Woo Calls for Council to Meet Weekly in the Valley : Government: The mayoral candidate seeks more accessibility to working people. Under his plan, testimony by phone would be allowed.

Los Angeles City Councilman Michael Woo proposed a series of steps Tuesday to make the council more “user-friendly,” including a requirement that one of its three meetings each week be held in the San Fernando Valley.

Woo, a six-year council veteran who is running for mayor, charged at a news conference at the Van Nuys municipal building that city government is often inaccessible, its regimen convenient to politicians, bureaucrats, lobbyists and gadflies but not to working people.

“City government has to change its ways,” Woo said, calling his plan a means of “bringing city government into the 1990s.”

Under the Woo plan, introduced as a motion Tuesday and then referred to a council committee, the council would allow people to testify by phone from their homes and would hold one night meeting each week.

Citizens should not have to “miss a day’s work or a day of school” to participate in civic affairs, Woo said.

And because a third of the city’s population lives in the Valley, a third of the council meetings should be held there, he said.

Woo also proposed that some city departments be kept open after dark on the same days that the council holds night meetings.

Currently, the council is regularly set to meet at 10 a.m. Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays at City Hall in downtown Los Angeles.

Since the mid-1980s a handful of council meetings have been held outside City Hall. The council has approved live TV coverage of its proceedings on the city-operated Channel 35 as well as live audio broadcasts over phone lines.

Woo’s proposal seeks to expand some of those efforts to reach the public and to codify others.

Woo was joined at the news conference by a dozen supportive homeowner group leaders, most of them from the Valley.

Alan Kishbaugh, president of the Federation of Hillside and Canyon Assns., saluted Woo’s reform package, saying it is long overdue. But Kishbaugh denied that his support of it means he is endorsing Woo’s mayoral bid.

“That’s separate and apart from this,” Kishbaugh said.

At his news conference, Woo said his plan would involve “minor costs.”

But later, Council President John Ferraro, who referred the plan to a committee he chairs, said his principal concern is the cost of nighttime and Valley meetings. “I think it’s going to be expensive to move this operation around,” Ferraro said.

“I don’t know where Mike gets the idea that the cost will be nominal,” Ferraro said, even as he admitted that he had no fix on the cost issue.

“That’s one of the first things we need to look at in committee,” he said. “We have to consider how we spend every dime today because of our budget problems.”

Councilwoman Joy Picus, a Valley lawmaker who hosted the first council meeting outside City Hall in the mid-1980s, said she also is concerned with the costs and has been considering for some time a plan to use interactive video technology to permit people at prearranged remote locations to testify at council meetings.

Councilman Joel Wachs, a Valley lawmaker and mayoral candidate who has been sparring sharply with Woo over ethics reform issues, called Woo’s plan an excellent idea even as he challenged its sincerity.

“Mike Woo’s never been supportive of the Valley before,” Wachs said of the plan. “Nor has he ever asked that a council meeting be held in that part of the Valley he represented for five years.

“Now that he’s running for mayor and not doing well in the Valley, he’s doing this. It’s transparent.”