Council Shuns Plan to Hold Regular Meetings Outside City Hall : Government: The group, however, agrees to conduct one October session at Pierce College in Woodland Hills.

After a lively debate on ways to make city government more accessible, the Los Angeles City Council voted Tuesday to hold at least one October meeting in the west San Fernando Valley but quashed a plan to hold regular sessions outside of City Hall.

At the recommendation of Councilwoman Laura Chick, who represents parts of the West Valley, the council voted unanimously to schedule a meeting at Pierce College in Woodland Hills to give Valley residents a closer look at their elected officials at work.

But most of the council members were unwilling to commit to a plan to hold four meetings a year in various communities throughout the city, saying such meetings in the past have been costly and poorly attended.

“I’ve attended every meeting outside of City Hall and that’s why I know that they are a flop,” said Councilman Nate Holden, an eight-year council veteran who has never had a meeting in his south Los Angeles district.

Officially, the council simply referred the proposal to a council committee for further study. But since the plan had already been approved by the same committee, sending it back allowed the council to kill the plan without voting against it. The action doesn’t preclude the possibility of other community council meetings if individual members request it.

But it was a harsh civics lesson for newly elected City Councilman Mike Feuer, who proposed the plan and was caught off guard by the opposition.

Despite strong criticism from several colleagues, Feuer pressed on, arguing that such meetings will address a long-held belief among many residents that City Hall is inaccessible and out of touch with residents.

“Why don’t we stand up today and tell the people that we want them to see us quarterly,” said Feuer, who was elected June 10 to represent a district that stretches from the Valley to the Westside.

Since 1983, the council has met outside City Hall only four times, three of them in the Valley and once in the Harbor area.

The last time the full council met outside City Hall was in 1990 when the 15-member panel traveled to North Hollywood for a special meeting to discuss the effect of defense cutbacks on the Valley. A year earlier, the council met in Sunland-Tujunga to discuss several local issues including the expansion of Lopez Canyon Landfill.

Critics of the plan to routinely take the council meetings on the road cited the logistic headaches of transporting dozens of city staff and audio and broadcast equipment to sites that can accommodate such meetings.

The City Hall chambers where the council meets three times a week seats 380 people and is wired with microphones and speakers so that all testimony can be broadcast throughout the building and recorded. Television cameras are mounted on the walls to televise the meetings live on cable. Electronic panels on the horseshoe-shaped dais also keep record of each vote.

City officials have never calculated the cost of such road trips, but they said that simply transporting cameras and other equipment to outlying meeting sites to broadcast the meetings live can cost up to $15,000 per meeting. The bulk of the cost would come from renting mobile broadcast equipment.

On a road trip, City Council members will have to raise their hands to vote, instead of using an electronic panel to keep track of the votes, city officials said. An egg timer can be used to keep track of the amount of time used by speakers, they said.

But Holden and others said such efforts and costs are wasted on meetings that rarely generate debate on serious city issues. In the past, they said, the topics of such meetings have focused mostly on relatively minor local issues and not on weighty citywide problems.

Councilman Hal Bernson, who represents parts of the northwest Valley, said such meetings in the past have been “a little bit of a dog and pony show because we stayed away from substantial issues.”

But Chick, who supported Feuer’s plan, said the costs and effort are minimal and will improve the government’s accessibility.

“I can’t believe that we don’t think it’s a good idea to bring meetings out to the community,” she said.

The debate also elicited its share of ribbing. For example, when supporters of the plan said the community meetings give council members an opportunity to become familiar with other parts of the city, Holden said he didn’t learn anything from the meeting in Sunland-Tujunga.

“There was nothing up there except punch,” he said referring to the refreshments served at that meeting.

Councilman Joel Wachs, who represents Sunland-Tujunga, fired back: “You didn’t say that when you were running for mayor.”