Westside Homeowners Believe Councils Will Dilute Their Clout
POLITICS
by Howard Fine
As the rest of the city rushes to form neighborhood councils, two large Westside communities Westwood and Pacific Palisades have decided not to join the bandwagon. And another community, Brentwood, is on the fence.
While each community has its own reasons for not forming a neighborhood council, there is a common theme: fear of a loss of clout. All three neighborhoods have long-established homeowners groups that have wielded considerable influence at City Hall and within their own neighborhoods.
“Neighborhood councils would dilute our voting power,” said Sandy Brown, president of the Westwood Homeowners Association. That’s because the councils must include not just residents but commercial property owners, businesses and even employees who work in the area. “In a community where land values and development pressures are high, you don’t want to dilute votes,” Brown said.
Homeowner and neighborhood groups in the other two communities are more concerned about the inability of a council to challenge city land-use rulings. That’s because neighborhood councils likely will be considered city organizations and, as such, can’t appeal a ruling by another city agency. (During the charter reform process three years ago, a battle was waged and lost by homeowners to give neighborhood councils veto power over land-use decisions.)
“If the neighborhood council is opposed to a project that gets approved by a zoning or planning board, then the council would have no recourse,” said Flora Krisiloff, president of the Brentwood Community Council and vice chair of the West L.A. Area Planning Commission. She said the council is waiting for the City Attorney’s office to clarify the issue.
High-Powered Help
The folks at Valley VOTE, the group fighting to place the San Fernando Valley secession question on the November ballot, are about to hire some high-powered help.
They are preparing to hire the noted campaign advocacy firm Goddard Claussen Porter Novelli. Goddard Claussen is the firm largely behind those “Harry and Louise” ads that sank the Clinton health plan back in 1994. They have also run several successful statewide campaigns.
“We’ve been talking to different campaign managers and Goddard Claussen,” said Valley VOTE consultant and former state Assemblyman Richard Katz. “We’ll probably be making an announcement in the next week or two.”
The anti-secession side, of course, has already hired the campaign team of Bill Wardlaw, Kam Kuwata and Bill Carrick.
Hahn Fights Back
In a section of his State of the City speech last Thursday, Mayor James Hahn said breaking up the city would “create more bureaucracy, more politicians and leave those areas with fewer resources” than if they remained.
In a sign of the strategy Hahn and the anti-secession side will pursue, he said, “We must defend the city against the empty promises put forth by the secessionists.”
He then spoke of the likelihood of reduced services in the San Fernando Valley, Hollywood and the San Pedro/Wilmington areas.
Leading Democrat
U.S. Rep. Jane Harman, D-Redondo Beach, has just been tapped to be president of the newly formed executive council of the New Democratic Coalition, a group of 74 centrist Democratic members of Congress.
The coalition not to be confused with two other centrist-leaning Democratic groups, the Democratic Leadership Council and the Blue-Dog Democrats is a caucus of House members that holds similar positions but is more oriented toward technology issues.
With technology and defense giants Boeing Satellite Systems Co., TRW, Merisel and Computer Sciences Corp. in her district, the NDC leadership post should be a natural for Harman.
Staff reporter Howard Fine can be reached by phone at (323) 549-5225, ext. 227, or by e-mail at
[email protected].
