Two Decades at Central San Pedro

As of February 2022, it has been 20 years since the founding of the Central San Pedro Neighborhood Council, which was not the first nor the last one in Councilmanic District 15. Still, this was a milestone. The vision of bringing government closer to the people was both the aspiration to make it work for the stakeholders and to keep the city whole in response to the session movement back then. The LA City Charter, the municipal constitution if you will, needed to be amended with this change and it was by an overwhelming majority. The preamble to this section reads:

Sec. 900. Purpose.
To promote more citizen participation in government and make government more responsive to local needs, a citywide system of neighborhood councils and a Department of Neighborhood Empowerment is created. Neighborhood councils shall include representatives of the many diverse interests in communities and shall have an advisory role on issues of concern to the neighborhood.

This was a nice premise and in the years that followed some 99 neighborhood councils were created across the entire metropolis. This was unique but also presented problems. The intent was to provide community empowerment but it did very little in terms of power-sharing. In the City of LA, with some 4 million residents there are only 15 elected council representatives. This equates to something like 250,000 residents to one elected representative. Structurally, cities like Carson, Lomita, or even Long Beach have better per capita representation. In LA, this gives immense power to one elected council office and it has often been abused.

The current race for CD 15 between Danielle Sandoval and Tim McOsker is unusual as it is the first time that a neighborhood council president has run for election. Yes, in other parts of LA, neighborhood council members like Ron Galprin, the outgoing city controller have been elected, but his example is the exception rather than the rule. The impediments to running for a city council seat are many and not easily navigated, unlike standing for a seat on a local neighborhood council.

The neighborhood councils were created to offset this imbalance of power, but over the course of the past decade, the city council itself and the Department of Neighborhood Empowerment (DONE) have done nearly everything they can to keep the neighborhood councils sidelined, regulated and (oddly enough) disempowered. They continue to do so. This has been especially true with outgoing councilman Joe Buscaino, who mostly treated the Central San Pedro Neighborhood Council as a threat and other councils as irrelevant.

For the past 10 years, Central San Pedro Neighborhood Council has been the focal point of this struggle for civic engagement, local democracy and re-empowerment. This struggle has even led to the recent ouster of the former Central San Pedro Neighborhood Council president Lou Caravella, who resigned under pressure, to either leave or be censured and removed. Yet this has been a learning experience for both the current council and the community about democracy. It’s sometimes messy but it sure beats not having a voice. If you look around the civic landscape of the LA Harbor Area the neighborhood councils are one of the few places where the average citizen can be elected, speak on public matters to a council and have their concerns addressed by local government.

The biggest problem with the LA City government is that city hall is so distant and the city bureaucracy so complex that getting anything done or even attending a council meeting is a daunting task for the average person. The advent of virtual meetings during the pandemic shortened this distance, but did not increase the access to those technologically challenged or otherwise disadvantaged.

So here we are in November 2022 with local, state and especially national elections that could change the nature of our national political future. The MAGA election deniers, the threats of violence and the tribalism of this national election this year have reverberated even down to local politics as we have reported upon previously. These controversies may well bring more voters to the polls than ever before both in Los Angeles and in contested battleground states ­— democracy is on the ballot. But in some ways it always is. My experience is that most Americans don’t really understand or appreciate democracy. Often they settle for something less that smells a little “democractish”, but letting everyone have a vote is just too damn messy.

Here we have 20 years of democractish neighborhood councils, with no real power except the voice of the people and not really empowered to make the changes necessary to hold city government accountable. Los Angeles still needs to change. Whether that change happens or not will depend on who is elected mayor and city council representative. Los Angeles still might serve as a model for the rest of the nation if we can actually make this thing called democracy work.

As of the day after the election, McOsker leads Sandoval 15,321 to 8,311 with only 35% of all votes counted, which is a reminder democracy only works if you show up and participate!