Entries tagged 'dlanc'

i got snippy with brady this evening at a downtown los angeles neighborhood council “committee” hearing, and i am sorry about that. and really, i have a lot to thank brady for — he is helping to put in motion exciting things for both the community and me personally.

but i got snippy because once again a meeting devolved into a tussle over what the rules were, and what a committee can do, and whether this really was even a committee, and how it could become a committee, and what the composition of a committee should be.

all of which is spelled out very clearly in the bylaws and robert’s rules of order. you can even cheat and just read the “in brief” edition of robert’s rules.

it pisses me off to see the vp of administration, the closest thing that dlanc has to a parliamentarian, constantly cite undocumented “standing rules” as reasons to come up with more barriers for actually appointing members to the mostly-defunct standing committees.

and it is galling that the dlanc president still does not know how to count votes all these many months after one of the board members tried to school him. and makes jokes about it.

it is not about getting slowed down by a bunch of rules. it is about taking yourself seriously so that others will take you seriously. it is about realizing that if the neighborhood council wants to be effective in the broader political arena, it has to demonstrate some basic competence in its own meetings.

don garza speculated about the downtown los angeles neighborhood council board elections and complained about how his neighborhood is represented. no comment on the speculation, but as i have gotten more involved with the neighborhood council, i am more and more disappointed with how disengaged most of the business and social services stakeholders are. besides the planning committee, none of them are involved in any of the other board or ad-hoc committees.

i hope we can do a better job of reaching out to more business and social services stakeholders in the upcoming election, and get some people on the board who want to actually be involved. right now the executive committee can’t really take action because it has an over-representation of residential stakeholders, and the executive committee was unable to appoint members to the rules, bylaws and elections committee because that too would have been dominated by residents. (the bylaws prohibit board committees from being having a majority of any one stakeholder group.)

most of the board’s standing committees have fallen in status to ad-hoc committees because they don’t have the five appointed members necessary to constitute a standing committee.

as for the strangehold that people from the midnight mission have on the social services seats, perhaps the board should look at a bylaw amendment to restrict the number of seats that can be held by people from any one organization. even if you think the folks at the midnight mission are great, and even if they were engaged, i think it would be healthier for the board to have a more diverse composition.

next thursday, project homeless connect is having an event at the midnight mission. i would link to more information about the event, but i can’t find any.

the downtown los angeles neighborhood council is having a book drive to collect books to give away at the event. again, i would link to more information about that, but i can’t find any.

all the information i know is from a flier that was handed out during the last dlanc board meeting, which says that the book drop-off is at the dlanc outreach office at 450 s. main street, between 10:00am and 1:30pm, monday-thursday.

digging into the minutes from the last dlanc education committee meeting, it looks like they will be sorting the books on december 4th, so i guess you should get your books in before that.

(unofficial) dlanc news will have more of this sort of news in the future.

i complained about the site for collecting special conditions feedback, but here is some more specific suggestions on how to fix it:

• make it clear who will be reading the comments, and how they will be used. possible wording: “These comments from the public will be read by Russell Brown, president of DLANC, and Bert Green, co-chair of the DLANC ad-hoc filming committee, and compiled into a report to accompany the special conditions when they are sent to the Los Angeles City Council.”
• remove the restriction on identifying information. just get rid of that paragraph. i understand 100% why it is there. it is wrong. the path to hell is paved with good intentions.
• change "To Post a comment" to "To send a comment".

things i am not suggesting:

• making the comments public.

to be clear, i support the special conditions. my concern is that we remove any appearance of impropriety in how comments from the public are collected. it will be far too easy for opponents of the special conditions to dismiss them if there is the hint of an appearance that dissenting opinion is being discouraged or worse.