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To all of our loyal Stakeholders in Westside Village:
The results of the straw poll taken at our MVCC election have now been completed.
Probably the most inconclusive results pertained to Question 8. I understand many of you are deeply concerned about this issue, and I wish to apologize now, if the inclusion of this question has caused you any pain.
The MVCC Board has made it clear from the beginning that this was an exercise in building Stakeholder awareness of the many issues facing our community — and an attempt to get people out to vote. It was never considered binding on the Board to take any action, and that was always stated publicly and in print.
Six of the questions which we threw out had never even been discussed at our meetings, and at least four questions were very specific to certain zones.
We had intended to ask each voter to identify their zone when they voted, in order to understand how the people most impacted by those issues felt.
Quite by mistake, the question asking for the voter's zone number was omitted, which invalidates our ability to give much credibility to those zone-specific questions such as No. 8.
Nevertheless, we succeeded in raising awareness, and we have opened doors to new dialog, which can lead to more meaningful discussions involving Stakeholders who may not have otherwise participated. That is our strongest mission in these early days of trying to instill grass roots participation in neighborhood councils.
With regards to the Zone 1 specific question, I was very interested to read George Garrigues's take on the results, which of course have already appeared on The Westmar Sun Web site.
[The Sun] says, "The closest vote in the referenda was that to allow Zone 1 (Westside Village) to get out of the Mar Vista Community Council and join with Palms on the other side of the 405. . . . It squeaked by with only four votes to spare — 124 to 116. Ninety-one voters didn't care one way or another."
"It was a close vote, and that does not surprise us. Many people do not know that facts. . . ."
How true.
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And even George has ignored one very important fac: Any decision should be made only by Zone 1 Stakeholders. And many things would need to occur before that can happen, and before any neighborhood council boundary changes could even be considered.
The City of L.A. requires that both neighborhood councils impacted must request that the city make a border change. The MVCC will not request a change without an intense outreach effort in Zone 1, followed by a fair vote of Stakeholders in Zone 1 — only Zone 1, and all of Zone 1!
And that's only half of the official LA city DONE [Department of Neighborhood Empowerment] procedure. The other half is that the ELECTED Board of the Palms Neighborhood Council would also have to make exactly the same request.
Don't hold your breath for that: It will be a number of months before Palms even has an election to create a board.
In fact, other options have not even been discussed, such as creating a subdivision of Zone 1.
The only thing we may have learned from the straw vote on Question 8 is that we can not totally ignore the Westside Village issue — that we need to come up with a long-range, fair plan, for Zone 1 to eventually revisit the self-determination of its neighborhood council destiny.
[Graphic is from the MVCC Web site.]
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