Citywide Web of Community Councils Urged

Amid a snowballing movement for the San Fernando Valley to secede from Los Angeles, five members of the City Council on Monday proposed a citywide network of 103 “neighborhood councils” to help residents feel more connected to their government.

“I needn’t tell you how cynical people have become about government and its inability to respond to our problems,” said Councilman Joel Wachs, who ran for mayor in 1993 on a platform of empowering neighborhoods and today plans to introduce a motion launching the process. “What we’re basically saying today is it’s time to give real meaning to the concepts of grass-roots democracy and of citizen empowerment.”

Wachs’ staff has studied neighborhood council programs in cities from Seattle to San Antonio, and wants Los Angeles to have a system that includes quarterly conventions of representatives of all the councils.

The neighborhoods--at least 103 of them already defined by post office or Thomas Bros. guide boundaries, but an even larger number if some want to split--would elect people to the councils and draw up their own bylaws.

The councils would have special rights, such as priority access to City Hall for informational requests and an official right of review before the City Council can pass legislation affecting them.

But like the current informal array of block clubs and homeowners groups, the councils would lack any legislative authority or control over the city’s purse strings.

That’s why some Valley activists, who are pushing a bill in the state Legislature to make secession easier, said Monday’s City Hall news conference sounded like just so much lip service.

“This idea only makes sense if the City Council is going to delegate power to these groups,” said Richard Close, president of the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Assn. and co-chair of a Valley group that supports the breakup bill. “We already have advisory groups throughout the city. To add hundreds more doesn’t make sense.”

Gary Thomas, president of the United Chambers of Commerce of the San Fernando Valley, agreed: “If it’s got no power, it’s got no substance,” he said.

Don’t tell that to Florence Jackson.

She and other neighborhood leaders--many of them active in the Empowerment Congress in South Los Angeles--praised the council proposal as a step toward giving residents more say in city issues. Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas started the Empowerment Congress in 1993 to connect scores of grass-roots groups to work on neighborhood problems ranging from public safety to economic development.

A resident of South-Central since the mid-1950s, Jackson has always called her council representative when something went wrong in her neighborhood. But three years ago, Ridley-Thomas called her. She answered his invitation to a community speak-out, and now serves as co-chair of one of the Empowerment Congress’ four “area assemblies.”

“Before he votes on things, he gets our input,” Jackson said of her councilman. “No one ever asked me before what I thought or what I felt. No one ever said, ‘Hey, we’re having a meeting to talk about the mayor’s budget.’ We never knew anything about the mayor’s budget.”

In the same way, Ridley-Thomas said, neighborhood councils could give residents throughout the city a more direct voice in city matters--even without formal power.

“It enhances the councilperson’s accessibility, and it increases that councilperson’s accountability. The perceived power, its authority, its influence, is felt in very specific and concrete ways,” Ridley-Thomas said. “There is a contract of sorts, a covenant that is created between the elected official and his or her constituents.”

He said 5,000 community residents have attended one event or another since the Empowerment Congress started in 1993. In February, 500 people attended the group’s annual convention. In between, there are dozens of community meetings, with rosters from half a dozen to a hundred, where folks talk about everything from bringing a department store to the local mall to cleaning up the alleys.

Xandra Kayden of the UCLA Public Policy Forum said the neighborhood council proposal, along with a pending plan to rewrite the city’s decades-old charter, is the best antidote to the burgeoning interest in secession..

At City Hall, many agreed. Besides Wachs and Ridley-Thomas, council members Marvin Braude, Laura Chick and Mike Feuer also attended the news conference to lend their support, and council members Richard Alatorre and Hal Bernson said later they back the plan. But others said that while they support the concept of neighborhood empowerment, the specific plan for 100 advisory boards presents problems.

“I think there is room for us to give more power to the communities,” said Councilman Richard Alarcon, suggesting that the councils be allowed to spend federal grants for local improvements.