So I let's just kind of jump off from the beginning. I want to learn a little bit more about your involvement in the neighborhood councils. I guess maybe just kind of start off and tell me. You know what your involvement is, and you know what's your role in the neighborhood council. Your Neighborhood Council.
All right, well I've been with the council. Our neighborhood council was started in 2002. I've been in downtown since 2000 and got conned into becoming part of the Neighborhood Council in. I think it was 2004 Maybe 2005 I've been the president for, I think, five or six terms now it kind of gets blurry. 17 years with the council two years as Vice President and then the rest of it is president and I've tried to during that time restructure the way things were done, it was just chaos. But then you're working with the city so chaos is probably breakfast for you. So it was pretty bad, and I came into it with, with the basically two careers behind me not well one of them still going. I'm a nightclub singer, and that's why I have this stupid thing on the wrong kind of input I needed a microphone if you were going to hear me that one. And I also I have a bachelor's degree from UCLA and theoretical mathematics, and I have worked with corporations to design and have implemented large applications packages having to do with Federal Accounting and commercial accounting. So I came into it kind of wanting to organize it the way you organize the big software projects. And what there's a lot of areas where there are issues and of course the city doesn't help at all. You're probably used to hearing that, but they, they change their minds all the time as to what's appropriate what isn't just a few years into it somebody filed a grievance against us, which obviously adds some meat to it, something that we did that we were never told not to do, never told anything about, and I went in to talk to them and I said hey, how do we quit your job is to make us the best neighborhood council possible, where do I read, what do I do to find out about these things that we can and can't do, and they basically said they didn't have the resources for that, but then when a stakeholder made a complaint they had to take it seriously. God and I've been, I've been trying to structure things. We're in the middle of elections I may or may not be here in a week, and I really wanted to take, I really wanted to take the last term and and turn it into a time when things could be really easily codified would, would have been easy for someone else to come in because, truthfully, to really do this job takes about 25 hours a week. And people, I'm 73 years old I can do that. Most people can't.
So
with that, I ended up not being able to do it because of COVID I couldn't take people into my home and have them sit with me and show them how all this stuff worked and everything, so I decided to run one more time, I'm not sure that I'm going to make it though this time we've got the democratic socialists are coming after the neighborhood councils during this election cycle and if they take us over, then it's not really gonna matter whether or not it's organized.
We just, we just want to yell
and scream and you know they said it during our, our candidate forum that they, they, this is a bully pulpit and they want to weaponize the neighborhood councils and make that make City Council do what they want. So I'm doing this all under the concept that I'm going to be able to continue to get everything organized. And one of the things leading up to one of the things that needs the most organization is the proper filing of agendas. There's two, two points to it. Number one, there are best practices that no one has ever told. I worked with a parliamentarian who's been with the neighborhood council system, since it started, and he teaches me things that they're not common knowledge and they're not out there, but if we could have a setup where the software, kept us from doing really, really stupid stuff, then, that it would work better. Things like, other than people who are presenting as speakers that are allowed to time people for the city or outside the city as to, to present something to the speakers, and we may or may not want to discuss and take some kind of action on it, other than mellows, There shouldn't be any items that aren't don't have motions attached, other than speak because it's really inappropriate to have, you know, talk about the weather on the agenda and then say alright, tomorrow we're going to vote for it to rain, because you didn't put it on the agenda first and legally, anything you're going to vote on the public needs to have 72 hour notice, and that's just a little example, that it is a question of making sure that everything goes into the agenda properly that there's some sort of a template for people who, to get started to know what they're doing. And then that certain things are regulated by the software. So, you have to have it posted in several different places, no later than 72 hours before the meeting, unless it's a type of special meeting some special meetings still require 72 hours, some 24 hours, you don't want to know about all this.
But I already know about a lot of
that so you know what the what the, what it takes. What what can make a 24 hour meeting because people very often don't get something filed on time so they may have a 24 hour special meeting to get it done. That's illegal. You have to have something that is time sensitive and couldn't be on the agenda for some reason or other, to make a 24 hour meeting, ie 72 hour meeting is fine because anytime you don't hold that meeting at the rock solid time that you always hold that meeting. It's a special meeting. Got it. So options at the beginning what is this one, you know if it's a this, let them. Let them remember what kind of meetings they can hold under what conditions, check the box, and then take them into I'm saying if you can take them into some kind of a template, so that it's really hard to make mistakes.
Well since you kind of are talking about this right now and this is something that I've been kind of interested in is we're trying to formulate a template, what, what should be kind of included within a template for agendas, or is there something that you guys use currently that is kind of a framework.
I, it's my template, and it requires my brain. Other people use the template but they can screw it up because there's nothing in it. It's just a document file, and there's nothing in it says, Don't put that there. You know it just go ahead screw it up all you want, it's, it's just, Justin and we'll file. What would be greatly be an online, or this I guess would be the best time, something that reminds them if our board meetings are on the second Tuesday of the month, if not in the second Tuesday of the month I didn't they have to be a special meeting, so it would be really nice if one week ahead of that. Something came up on my phone and set a reminder, you have, you only have so many days to post your agenda, and things like that would be very helpful. I actually set them up myself so that I get the reminders, but it was part of the agenda process so that it knew, and, and I'm getting and I'm getting into a lot of I'm used to writing software that is application. Application sensitive so it's it's it's user sensitive and it has an SQL database and ready you know you can you can say nope can't do that, reject, but I understand. I don't know what languages you're writing in or anything but it would be really great if you had if you took your choices, and it sometimes said, can't do that.
You just pick this you can't have that with this. What do you mean as far as choices is, or maybe give me an example of the agendas.
Well, if you if we were to set up for my redemption at the console and say, the second Tuesday of the month is the board meeting, the first Wednesday of the month which is not always the first Wednesday of the month because it's the Wednesday before the board meeting is the executive meeting the outreach committee is on the third Monday I mean there's all these committees, don't have to be quite as strict but they do with the 7224 hour things that if the first thing that should be on there is any legal notification like right now because we're doing zoom meetings, the first thing you see is a legal notification showing that it will be zoomed in, it was written by the city and we plop it in. The second thing would be, roll call. And, you know, started the meeting. The meeting begins. There should be a way to turn the agenda into the minutes. I do that by creating a worksheet for our minute taker, where I take the box that has the attendance box that has all the names in it and a place to check whether they're there or not. I reproduce that underneath every single motion so that they can say how people voted, because legally every vote, you're supposed to not just show it was six to two so at one, you're supposed to show Joe you voted yes Mary voted no. Louise abstained. That's part of the legality so it would help, I mean I'm rambling, but it would help if the structure that we put into the agenda, turned into a worksheet for the, for the minute so that the minutes follow the agenda. We get, I get a lot of complaints from people go to other meetings and they say well, the minutes, said you know we voted on this we voted on this but it I couldn't find it in the agenda where it was, but if you make if you make it so that they are dead, the same for by numbering and everything that it's, it's that, that helps the stakeholders to understand. I want to know what you did on number seven. I go to the minutes and I look at number seven, I should see what you did should be the same, same format.
So, this should be identical. Yeah, yeah.
Why numbering system and coordinates. So, you start with that and then there should be a place for speakers. And for a choice to say Will there be action taken with a speaker or not. We have a special area that's for city, county, elected representatives, And we say at the beginning of that that, that there can be discussion, because otherwise when a person's making a presentation, you can't have discussion, you have to say it so we have, we have all those we have the options, and I always make sure I put them in whether we're having a discussion and whether we may take action. Okay, I see and then you get into the business of the day,
that would start out with. You look at porn and make sure you don't miss anything.
I mean, for the most part, most, most agendas.
You start out with things like, Okay. Does anyone have any ex parte communication. And then we got we normally go into the financial that the treasurer make his report show any motions that need to be done because those all have to be roll call votes. Can't show hands on them, and we get that out of the way and then we go through the president's report and then committee by committee whatever motions they have sent to us, and we're very strict about motions, coming from the committee so that it's we don't get all these Fly By Night things happening, committee looks at it sends it to us with a recommendation, we can take the recommendation or not, but at least it's been discussed in public and people had a chance to come and talk for a long time, and not just the otherwise we have 40 minutes 40 our board meetings, especially with planning and land use, so we go through each of the committees and the excuse me, I've been allergic to everything since the pandemic started. Then we go through all the committee motions, and from there go into 30 liaison reports there any additional committee reports if there's any comments that the board members would like to make, of course, all of those are without discussion, because if you have something that's going to be discussed, you have to let people know ahead of time that they will be able to speak on it. Okay, and, you know, that's that that's a, that's an agenda, and then greatly part of journeying. Is that too much.
Um, no I mean it's definitely helpful and good I just want to kind of, kind of stay within time so I'm not keeping you too long, But, definitely. Everything you said was helpful. So as far as the agendas, do you create them, is there a specific person who creates them is this a group effort, or
board by board that will have into the in their bylaws how they create the agendas, and are in our bylaws. It basically says that they will be reviewed by the executive committee and that's the Wednesday before the Tuesday, but reality, it doesn't really matter because the president ends up doing it because everything comes to the president or the chair, and in our board, the, the Vice President of Administration is usually supposed to help with that. Get everything sure everything's together make sure that we didn't skip anything. We actually set up a special email that we both have access to where we forward any email that comes in that looks like we need to look at it when we're making the agenda, and make sure we go through all of them. Let's have to be structured or pause through the crap.
And how long does that take, I mean how much time do you spend on writing the agendas,
from, from the time that I go through looking for things that have to go on to it, creating it, to having it proof.
Sure, the overall time leave the month. I'm sorry I'm sorry you kind of cut out how, what was that
five or six, five or six hours a month.
Okay, got it. And then as far as kind of. You've already kind of walked me through what's on the agenda is there certain steps that need to be taken to create the agenda.
Well, once you've got your you have to get the motions in from the other committees. And if you're smart you'll be like I am and say this isn't in the right format I'm not accepting it because otherwise you end up rewriting everything. But, yeah, you just it's a question of collecting all the work that's been done through the month, and making sure that everything is on the board agenda for validation because nothing is real until the board approves it.
Okay, so the board is approved, all the everything that's on the agenda. And you're saying that committee committees will submit their items to be put on the agenda is it only committees that can submit agenda agenda items or
stakeholders can can submit something, of course we've lately had a lot of issues with stakeholders that are submitting things where they want us to further investigate the corruption that happened in the city with Jose Luis our neighbor councils are allowed to do that. So, I take when something comes from outside. I usually run it past the city attorney and listen something I'm familiar with. And, and also if something comes from the outside, we normally will send it to the proper committee and let them really parse it out. Because again, beginning a discussion at the board meeting can be very difficult, instead of six or eight people discussing it, you got 24 people discussing it and nobody has any background and nobody has, you know, nobody's been able to report, we studied it, this is what's here, it's best practice certainly not a rule but I stick pretty much to trying to get things in order before we take them
on to the board.
Okay and then as far as that goes. Do you kind of set a deadline for when committee, you know, these committees or stakeholders need to submit this stuff to you so you can compile it in time.
I don't have it by end of this this Friday before the Wednesday, executive committee where we will go through it. You haven't got a snowball's chance in hell of getting it done by chance.
Okay, and so that's something that just everyone knows that if they don't get it in by that time, then it's gonna have to wait.
There's, there's a, there's a lot of sloppy thinking and, like, the VP of administration will call her and say you know, it's Thursday, tomorrow is Friday.
Okay, so there is some type of reminder that goes out that like if you want to get this on the agenda you guys need to submit it by tomorrow.
Yeah, that's for the most part yes of course we're breaking out we're in lame duck period because we're having elections so half the half or more of the board isn't coming back. So they don't even hold the meetings, but then Election Day is tomorrow so this is going to be resolved one way or the other.
Okay. And then as far as like the agenda items that are sent to you is there any type of approval process I think it sounds like you review them and then possibly what happens if you know it doesn't meet your standards or the language isn't correct, what happens from there.
Well, it depends whether or not I really believe that the chair of the committee could get it correctly to me, or whether I should just, you know, do it myself and, and get it over with, especially the treasurer is the one who's got to be really careful. Monetary motions have to be very specific in their language and include certain things, and if they don't, you can't vote on. So, but then you get a good treasurer like I've had for the last few years and it isn't an issue. Sometimes somebody will send me a motion that includes their entire conversation, and all the reasons that they thought maybe this may be that you know what, if I'd wanted to come to that meeting I would have been there. So, same thing for all the rest of these people let's, let's get a motion. I need a motion, and I need the documentation that supports the motion, which does not go into the agenda, it is referred to, we have what we call a packet, and it's a directory full of all the documents that will be involved in that in that meeting, including the agenda and the minutes from the last time.
Okay. And then so it sounds like to me that your people will submit I'm just trying to get a kind of a high level overview of the steps along the way. So after a committee or stakeholders sends you an agenda item. It's kind of reviewed by the executive board, is that correct and then. No,
it's put together as an agenda. Okay. The. There should be a draft agenda by by that night. And then we go through it and somebody says, What are we going to ask the board about this next hour. Okay, right, you got to put that in. You know, I don't think that this motion actually has enough material in it for us to talk about it, and the executive committee can can take steps to say just remove that one or they can make a statement. During the meeting and say, we left this on, but we don't think it has the right, and we'd like to. We'd like to get the board's approval to send it back to committee for additional work.
Oh, okay, so it could remain on the agenda but you talk about possibly pushing it to the next agenda or an executive committee vote.
And then there's also the possibility, like we had a couple of months ago that something comes through planning and land use, no one from the, from the community came out to say anything. If it was sent to the board with a preliminary we should probably approve this apparently, the asks were pretty simple because they were almost solved by right. And then at the board meeting, 350 people came out of the woodwork and said, We don't want this in our neighborhood. Now we've got to listen to that. That's part of our job, so that they immediately went back to committee and we told the guy look you've got unhappy stakeholders, You work with them you figure out what you're doing, then you come back and they just came back last Tuesday, after about three months, and then that way everybody got heard. Okay, neighborhood council, can't stop everything, but that is really weird. Sure.
So let me see here. And as far as, let me get to the kind of the point after it's been reviewed by the Executive Committee. How is the agendas, distributed, kind of what after it's created what are the next steps.
All right, according to the city regulations right now, we have to post a paper copy of it somewhere. The Palace Theatre on Broadway allows us to post it there. The average halflife is about 12 and a half minutes before someone tears it down and uses it to look up from their shoe or god knows what. Downtown is there is no place downtown to post a paper posting, where every page will be visible. And you know, nobody's gonna let us use their whole wall or they're holding 24 hours a day so you can't do it indoors anywhere it has to be at someone's window or any, there's, there's rec centers and we don't have any of those things downtown. So, we put it up there and people take it down and we've checked the box. The others of course is that we have to send a copy to NC support so it can go on to their system to be posted,
is that their early notification system.
You're the, the early notification. Exactly. We had a bit of talking about that where they said well you know we didn't get it at time to post it for 72 hours and they said well that's tough because I sent it to you a time. If you don't want to work on Friday afternoon, Saturday, Sunday, then don't talk to me about you didn't get it up in time, and they finally started having people monitoring it all the time and now they get them up. The other thing we do is to put it of course on our, in our packet on our calendar. So we put the, the event up as a meeting and we attach all these documents to it as a packet, anyone can go in and take a look at them all of the documents, not just the agenda. And
this is posted on your website.
That is our website. On our website, yes. And then of course, pre COVID We used to send it to the Little Tokyo library they put up all our stuff of course it wasn't a 24 hour visibility posting so it didn't count but they were always really great about and we're hoping that someday when they open libraries again all that we can start doing it again. Like to legally we're only responsible to have it on our website, you know with our with a meeting and to have the one paper posting and to go to the NS.
Okay, and then the NS, like you were saying there in the past there has been issues do they tell you a deadline of when you need to send it by or.
They were saying well you know if it's if it needs to be posted on Saturday or Sunday and that's your 72 hours, you got to get it to us by Thursday. And we had a few words about that because it wasn't always ready by Thursday, there were people who were waiting to hear back from people you know, you can't just say, make it five days early instead of three days earlier six days early because I always try to get it done a day early on ours being Tuesday, Saturday night would be the posting deadline, and I am an observer Q and I'm depends on the time of year whether I can do that, so I try and get it out. By midday on Friday, but even with that if I get it, if I used to get it to about four o'clock on Friday and they say, We can't post it, it's you know we need it earlier and I said well I can't get it to you earlier work it out.
So you're you're definitely like on your side you're at least getting it out by the 72 hour mark, but there's sometimes some sometimes the e ns is saying that you needed to send it earlier, okay I see what you're saying,
Oh, no, we worked that out, we did. We said look, if you want it up, if you're going to start slicing minutes, then you better have somebody there to get the emails, and they've been really good about it the last couple years, so yeah. But those are the only three places where legally required. And like I said, the library has been great, posting it the great people. That, that's all. So we have a legal. And I've if I ever come up with any more energy for fighting them again, I probably would like to get rid of the requirement for a paper posting or, so that every council can decide whether or not it's correct or whether it's useful.
Yeah, I've heard some of the same sentiment, speaking with other neighborhood councils. Let me just ask you a couple more questions before we kind of wrap up. So, I mean I know you're there representing the downtown area and there's a lot of different languages spoken in your community is there particular languages that are the agendas are produced in or is there any requirements for that.
There's not a requirement to produce the agenda in any other language. Yeah there, if we're asked to we can, the city will provide a translator for during the meeting. However, in 17 years no one has ever asked for translation. Downtown is pretty much English, going to the, the areas around you get into Spanish speaking areas Korean speaking areas, Japanese, but we have never had a request for translation, and the only requirement for the agenda is English. I'm sure that if, if there were areas where it would be really nice to have it in several languages if they held the meeting in two languages or something. And it was service that could translate it would be lovely, but like I said 17 years and no one ever asked. Okay.
And then I guess what is, what's your highest priority when you're creating agendas or agenda items,
accuracy and completeness.
Okay. And what,
no, no piece of software is going to be able to do all of that some of that just has to come out of the person who's putting it together. But yeah, if this could catch some of my really, like, I don't even I don't even want to pay $1 for every time I actually took the agenda template and moved it over and didn't change the date. And someone always notices, not just the one at the top, sometimes next next meeting will be at the very bottom right before it says a jury. You can't get away with it for one second. It would be no it would be great if if part of the initial thing was to say what is the date of this meeting, because then you can't, you can't copy from last month or three months ago because the meeting was really similar and be great to start off with that one. But I would love to not make that mistake anymore.
I mean what the accuracy is or any other, I guess, examples of things that need to be accurate throughout.
Well, the only other thing I can think of and now we're getting into a much bigger picture would be, like I said before, we keep a special email address on our D line. COMM emails for agenda, and anytime something comes to me or to the VP, that looks like it should be considered what we're doing the agenda, we forwarded to that agenda to that email account, then we go through and read all the emails in that email account to make sure we haven't missed anything we were thinking about, or the someone requested or whatever, and it'd be just great. If instead, there was a repository of those things that actually could be drawn in to the, the agenda.
Okay, I see what you're saying. And let me just kind of wrap up here, what, what was that
I always ask for a lot.
I mean, you know, hopefully we will be able to address a lot of these things but it might take time to implement, step by step by step, you know, yeah exactly and I mean this is the kind of the whole point of meeting with, you know these neighborhood council members is to get everyone's perspective and see, you know what is at the top of everyone's list, and you know what, what's important, what's not, I guess, kind of maybe to wrap things up, you know, things have changed a lot because of COVID. Yeah, so has, kind of, could you talk about a little bit of how things have changed within the neighborhood councils and maybe specifically, you know, the whole agenda process, or, you know,
the agenda is still the agenda, there's no difference in what it looks like or what kind of information goes on, or the way that it's the wording on emotions, nothing has changed that. The difference of course is that you can't get two people sitting in a room together, to work on it. And that makes it very difficult so I'd say the biggest thing that I've noticed since we started doing zoom meetings is that more of the burden falls on me, and there's less I can ask of other people because of the situation we're in.
Okay so, I mean I guess normally you're saying people would get together and work on the agenda or work on
getting right here. Yeah, and he would have a tablet and I have the bank computer we're going to he said, Okay, we said we were going to do this. So, and, you know, one or the other of us would do the editing, but yeah, it's
how how is that different, how is that, how have you been handling that currently then do you guys jump on a zoom call or phone or email or
I do it I do it, and she looks at it to see if there was anything
I missed. Okay, I see, so you'll kind of, you'll go through the process you'll send it over. You know for review and then she'll send it back. Okay.
All in time for the executive meeting which he will attend as well but I like to get the draft in as good a shape as possible but before that meeting.
Okay, so it sounds like sometimes there's a little bit of back and forth going that would normally have been sped up if you guys were working together and you're
sitting next to each other would have taken five minutes, yeah, about two days. Okay, so
the process is kind of drawn out a little
zoom meetings have positive things too, I mean, we've been able to get so many more stakeholders to come in because they can do it in their underwear, you know, it's,
yeah, I mean that's cool anyway. That's was one of, one of the things we're also trying to, you know help facilitate is helping get more stakeholder involvement, you know, since you know sometimes people can't always attend the meetings. So you know,
I do not believe, I'll just put this out there, somebody said well you know you can always broadcast the meetings on Facebook. I don't think that that engages anybody. They can't raise their hand for public comment on a particular item if it if the mood shoots to them. It just, it means you're watching on TV I'm sorry that's not that's not engagement. So, yeah, I'm hoping we're going to be able to keep some sort of ongoing. I'm not sure how to do it but some way of doing doing this as a hybrid with people and with with electronics.
Yeah I mean maybe as time goes on, maybe kind of both can be done or who knows but I guess time will tell. Well I feel like that pretty much wraps it up for me.
I'm not gonna know for about 10 days whether it's even my problem. Depends on the.
Well, you know, fingers crossed, hopefully you can keep continuing what you're doing.
I'd like to do one more turn because I really would like to codify more and know that I'm leaving it and halfway decent shape. It's not in decent shape I think the pandemic just squished everything. Like when stomping around and breaking things. I'd like to get things back together again before I leave, but I'll be 75 pushing 76 The next time we have an election and I think maybe, enough is enough.
Enough to call it quits at some point well I mean I guess you want to at least leave it off in good hands and feel like
I'd like. I'd like to leave it in good shape, and it's not in good shape right now because things have been too chaotic to really keep things settled, you know, I'd like. I'd like to be able to write the manual that says like these are the things you need to watch out for. Nobody in the city is going to tell you about this, but be careful about this. Be careful about that. See what happens. Anyway, I hope I didn't go too crazy on you.
Oh no, no. Reno, everything you shared with me was definitely insightful. Especially since you have so many years of experience working within the neighborhood councils. You did mention one thing about you have a template for an agenda, is that something that you possibly could share
the doc file. I don't use the basic one anymore because I'm always finding it easier to copy and edit, because there's so much stuff that, that's so similar. The big problem with that of course is that it's July and instead of saying we're going to approve June minutes I say May because the one we borrowed from her worse. April because it's, you know, because I picked it up from last year but it was so, like what we're doing this month.
I mean I could, I could send you one of our agendas, you could look at it, but it's not, it's not a fill in the blanks thing.
Okay, so it's pretty much if I looked at one of your agendas, it would be pretty similar. I mean
I do that for the setup templates, specifically for a committee if they're not sure what to do. I will take the headers of the things that was it, and insert your motions here and of course with in the fairness discussions more than motions because that
sharp.
Okay, well I mean three
dead. Folks, I don't want to hear from most of the time. Alright, anyway, it's very, very complicated job, and I don't think the city believes that but it's true. And so we're you know, we just muddle along because we don't get the help we need. And I think what you guys are trying to do for us is absolutely amazing and very much appreciated.
Well I mean hopefully we can come through on what we want to deliver to you guys. I guess time will tell. With that, but we're working on it. And I guess we just kind of want to wrap up there and thank you for, you know, sitting down and talking with me. Really appreciate it.
This is definitely in my benefit. So, if we can make things easier.
Well great. Um, I also have one more question, I guess, as we kind of progress through our research, if there's anything that we kind of need clarifying and do Do you mind if we kind of touch base with you on.
No, feel free to to contact me whenever you need to.
Okay. All right, well great. Well thanks again for doing this, really appreciate it, and I'm sure we'll, we'll talk somewhere down the road.
That was a pleasure to meet you thank you thank you again for what you're doing, you guys get paid what I get paid so much. It really is appreciated. Thanks for doing what you do.
Yeah, no problem. Thank you. All right, well have a good day. You too.
