Notes, CPP Collaborative Meeting, 10.21

CPP Collaborative Meeting Notes, 10.21

Meeting begins with a brief discussion about why everyone is here and what they hope to accomplish.

First question:
Is the Vision/Mission statement redone and ready to vote? If not, how long do we give these teams to work post-collaborative meeting to resubmit/finalize their work?
There are not set due-dates, but we will press the team to re-meet soon and finalize the statements.

Review of the 2004 draft
Organizational Structure team began looking at the model and how it relates to neighborhood organizations; feels that directly using the 3 tiered system based around neighborhood councils could have some problems. Example: in a certain area (Treme), one team member could join 4 different neighborhood associations that claim her street. How do you reconcile those overlaps within the neighborhood councils?

Org. Structure Team proposal:
Planning districts, where appropriate, would be broken into multiple councils which would consist of a grouping of neighborhood and community groups.
Each individual resident within the boundary of the Neighborhood Council would vote for representatives on the council board. [Actual number to be determined.]
For instance, District 4 could be said to consist roughly of two distinct regions that could be formed into aggregate neighborhood councils. Namely Mid-City and Downtown. Dividing District 4 into these two regions to form neighborhood councils could avoid some of the conflicts over boundaries and representation. Also the structure could keep intact the social organizations of neighborhood and community groups without having to impose overburdening standards upon them.
Questions and concerns:
Would specific organizations or constituencies get guaranteed representation on the board such as neighborhood associations, renters, ethnic minorities? Or would voting just remain open, meaning that these constituencies would have to compete for the support of Neighborhood Council residents?
Is this actually creating a four-tired system- Neighborhood associations, neighborhood council, another council board for the district, and then citywide?

Does this proposal address citywide communities?

There should be as few tiers/layers as possible between citizens and government.

The larger this gets, with more and more layers, the more expensive this becomes- need to think strategically about funding and make this have as small as budget as possible.

Where exactly should affinity groups plug in? If this takes a one person, one vote on geographic basis as how this is going to be organized, we can’t have people be able to vote a second time as a member of a special-interest group.

Should there be some sort of sunset clause for displaced residents, i.e. they can vote in these neighborhood elections until a certain cut-off date? Can’t leave out displaced residents or we will perpetually have the green-dot conversation.

We also need to know how to include people not geographically based.

Participatory Budgeting/LA Budget Day presentation
This has been going on for four or five years now- all neighborhoods/citizens invited to participate in the Mayor’s Budget Day. Khalil and Dave from the Scope of Activities Team attended. 90 neighborhoods sent 2 representatives each.

City of LA is experiencing a massive budget shortfall and so is California in general. The budget was distributed out in handy blue-books that show where the money is coming from and where the money is going to, and the citizens looked at how the budget could be reallocated before they started to look at what programs to cut.

Overall a very good experience. Participatory budgeting is something that the Scope of Activities team is thinking about including in the CPP.

Discussion of the CPP process in general-
Things need to be simplified and easy to understand and we need an expedited response time to deal with issues as they arise.

There will be community polling during the month of November- short 10 question poll followed by distributing information. Info/polls can be distributed at neighborhood meetings. This will mostly serve as an outreach tool- no real scientific merit to the polling, but might provide some interesting data to work with.

Also, we are going to organize a community breakfast on January 10th. Will work to bring more people into the process as we begin to work on the draft, and will also serve as a larger conversation between all the action teams to start making concrete decisions.

Should start looking into free publicity, try to get on talk radio, post meetings in newspaper, cable access- all sorts of ways to reach out to more people and CPP should become more active in that way. Need to set up a constant info flow with Unified Non-Profits.

Next CPP Collaborative Meeting: Nov. 18th, 6:00pm, 3500 Canal Street