URBAN PO L I C Y B R I E F

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA URBAN INITIATIVE

Neighborhood Councils In Los Angeles: A Midterm Status Report

Juliet Musso, Christopher Weare, Terry L. Cooper

UR B A N PO L I C Y BR I E F
Urban Initiative Public Policy Brieng 2004 USC Urban Initiative & the USC Neighborhood Participation Project

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION: USC URBAN INITIATIVE 3470 TROUSDALE PARKWAY, WPH 604 UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES, CA 90089-4036 www.usc.edu/urban

NEIGHBORHOOD COUNCILS IN LOS ANGELES: A MIDTERM STATUS REPORT

Juliet Musso, Christopher Weare, Terry L. Cooper1

URBAN INITIATIVE POLICY BRIEF

Reporting on a study supported by the James Irvine Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the USC School of Policy, Planning, and Development, and the USC Urban Initiative
n June 1999, Los Angeles voters enacted charter provisions creating a citywide system of Neighborhood Councils (NCs). The charter states that the broad goal of the reform is to promote more citizen participation in government and make government more responsive to local needs. Three years have passed since the City Council approved a plan for charter implementation, and the 2006 charter-mandated review of the Neighborhood Council system is approaching. Other cities required many years to implement fully a Neighborhood Council system, suggesting that the Los Angeles system is still in a formative stage. This brieng considers whether midstream corrections are in order, and suggests benchmarks against which to evaluate outcomes over time.2 The criteria applied in this evaluation include democratic legitimacy, the extent to which NCs provide meaningful input on city decisions (relevance), and the extent to which NCs appear to have the potential to inuence City policies and develop relationships that bring together diverse groups within and across communities.

ISSUES OF LEGITIMACY AND RELEVANCY

clear measure of progress is the extent to which the system is citywide, as intended in the charter. As of May 2004, 81 certied Neighborhood Councils represented areas containing 3,150,652 residents an average of 38,411 per Neighborhood Council (Map 1). Sixty-six NCs have had held one or more elections to select Board members; turnout in rst-round elections was on average 372 stakeholders (Map 2). Voting participation in rst elections exceeded 20,000 residents, an average of 1.3% of the residential population. This turnout needs to be contextualized by recognizing that the citys recent history has been one of relatively low electoral participation; for example, the turnout in the last general election constituted just 4% of city residents. Implementation of the neighborhood council system has drawn criticism on grounds that administrative practices are inconsistent or excessively cumbersome and intrusive. We nd that two issues are particularly important to the legitimacy and relevance of neighborhood councils: (1) controversy concerning NC elections; and (2) the slow progress of participatory innovations to support Neighborhood Council involvement in City policy-making.

We nd that: Democratic legitimacy requires policy reforms to ensure that Council elections are fair and inclusive; Policy relevance necessitates development of avenues for systematic participation in City governance; While it is too early to evaluate their long-term input, we suggest several benchmarks, including the quality of NC activities and impacts, the development of social and political relationships, and the impact of the system on political efficacy and attitudes toward City government.

1Expert analytic assistance was provided by Kyu-Nahm Jun, Nail Oztas, Amy Sheller,

and Michael Sithole.

2The rst section primarily employs information from semi-structured interviews, focus

groups, eld observations, and documentary research. The second section relies on surveys of: (1) 51 elected Neighborhood Council Boards, conducted between July and September of 2003 (response rate 66%); (2) 799 Los Angeles city residents conducted in 2002 by the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) and USC (Baldassare, M. PPIC Statewide Survey: Special Survey of Los Angeles County, March 2003); (3) 49 purposively sampled City Council staff from all 15 city council districts; and (4) 16 DONE project coordinators evaluating 62 of the 82 Neighborhood Councils certied to date.

URBAN INITIATIVE POLICY BRIEF JUNE 2004

MAP 1: CERTIFICATION AND ELECTION STATUS AS OF 2004

Electoral reforms required for legitimacy. Legitimacy of the NC system requires fair and inclusive governing Board elections. Neighborhood Councils self-administer elections with the advice of project coordinators (PCs) from the Department of Neighborhood Empowerment (DONE). While most elections have been non-controversial, elections administration is burdensome, and NCs have suffered from a lack of clear guidance from the City. The PCs rate only 60% of Neighborhood Councils as having conducted a rst election that was professional and fair.

Local conict and sporadic elections controversies could place the long-term legitimacy of the system at risk. For example: Six certied Neighborhood Councils have not yet held elections, despite having been certied for more than seven months. These delays are due at least in part to organi zational difficulties; Local factionalism sometimes leads to accusations of excessive Board inuence or inappropriate electoral procedures;

JUNE 2004 NEIGHBORHOOD COUNCILS IN LOS ANGELES: A MIDTERM STATUS REPORT

MAP 2: TOTAL NUMBER OF VOTES CAST IN NC ELECTIONS

Charges of electioneering, inappropriate absentee provisions, inadequate outreach, or lack of qualication of voters have characterized contested elections. We recommend that the City Council adopt standards regarding procedural matters such as absentee balloting, outreach, and voting qualications. To protect DONE from charges of favoritism, the City could ensure neutrality by contracting with an independent entity for elections administration, and designating a nal arbiter of elections challenges.

Participatory innovations for relevance. To be relevant, Neighborhood Councils require avenues for meaningful input into City policy. Table 1 summarizes the status of charter provisions intended to empower Neighborhood Councils. The City has made relatively good progress in a couple of areas, most notably on-line information availability and NC involvement in budgeting. There is a need, however, for earlier notication of pending City decisions and an improved system for feedback regarding service delivery. The DONE is now reorganizing its technical assistance and training to occur through an Empowerment

URBAN INITIATIVE POLICY BRIEF JUNE 2004

TABLE 1: STATUS OF EMPOWERMENT PROVISIONS

Charter Provision Early Warning System to notify neighborhood of pending City decisions with reasonable opportunity to provide input. (Charter Section 907) Status Not fully implemented. City provides automated distribution of agendas, a significant innovation compared to notification arrangements in other cities Agendas are distributed only 72 hours prior to meeting, which does not provide reasonable opportunity to provide input Need to make system more user-friendly, and provide earlier notification of issues of import to Neighborhood Councils Neighborhood Councils may make budget requests to Mayor (Charter Section 909) City will provide support for a citywide Congress of Neighborhoods (Section 901) Mayor implemented regional budgeting process for 2004/5 budget, and has published a neighborhoods budget report Congress of Neighborhoods has functioned primarily as a forum for technical assistance and training There is a need for a deliberative forum to address systemic and citywide issues Neighborhood Councils will monitor service delivery and meet periodically with responsible officials. (Section 910) City Council may delegate hearing authority to Neighborhood Councils on matters of local concern. (Charter Section 908) City has not adopted consistent mechanisms for feedback on service delivery

No action

Academy. Consequently, the Congress of Neighborhoods should be reconstituted as a deliberative forum that will engage Councils around citywide issues.

INTERMEDIATE OUTCOMES AND BENCHMARKS

here are three important measures of long-term Neighborhood Council success: the quality and impact of their activities, the social capital developed by the relationships they create, and the degree to which stakeholders develop increased political efficacy and better attitudes regard-

ing City government and their community. We set forth several benchmark measures in these three areas, based on surveys of DONE project coordinators, City Council staff, and NC Board members. Future measuring efforts should also evaluate perceptions of community stakeholders. Neighborhood Council activities. A review of operating expenditures by Neighborhood Councils should inform our understanding of their current activities. Based on expenditures as of February 2004, it would appear that almost half of Neighborhood Council expenditures relate to outreach

JUNE 2004 NEIGHBORHOOD COUNCILS IN LOS ANGELES: A MIDTERM STATUS REPORT

FIGURE 1: NC EXPENDITURES AS OF MAY 2004

Community Events & Projects 19%

Training and Professional Services 4%

Administrative Operations 29%

Outreach & Communications 48%

FIGURE 2: PERCEPTION OF NEIGHBORHOOD COUNCIL ACTIVITIES

100% DONE Project Coordinators City Counc il Staffers 80%

60%

40%

20%

0% Keeps Informed About City Actions Voices Views to Elected Officials Engages City Depts. to Improve Service Delivery Works w ith Other NCs

URBAN INITIATIVE POLICY BRIEF JUNE 2004

FIGURE 3:
PERCEPTIONS OF NEIGHBORHOOD COUNCIL IMPACTS
100%

DONE Project Coordinators City Council Staffers

80%

60%

40%

20%

0%

Had Po sitive Impact on Quality of Life in Its Community

Had Impact on City wide Issues

FIGURE 4:
A BENCHMARK MEASURE OF SOCIAL CAPITAL: BOARD MEMBER COMMUNITY LINKAGES
20.00 Linkages to Other Boards 18.00 City Hall Ties Stakeho lder Ties 16.00 Linkages within Board 14.00

12.00

10.00

8.00

6.00

4.00

2.00

0.00 1 3 5 7 9 11 13 15 17 19 21 23 25 27 29 31 33 35 37 39 41 Elected Boards Summer 2003

JUNE 2004 NEIGHBORHOOD COUNCILS IN LOS ANGELES: A MIDTERM STATUS REPORT

FIGURE 5: BOARD MEMBER AND RESIDENTIAL ATTITUDES TOWARD THE COMMUNITY AND CITY GOVERNMENT

Goo d to E xc ellent City Perform ance

Some to a Lot of Attention from City Government

Some what to Very Satisfied with Community

0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

70%

80%

90%

100%

Some what to V ery Satisfied with Commun ity CITY O F L A NC BO ARD 84% 79%

Some to a Lot of A ttention from City Government 57% 63%

Goo d to E xc ellent City Perform ance 29% 35%

and communications, including direct outreach expenditures, printing, and telephone expenses (Figure 1). Another 29% supports administrative activities, and 19% community events.3 Figure 2 suggests that the City employees who work most closely with NCs, DONE project coordinators and City Council staff, rate favorably the activities of most Councils they encounter. Neighborhood Councils receive the lowest ratings in the area of working with other NCs, a nding that reinforces the need for a citywide Congress that engages Councils in local networking around substantive systemic and city policy issues. While most Neighborhood Councils are rated as having a favorable impact on their community (56% of project coordinators, and 73% of City Council staff), most are not perceived to have citywide impact. This is consistent with other published research on Neighborhood Councils, which nds that they tend to be more inuential at the local rather than the citywide level. There are nonetheless several citywide issues upon which Neighborhood Councils exerted inuence, the most recent being their widely acknowledged inuence in the decision by the Citys Department of Water and Power to reduce a proposed 18% rate hike to 11%.

Social capital: networks of relationships. A successful Neighborhood Council system should contribute to the civic culture of the city by creating sustained relationships that build social capital norms of trust and reciprocity. The average Board member surveyed reports 12.25 relationships related to Neighborhood Council involvement, of which 6.71 are with other board members, 2.69 with stakeholders, 2.38 with City Hall, and .47 with other Neighborhood Council Boards (Figure 4). Over time, a measure of success will be the extent to which these ties thicken within the Neighborhood Councils, and connect across the citys communities. Political attitudes of participants. A last set of benchmarks involve the extent to which Neighborhood Councils inuence stakeholder perceptions of their communities and the City, as well as impacts on political efficacy, the extent to which people feel that they can make a difference. Figure 5 suggests that Neighborhood Council participants rank their communities less favorably than do residents in general. They are more satised with City government; around 60% of Board members report that their concerns receive attention from the City government, and one-third
3 It should be noted that this is a preliminary indicator given the small amount of expenditures reported to date, and given the start-up nature of these voluntary councils.

URBAN INITIATIVE POLICY BRIEF JUNE 2004

FIGURE 6: NEIGHBORHOOD COUNCIL BOARD MEMBERS PERCEPTION OF POLITICAL EFFICACY

46%

8% 1%

45%

Question: How much influence do you think people in your neighborhood, working together, can have over local government decisions?

None Very Little Some A Lot

rank City performance as good or excellent. Over time, if the system increases City responsiveness, we would expect to see improvement in these measures. Political efficacy, the extent to which individuals feel that they can inuence political events, is an important constituent of civic culture, and is associated with political activities such as voting and volunteerism. Research on Neighborhood Councils in other cities has found that political efficacy tends to be higher in cities with well-functioning Neighborhood Councils. As Figure 6 shows, 45% of Neighborhood Council Board members express beliefs that people, working together, can have a lot of inuence over political affairs. Only 9% thought that people could have no or a little inuence. We would expect attitudes of political efficacy to improve further if the City becomes more responsive to local concerns, as intended by the charter.

JUNE 2004 NEIGHBORHOOD COUNCILS IN LOS ANGELES: A MIDTERM STATUS REPORT

Cover Photo Credits:

Photos by Mark Elliot Art Direction/Design: USC School of Architecture Office of Publications.

URBAN INITIATIVE POLICY BRIEF JUNE 2004