All right. To start things off I want to get to know a little bit about you. How long have you been a Neighborhood Council member
I've been in the Neighborhood Council for about over three years or so.
Okay. How did you become a neighborhood council member.
Like what sparked my interest?
What sparked your interest and how did you get involved with it?
Sure. My background is in urban planning, I moved here from Nashville, Tennessee, to get my master's in urban planning at USC and I happened to move into the Westlake MacArthur Park area, and just kind of by nature as an urban planner, you kind of want to try and get involved with the community so I just did my research and my own due diligence and ended up seeing there's room for opportunity to help and assist and support the community and also the council so I just jumped right in.
Great. As a council member what are some of your main duties?
It varies because work for our council and I could speak for other councils as well. Depending on the type of community, the type of neighborhood, the people that are involved, it ebbs and flows with the amount of support and the amount of people that are involved. So, my roles and responsibilities have changed. I've went from my primary interest as operating as chair of the Planning and Land Use Committee to operating as a co-chair for the Community Outreach Committee and wearing a different hat as being a treasurer. Sometimes we don't have enough people so I also act as recruiter at some points in any way shape or form. I kind of lend a hand any which way that I can just to make sure that we get things moving and going.
Okay. Then with so many different roles or with the roles evolving how much time do you think you spend working as a council member?
To quantify that do you mean, hours a week or what's the best metric?
Probably hours a week, I mean I don't know if you can pinpoint that because you're involved in so many different areas but...
You know a lot of people ask about how much time commitment that it takes to be on the Neighborhood Council and I literally tell them it's what you make of it. So, for example, you could just show up to the Neighborhood Council meetings, once a month for that hour or two and considered you work one hour a month. And it scales up from there for me. Right now because I do this is as a volunteer position and I have a full-time job I also do some other consultancy work and I have my other interests and voluntary endeavors on top of this. But, I guess I'm weird in the sense that I enjoy doing, like an eight to five, nine to five and then I'll do a six to nine or whatever it is that I care about. But, I would say maybe four hours to eight hours a week. That's with no coordination, that's with having phone calls like this, and oftentimes talking with a constituent or another member or someone that's interested in doing something with the community. Just a simple phone call, could last you 30 minutes to an hour just listening and trying to coordinate and plan and strategically move about whatever it is that we're trying to do.
Okay, great. That gives us a good idea. You briefly just talked about it but how do you interact with the other council members? Is it directly through email, I know times are a little different right now, but talk a little bit about that.
Sure.
This is only my experience, and this is only through my community and the council members that are involved in our community. We're an underserved community area within our boundaries. A lot of our council is older in age and also English may not be their first language. So there are some communication challenges that come about. And that has also deterred our capabilities to even talk. A lot of the time communication is done by (I guess it depends on other members but in my experience) email. It is probably one of the best solutions. Text messaging is a great solution but you have to be careful abiding by some of the laws if you speak to over a certain amount of people at the same time, that's against the law. That's against some of the rules and regulations of Neighborhood Empowerment, of the system that's in place within Los Angeles. Oftentimes if I really need to speak with somebody because there can be a lot of lag and there can be a lot of non-responsiveness within my Neighborhood Council I just take the initiative and give people a call and play phone tag with people, a lot of the time. It's a really inefficient communication measure. Again, this is only my Neighborhood Council. Obviously, there are a lot of other councils that are progressive or much more up to speed with technology and operate a lot faster and things are a lot smoother. I think it's on a case by case basis.
Okay. All right.
I hope this helps because my cause is a bit unique, but other councils I've spoken with operate a lot differently, and there are a lot more people and a lot more resources behind them.
Yeah, this is definitely all helpful, and we're going to reach out to other council members. We're going to synthesize all that information so everything you're saying is definitely valuable. Okay, I want to switch topics a little and talk about agendas and the creation of agendas. What is your role in that? Are you usually a contributor? Publisher?Is it administrative...
I am a contributor. (And again, specific to our Neighborhood Council) We are supported for lack of better terms by our Neighborhood Empowerment Rep, who is the publisher of our agendas. That's due to the history of the Westlake-South Neighborhood Council, where we have been in a lot of unfortunate situations of being an exhaustive effort. That means we don't have enough people to operate at full capacity, and to do a lot of those responsibilities, even though we may be capable at certain points. We may be able to delegate those responsibilities but for some reason it has still been chosen by the rep to administer and publish our agenda items. So for instance I will contribute to all of the agenda items or things that our council is interested in. Or any sort of things that we're working on. Or if I hear something from a constituent or a nonprofit coming into my space and requesting to do a presentation or asking about a need or anything like that. Whatever it is that they want or want to speak on or do I pass that along to our Neighborhood Empowerment rep and request them to please add this to the agenda via email, and move forward from there.
Okay, great. So in this situation who's the person actually producing the agendas?
The Neighborhood Empowerment Rep.
Okay. How often are agendas produced?
At minimum once a month just for the primary general board council meeting. I will dial it back on that, we have a lot more freedom and liberty to create our own agendas within our committees (that are within the council members). So right now I'm on the Planning and Land Use, and the Community Outreach Committees. And I will work with someone else to create the agenda for our specific council, special committee meeting.
Okay, and do those...
We do have responsibility over that and run it by our Neighboring Empowerment representative to say, you know, this is good, this is okay and then we just, you know, we run the meeting ourselves.
Okay, so do those agendas differ a little than the main agendas?
There's a template in place that has the general body of necessary or mandatory information that will always be on agendas. But what's within the body we create on our own. The way we create those is, we have an idea, we have something that we want to address, usually what I do is I will, if I don't have the experience of posting this particular type of agenda item I will get in contact with some of my other council member, or other council members from different neighborhood councils, or I will speak with Jose, or I will speak with our Neighborhood Empowerment Rep. to see how to best frame and word, the agenda item, if it needs to be properly done. I will look at other council members agendas to see how I can best frame, the agenda item that I'm trying to post, but that's just my own due diligence, it's not mandatory or what people usually/typically do.
All right. I know this is another abstract kind of question or it might be hard to pinpoint but how much time do you think you spend on creating agendas?
Because the Neighborhood Empowerment Rep. tends to formulate the general board meeting agendas, which is the overall Neighborhood Council meeting agendas. Not that much. Unless it's specific to what I need to do. I would say an hour, let's just say an hour. It's about the amount of time it takes to email somebody back and forth. That takes a few minutes to do your own due diligence. What would take longer than an hour is to look at other people's general board meeting. Looking at their agendas and their agenda line items might take some time. Some people might reply to an email inquiry about their agendas or how to word it tomorrow or in like two or three days or they could respond in the next five minutes but let's just say like an hour, at most, an actual time span.
Okay. You touched upon this already, but I just want to clarify. So there's the the main agendas and then there's some committee agendas, are there any other types of agendas?
No, not that we have.
Okay, great. And then, as far as the creation of agendas, can you give me a brief overview or walk me through the steps of how that goes?
What's within the agenda, or how does it get created?
How does it get created?
Okay. Yes. As previously stated there's usually, for both special meetings and for general board meetings there's a template that we have that has a lot of the general information. I actually created the drafts. So it has the city logo in the top left hand corner for us, the formatting is all different for whoever's Neighborhood Council it is, but for ours, the appropriate logos are in the corners of the document, and then it has within, the title or the header, it'll have a list of all the active board members. It'll have information that includes the time in which the meeting will occur, it'll have the duration of which it's supposed to occur, which usually lasts a lot longer. These things(meetings) take a while, sometimes. And then it'll have some of the templated information that talks about the usual stuff that's always included. That includes general announcements, announcements from whoever's requested stuff, whoever speaking, announcements from the police department or whoever else is there and all that information is always there. That doesn't necessarily mean that somebody speaks. We had that there just to be in place that's always in place. And then along that line item there we're going down the document right now. Along that line item so at the top we have the headers the logos all that stuff, and the as the body begins it has some of these general agenda items that are always going to be there, that are mandatory whether you do them or not, like the general announcements or requests and things like that. Then you have the specific line items that are created by members or whoever else to address things such as finances, etc. Then towards the end it's back to the templated information where it has closing remarks and any last second stuff.
Okay, great. That'd be great if you could send one over. I'm pretty sure I've seen a couple but that would be awesome. And then how are each agenda item created, or does that differ, or is there a process to that?
Yeah, so I'll pull up an agenda now. I'm going to share my screen.
Is it sharing?
I don't see anything.
Can you see it?
Yeah, I can see it.
So let's just say for example, our Neighborhood Empowerment Rep...We have our meetings usually the last Thursday of every month at 6:30pm. So, after this meeting happens at any point in time, you can request, or send our Neighborhood Empowerment Rep. any sort of things you want to put onto the agenda, up until about, there's a deadline because you have to post (for a general board agenda) at least 72 hours, so the public can view it. That rule does not have to necessarily be abided by on special general board meetings because I believe in some instances, you can post within at latest 24 hours to have the public view. The Neighborhood Empowerment Rep. will send a reminder to say send me agenda items by this time, so I can add it appropriately and it can be posted. So let's open up an agenda. There will be documents, there will be the general agenda document and any supporting documents which may be financial documents as well. You know just information for us to review for the agenda items that are included. But if we go to the general board meeting agenda...
Yeah, I think I created this and it would just get modified to fit whatever else that was needed to be done. It has the info in English and Spanish because that's kind of the community that we are represented by, it has our board members all this relevant information usually. So on this first page here. All of this is always going to be here. The only thing that really changes is the time. And so we move forward, would go through the second page. All of this stuff right here like the call to order this is like let's talk about the general announcements. This right here, pretty much discussion items from 1-3 are always going to be on the agenda. The discussion and a possible action to approve the past meeting minutes, so basically the meeting that was recorded is approved and there doesn't needs to be any changes or any modifications that generally happens as well. The only thing that changes there are the dates. And then afterwards that is when we get into these other agenda items. Which, for this particular agenda, these two items were the only things that were requested and coordinated and then we're getting a little niche but line items 7-11 are items that were brought up by council members or brought through council members to add to the agenda. And then line items 12-14 are always going to be standard within the general Neighborhood Council board meeting, as well as the stuff below is the same information. It's always going to be mandatory and included. There might need to be some changes to a few dates, but that's it.
That was helpful. Thanks for walking me through that.
Yeah, it's hard to abstractly explain so I had to show you.
I totally get that. If you don't mind at some point if you could email that over to us, if possible. (Erik dropped link in chat) Perfect, in the chat would work. I also had a question, does someone need to sign off on these agenda items or is there an approval process?
That's the tricky part.
Um,
That's the issue with with our own knowledge and research to be very transparent with you. There are a lot of rules for us voluntary efforts to abide by. And I think we just go to our Neighborhood Empowerment Rep, to kind of get everything approved and to move forward with. But that's the tricky part because when I was speaking earlier about the special agendas I basically create it, and then we'll send it over (the rules are...) to our webmaster who controls and posts all of our information online. And then you have to post at a physical site (at least one physical location within your community). And I think there's another requirement perhaps. But basically you can do whatever you want, as long as you abide by these certain sets of rules that are in your bylaws or that are in the Neighborhood Empowerment rules, regulations and guidelines. It must be done by this time and it must be posted on all of these outlets within a certain amount of time. The general board meeting just happens to be for us specifically ran through our Neighborhood Empowerment so we send everything to him and then that gets taken care of. Either myself or the president or whoever will post it in a physical location.
Okay, great. And then I think...
Those rules are somewhere. If I have the time I can pull it up and send you the document but there is an official document where you can preview this information. I'm sure if you go through multiple interviews just ask somebody, and maybe they'll just have it, and can send it to you.
Okay, great, thanks for that info. And so you were saying the EmpowerLA Rep is the person who distributes the agendas?
Um...
Not necessarily distributes but coordinates. He'll split the coordination and he even helps publish it. So there's the Neighborhood Empowerment Rep. and then there's the webmaster. The webmaster doesn't have any actual power. They just get paid to update the website, to update certain things on some of our socials but not all of them but some of our socials, and our email, and they'll send out (her name is Christina) that information, the general board information or the agenda to all of our outlets, and then someone has to go post it to a physical location. The coordination is with the rep and I guess kind of the vetting, you could say would go through the rep. But that's just, again, that's the extent of the unique situation is that that's just for the general board meeting stuff. For us, a special meeting, we'll run it, and we'll do our own thing and make sure that we get it posted correctly with the webmaster, so it's kind of like the ball is in our court.
Okay, we're coming up on time but I have a couple of important questions I want to get to real quickly.
It's okay. I'm on lunch so we can chat.
Okay, cool. I didn't want to hold you up if you had other meetings or things to do. Probably shouldn't go much longer. Okay, what tools are used in the creation of agendas? Is there any?
No, that could be helpful.
Okay. What kind of tools do you think would be helpful?
Um...Tools?
Like actual tools that aren't created yet? I mean, we just grab the existing template, and just plug and play. In my mind what could be helpful is some sort of database or form of sorts, where (this is just coming off the top of my head) it's like if you know/want to pick what kind of agenda item you want to do, like a certain category, let's say like neighborhood apartment grant, let's say like a cleanup or let's say a community impact statement or whatever, you can choose what kind of agenda item you want to post,
and you can
filter that through the list and it'll automatically generate a plug and play for that specific line item. Which that's kind of a lot of data and research to be able to automatically populate that kind of stuff. You just plug in the actual specific challenge but to get like the basic...a lot of that stuff, if you look at other people's agendas, a lot of other people's items, and especially within the networks that are within the Neighborhood Councils, like for example, I'm involved with the Progressive Alliance Neighborhood Council Network, and there's a lot of community impact statements that are involved and you want to make sure everybody's on the same page with their community impact statements so you use the same verbiage and language. So it can be a lot stronger of a message. It's a synchronized message so it will be less troublesome, a lot easier and a lot quicker to do these things if a lot of that stuff is already generated and you just plugged in the proper information that's specific to whatever it is that day, or whatever the topic is, or subject is or project is or presentation is.
Yeah, okay. So it sounds like there's a lot of similar format and structure, and that if you could just kind of input things it would go by quicker.
Exactly. Same thing with the template. Even though I showed you the top and the bottom parts. In the discussion, possible motion to 123456, discussion of possible motion to this, this, this, this, this...that's very easy to do but it's not always automated and it can be automated even more to this specific type of motion that's discussed or presentation or whatever it is. There's certain categories that can really just, I'm going back to community because it's the easiest thing, usually what you pull in the community impact statement is whatever the ordinance or whatever the rule or regulation or whatever the situation is, there's certain documents or language that have to be pulled from, like the city website or whatever. And that's pretty much the only part you need to input, and the Neighborhood Council's position on that ordinance, rule, law or whatever it is. Then they can create their opinion on it, they can type their own opinion. But everything else can somewhat in any way shape or form be automated and filtered. That's just my opinion.
Okay, that's all great feedback.
Cool. Let me see if there is an example that I could forward your way while we're on the call because if we don't do it on the call I'm going to forget. (See Attachment)
And just full discretion, I know this is being recorded, I'm going to forward you this email, take it in a discretionary fashion, just because I don't know what is appropriate. This again the challenge of being on a volunteer organization and having all these rules, regulations and stuff like that. You know I'm trying to help progress this but you know I don't want anybody else to get into any trouble or anything of that nature but I'll forward you an example of a conversation that's been had through some of the network.
Okay. We appreciate that. We're absolutely not going to try to do anything to get this out there or get you in any type of sticky situation.
Yeah because it's just people trying to do collective work on contributing to community impact statements. They provide like an example of the Community Impact Statement within their agenda and they share it, to have people model after it. What's your email?
You can send it to the Engage...
Engage project?
Yeah, Engage Project.
And this is one of many emails but, you can just look at the email thread and see how people are...okay, like this is a thing that needs to be brought up and and brought to attention. Here it is, they'll pull up a council file, which you have to go through a certain website, navigate the council file, which that again can be automated and filtered (Rambles about statement made previously at 28:35 timestamp) and then they input the council file number and information. A lot of this stuff can just be automated. I think it might be helpful, not for all the council groups because there are a lot of people that are on top of their game and don't have a problem with typing out everything or using a template, but for others it might help boost them, or make them more willing to take that extra effort to go to the community impact statements. Because in my experience a lot of people want to write something or do something but it's too hard to figure out how to properly do it. So if that was figured out for them, you would have a lot of more community and council engagement with jurisdictional agencies in the city itself. A lot of this stuff gets bogged down and takes longer to do because people have to figure out how to do it.
Got it. That's great insight. Slightly changing gears a little and this is towards the end of the questions I have for you. You slightly touched upon it, at least with other council members. But there's lots of different languages in the community, do you know how many different languages there are or what type of languages are in your community?
Spanish, Korean. But you know there are always some sort of subgroup even though a lot of people speak the general language of Spanish, a lot of Salvadoran community members are in our population so they speak their own type of language. There are different subsets and I can't necessarily speak on those things because I don't want to misrepresent them. You gotta be very careful with some of those things. In your interviews if you talk with anybody else from our council somebody may have the answer. But generally speaking people can either speak English, speak Spanish, or a lot of people speak Korean. For us according to the data I think those are the three main types that will reach the majority of our audiences. This has to be figured out at some point, this is across agendas or websites or whatever, just like some sort of translation system that can be done automatically but... people don't want to pay for that. That's not in our council budget. Our council budget is reduced every year it seems like. From $40K to $32K to potentially even less than that. So we to pick and choose our battles here. Sometimes those language translations are supported, sometimes they're not.
Okay, that's what I was getting at. What languages are the agendas produced in?
Well, I mean, you saw the one agenda, it's really just English and Spanish. As of now.
Okay. And...
One of the Koreatown Neighborhood Councils, I think they probably do a lot more due diligence on some of that translation, and those translation services. I don't know how they go about it but I'm sure that they have figured out a way as opposed to someone just sitting there and typing it all out. But, even our agenda items, themselves, (the top part, the template, it has some of the information in Spanish) when you get to the agenda it's in English.
Okay. Is there somebody that actually translates it? Like you were saying some of it's in Spanish.
All the stuff that is in Spanish is templated. So, no.
Okay, so like the main body, the agenda topics, are usually just in English?
Yeah,
Great, and just a couple more questions. What's your highest priority when creating agendas?
Say...
I mean is it a priority of coordinating with other parties? Is the Brown Act always something taken into consideration? Is that a top priority...
It's less about the Brown Act or the rules. I think it's more about the time sensitivity of an initiative or a project that needs to be ensured to get on the agenda. Like we need to have a consensus on how we're going to approve the budget for spending to do Food Bank donations or to host this community event. A lot of it is really based around that kind of priority of time sensitive information or providing resources to community members. That's the best I can probably answer in that way.
Okay, perfect. And then one last questions I have for you. I know things have changed a lot during this time with the pandemic and everything. How has that affected the process of creating agendas? Are there things that are different now than they were before?
I think what's very helpful, I think it's a silver lining, there's a lot more civic engagement. Because community members, no longer have to show up at a physical location to have their concerns heard, they can go online from their phone, or from their computer and speak their mind and have things addressed. And because your average citizen works from 8-5/9-5, or they work a second or third shift and again, it's on everybody's voluntary time, so it makes things more feasible and flexible. It's still kind of unfortunate to have to post something at a physical location (post the agenda at a physical location still) especially during a pandemic. You're forced to go outside and risk your health to post at a physical location that likely, in my opinion, in my neighborhood, is obsolete. Who goes just to the physical location to look at an agenda? Like who does that? People might do that but everything's digital, everything's virtual. People will call, at minimum they're going to call somebody to get something figured out. Nobody wants to remember to drive here 72-hours before the end of the last Thursday of the month and see what's going on in the agenda. Nobody does that. I think that's obsolete, that can be wiped out. Other than that, I think it's just helped increase a lot of the virtual civic links and civic engagement. That needs to be a bit more built up and robust and tough and easily accessible in all shapes, ways and forms
