going to get in the business of handing out grants (and perhaps it should), then the grant-giving process should be opened to everybody, and not merely some outfit that had the good fortune to be written up in the Metropolitan Blat.
What is keeping the good ideas from flowing? Surely the hard-working founders of the Community Council (many of whom are now sitting on the Board of Directors) should have known from Day One that they would have charge of a city-funded budget that many of us would envy.
President Tom Ponton says that the board wants to allocate the funds to a "big project," but little work has been done on deciding what that should be.
Let's put President Ponton to the test of (1) drawing up his own budget for the Community Council, (2) presenting it to the community for comment by stakeholders and (3) riding herd on a fractious board until the budget is adopted — and the money spent wisely.
Just to start it all off, here are a few suggestions, not one of which will have anything to do with one board member’s seeming obsession with the Green Line light-rail system near Los Angeles Airport.
Here goes:
- Launch a campaign to aid local shopkeepers to replace their graffiti-scarred windows with glass that is resistant to the acid currently favored by tag-vandals. Help the merchants get organized to solicit bids for a major glass-replacement job throughout Mar Vista and the Westdales. (The bigger the job, the lower the unit cost.) Maybe even hire an expert on a temporary basis to run the program.
- Adopt a scheme to communicate on a regular basis through the U.S. mail with EVERY stakeholder in the Westmar area. Enough of this hand-wringing about the "inability" to bring new blood into the council's activities. You can send a notice to every address in the Mar Vista-Westdale district for about 7 cents each.
- Pay the city Department of Transportation to set up a DASH short-haul bus system to get folks from their homes to a nearby shopping center. Or maybe an on-call taxi service would be nice.
- Open a store-front office where all the records and files of the Community Council would be available for inspection by all stakeholders. (Well, that's a requirement for the councils anyway.)
- Hire neighborhood folks to go from door to door soliciting Spanish-speaking stakeholders to take part in local activities. You wouldn't know if from looking at the current crop of board members, but most kids who go to Westmar schools are Hispanic, and many of their parents don't speak English or would prefer not to. (See the statistics here.)
- Throw a big party for the stakeholders, with food donated by the Mexican, Indian, Japanese, Chinese, Italian, vegetarian, Argentinean and Thai restaurants in our area. Get Overtones and Cherrydelosreyes art galleries to set up some exhibits for everybody to look at. (Go here for a list of restaurants to hit up for donations.)
- Pay the fees for some poor kids so they could learn to bowl at the Mar Vista Lanes. Keep 'em off the streets.
- Or help the schools organize activities with L.A. Scores, a fine outfit that combines soccer with literary creation, an offbeat idea, but one that works.
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There is too much wheel-spinning and gear-shifting in the city's demands on neighborhood councils.
1. One example is the ridiculous exercise of the fall when Mayor Hahn suddenly announced that the local councils would have to scurry around to find out what were the biggest problems facing local communities.
So the Mar Vista Council had to put all other priorities on the back burner just to make sure Hahn's budget pot would boil. Somehow the council rose to the task and came up with five priorities. (Go to this MVCC page to see them.)
Did Hahn actually look at any of those priorities? We don't know. In a byzantine fashion, they were supposed to have been kicked around by a regional grouping of neighborhood council representatives, then by a citywide conclave and then go to the mayor's office.
2. The city requires that five, count them, five, notices be put up at public locations for ALL meetings of neighborhood council committees at least three days in advance.
This is too many for volunteers to accomplish. Let the hard-working council secretary or committee chairmen put up one notice at the Mar Vista Library and another at the Launderland Coin-Op Laundry in North Westdale. That, and posting on the Web, plus sending notices to people who ask for them, should certainly be enough.
After all, when was the last time you saw a City Council member shlepping around town sticking up meeting notices at churches and in grocery-store windows?
(As an aside, it is time for the Board of Directors to ask if it should hire an executive assistant who could be responsible for all that busy work.)
Where is the Sept. 9 motion whereby the board approved $6,780 in expenditures for the Community Council? It was supposed to be an Attachment B in the board's minutes here, but as of Nov. 7 it wasn't attached.
So nobody other than the dozen or so people present at the Sept. 9 meeting knows what was authorized, and we bet that even they are a bit hazy by this time.
A specious bit of nonsense: The idea that public notice can be given of Mar Vista Community Council activities by hanging notices on front doors.
That's what was done the last time the council had an election. A company called the Walking Man did the job.
Yeah, good luck: One notice stuck on the front door for up to a hundred residents of apartment buildings.
This is the kind of arrant effrontery The Sun would expect from a board composed almost exclusively of homeowners' association people.
Next time, use the U.S. Postal Service.
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