The unspoken question in the supervisorial election between Bernard Parks and Mark Ridley-Thomas is how much influence the winning candidate will allow the unions in negotiating the reopening of Martin Luther King Jr. -Harbor Medical Center, which once served thousands of poor people.

Getting King functioning again is the most important issue in the race for the 2nd Supervisorial District seat. The hospital in South Los Angeles County has been closed for 10 months after it failed federal inspections. It’s criminal that it remains closed, but that’s what happens in the do-nothing behemoth, Los Angeles County government.

The unions representing county workers, including those from the shuttered hospital, are supporting Ridley -Thomas. They have donated at least $4 million to an independent expenditure committee campaigning for him. A total of $980,000 of it came in during the last two weeks of the primary campaign, which ended with Ridley-Thomas finishing ahead of Parks but short the majority needed for victory. The runoff will be held in November, on the same day as the presidential election.

Both have pledged to restore the hospital. But no matter who wins, the unions will be the real power in shaping the contracts and civil service rules that will govern the nurses and other medical personnel at a reopened King and the other county hospitals.

Union reps, county bureaucrats and supervisors and their aides will resolve these matters in secret, as is the custom for big issues in the Kenneth Hahn Hall of Administration, even though they involve major questions of public policy. In this instance, the county imposes secrecy because of its lawyers’ broad interpretation of an exemption from the state open meeting law for anything dealing with personnel. The way the county sees it, that could be most anything.

Nobody wants to talk much about this aspect of the King issue, not even someone unconnected to the county, like Robert K. Ross, president and chief executive of the California Endowment, a private foundation interested in improving access to health care.

Last month, Garrett Therolf reported in the Los Angeles Times that when Ross contacted county officials to help find an institution to take over King, his letter “did not address another issue that many said was a stumbling block [to opening King]: whether an operator would be required to employ members of the county’s public employee unions and be bound by county personnel rules that make it difficult to discipline or transfer workers who harm patients.”

Of course the unions will insist on such a requirement, and make their feelings known in the closed-door meetings with supervisors, supervisorial aides and bureaucrats.

Ridley-Thomas and Parks proposed solutions that shed no light on how they will handle the union issue. Parks wants King and the other hospitals run by a new authority “sufficiently insulated from political vagaries.” Ridley-Thomas wants the hospital to be run by “an administrator and governance structure that operates outside L.A. County’s political authority and its health services bureaucracy.”
Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, who is not up for re-election, said in a Times op-ed piece that he wants the hospital turned over to the University of California, which would be “unencumbered by the county’s human resources and hiring rules.” He did not address the union issue.

In bringing up the unions and civil service rules in his story, Times reporter Therolf raised an important question. It deserves to be answered in the campaign, especially by Ridley-Thomas, the recipient of union financial support.

The dream of home ownership has long been part of life on 92nd Street and similar South Los Angeles working class neighborhoods. But making the dream come true has never been easy-- not more than a half century ago when the area was mostly white and not today when it is African American and Latino.

The dream was the topic Saturday May 30 when ACORN, the community activist organization, held a press conference-demonstration in front of a small house at 755 East 92nd Street, a home headed for foreclosure, its owner one of the many casualties of the sub-prime mortgage crisis.

The street is broad with bungalows on either side. It was quiet at midday, with most of the activity occurring at the bungalow owned by Millicent (Mama) Hill, who was an English teacher at Crenshaw High School before she retired in 2000 and set up a program in her home to help young women and men avoid the gang life and crime. ACORN volunteers, most of them older men and women, gathered in Mama Hill’s front yard, all of them wearing the organization’s bright red t-shirts.

Mama Hill has been operating the program on her pension, small donations and with the help of friends and supporters who assist her with tutoring, mentoring, anger management and other services needed in a neighborhood that is pretty thick with gang action despite its peaceful appearance on a Saturday.

With expenses exceeding income, and house prices rising fast, Hill refinanced her house. “I needed a loan quickly,” she said. She was promised one at 7.5 percent interest but before she signed the final papers, she was told the interest would be 10 percent “but they promised it could be renegotiated.” When she obtained the loan, the house was appraised at $405,000 but has since dropped far below that. She fell behind in her payments, and the mortgage holder is now foreclosing.

One of her supporters, Cedric R. Brown, president of Youth Incentive Programs Inc said Hill got the loan at a time when housing prices were exploding, even in this modest neighborhood, and mortgage brokers flooded the area with tempting refinance offers. “The predatory lenders took advantage,” he said. Some of borrowers were hard-pressed, like Hill. Others were tempted by the chance to pay off debts and improve their living conditions. Houses once valued at $450,000 recently dropped to $385,000 to $360,000.

Hill spoke to supporters and the two or three journalists who showed up. Then the ACORN volunteers walked the neighborhood, going door to door to urge support for Isadore Hill, a Compton city councilman running for Assembly in the area and for others who support bills pending in Sacramento designed to crack down on predatory lenders. Given the power of the financial business in the Capitol, I’d say those bills face a rough future.

Afterward, I drove a few blocks east to 1233 East 92nd Street, a brown stucco home with a tile roof and an excellently tended front yard. It is an unmarked monument to working class L.A.’s dream of home ownership.

In 1942, an African American family, the Laws, bought this very house. The neighborhood was then predominantly white. But the house deed included a restrictive covenant banning a sale to a racial minority. Such covenants were common in those days. Henry Laws and his family were African Americans, The Laws family fought the covenant. Charlotta Bass, the fiery editor of the California Eagle, espoused their cause. A judge ordered Mr. and Mrs. Laws and daughter jailed. Their sons returned from service to find their parents and sister in jail. The Laws eventually prevailed and courts began overturning the covenants.

The saga of the Laws family is a great inspiration to ACORN and its volunteers as they fight predatory lenders who, in their own way, are as vicious as the segregationists of 60 years ago

Whether Bernard Parks or Mark Ridley-Thomas wins the Los Angeles County 2nd supervisorial district election June 3, one point is certain: The sleepy board may actually wake up.

Years ago, I used to cover the supervisors. In recent times, I have been spared that duty. All I know is what I read in the papers and what I am told by various reporters who have been sent to the county building to report on the five enigmatic supervisors.
From those observations, I surmise that the supervisors go through their paces every Tuesday, voting on matters that have been previously approved by their staffs in sessions held somewhere out of the public’s eyes. The meetings are pretty boring unless Gloria Molina yells at an unfortunate department head. The board’s main accomplishment this year is keeping Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital closed, denying hospital care to Los Angeles’ poorest and sickest residents.

Neither Parks, a Los Angeles city councilman, nor Ridley-Thomas, a state senator, are get-along, go-along types who will blend into the present board’s way of doing things.

Ridley-Thomas is a challenge to reporters and colleagues. He likes to argue. He always thinks he is right. And he’s rough on those who disagree with him.

When he was pushing the Staples arena project through the City Council, I was writing columns demanding public disclosure of the lease. He didn’t like those columns. At the height of it, he came up to me and said I was just trying to revive my failing career. Later on, after I was promoted to city editor, I sought him out. “It worked,” I said.

When Parks was police chief, he’d go after any reporter who crossed him. In his mind, trying to dig out a story amounted to crossing him. We had long arguments, once in public , another time in his office. He’d never conceded he was wrong. In his mind, he never was.

I enjoyed arguing with both Ridley-Thomas and Parks. They never backed down and neither did I. That was OK. They had a right to complain. I had an obligation to listen, and the right to reply in kind.

From my experience, neither is cursed with the supervisorial state of mind—a peaceful somnolence more suited to a retirement home than the governance of LA County. I hope the winner never adopts it and retains his testy, argumentative ways. And I truly hope the new supervisor figures out how to re-open Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital..

Two events in the 2nd Supervisorial District pointed up some of the immense difficulties facing politics and government in Los Angeles County, and the possibilities of overcoming them.

The district, where Los Angeles City Councilman Bernard Parks and State Sen. Mark Ridley-Thomas are competing to replace retiring Supervisor Yvonne Burke, reaches from upper middle class, predominantly white stretches of West Los Angeles across Los Angeles County to the struggling Latino and African American working class neighborhoods, such as Watts Willowbrook. The candidates, both African American, are competing for an electorate that is strongly black

One of these events occurred roughly in the middle of the district. It was at the University of Southern California, where one of the indomitable forces in California political life, Carmen Warschaw, announced her gift of $3 million to endow the Carmen H. and Louis Warschaw chair in practical politics. A search is now on for a professor to fill the chair.

The other occurred a day later, at a smaller school, Beethoven elementary, several miles west of USC in the West Los Angeles neighborhood of Mar Vista. At Beethoven, Ridley-Thomas and Parks debated over the kind of practical political problems that the new Warschaw professor will try to teach students to solve.

Carmen and her late husband, Lou, helped shape the California Democratic party and the careers of many of its leaders. They were teenage sweethearts, attended USC together and immersed themselves in politics as volunteers, donors and in leadership positions. Carmen has played politics tough and hard. She is unforgiving to enemies, generous to friends and has always tried to fill political offices with the women and men she thought would do the best job.

In announcing the award, she said she didn’t believe much in political theory, no doubt chilling the academics in the large audience of faculty, her friends and family. She believes in the nuts and bolts of politics, from lawn signs in her early days to today’s computerized methods of identifying voters, and from shaking hands at campaign fund raisers to providing constituent services while in office.

She talked about the pre-term limit days and wished they were back. Never a fan of political reformers, she put in a good word for lobbyists. And, she spoke of the difficulties facing the winner of the supervisorial race. “How do you represent a district of two million people,” she asked.

That’s the question Parks and Ridley Thomas tried to answer at their debate at Beethoven school.
There are a lot of issues in this campaign but the most important is how to reopen the badly needed public hospital in Watts Willowbrook, once known as King Drew, then King Harbor and now closed after the poorly trained and incompetent staff failed to pass federal inspections. A huge area, home of L.A. County’s poorest, has been left without a hospital.

Neither Parks nor Ridley Thomas offered satisfactory solutions. Parks blamed cuts in federal and state funding for medical aid to the poor, and he said he wanted to get the University of California medical system involved. That’s a great idea. Maybe someone from the UCLA hospital will teach the King people how to sell confidential information to the tabloids. It also makes no sense with USC located in the district. Ridley-Thomas proposed convening a group of high-level officials to talk about how to re-open the place. Perfect. Another committee.

Neither talked about the real failure at the hospital. It was for years a job-creating machine for the African American community around it. The largely African American staff and African American political and community leaders were a powerful force in protecting the hospital and its workers. The 2nd District supervisor, Burke, who is African American, did little. Her four colleagues, who left the mess to her, are just as guilty.

USC, a few miles north of the old hospital, should be part of the solution. For generations, USC has produced some of our area’s best political leaders and government experts. Now, with the creation of the Warschaw professorship for practical politics, it is in a better position to tackle failures, even those as extreme as King hospital. The new professor can’t do it alone. But there are many other resources at SC in the schools of medicine, public policy, law, social welfare, gerontology and athletics, where football coach Pete Carroll has repeatedly shown his commitment to South LA. The Warschaw professor can be a real leader in the effort.

A march through downtown Los Angeles on Friday, April 25 was an excellent reminder of how L.A. is divided by race and class.

I joined between 700 and 1,000 marchers, who were mostly janitors and renters of slum apartments in Westlake, just west of downtown. Many of the marchers fit into both categories. They were low paid janitors who lived in the packed old apartments. They wanted better pay and protection for tenants like themselves, who are being forced out by landlords and developers determined to upscale the area.

The idea of two L.A.s, one affluent the other struggling, is not new. Long before Sen. John Edwards built a presidential campaign on the concept of “Two Americas,” LA Observed’s Kevin Roderick proposed a series for the Los Angeles Times on Two L.A.s, one affluent the other poor.

Roderick was a reporter in the Times City-County Bureau in the ‘80s when he came up with the project. I, the bureau chief, thought it was a great idea. Roderick did preliminary interviews and other research and wrote a detailed memo laying out the concept. The City-County Bureau reporters, who had been digging into the social, economic and racial forces that were dividing Los Angeles, would collaborate on the project.

Our bosses quickly rejected Roderick’s idea. In fact, I was urged to shift our coverage to issues affecting the middle class. Such bad decisions should be noted by those mourning the long passed “great old days” at the Times. A lot of those days were not so great.

Life went on. The city was ripped apart by the 1992 riot, and we finally got around to reporting on Two L.A.s

I thought of that as I joined the marchers gathering at the headquarters of Service Employees Local 1877, which is organizing the Justice for Janitors campaign for better wages and working conditions. Other groups were involved, including the ACORN organization, the Los Angeles Housing Partnership, the LA Alliance for a New Economy. and UNITE HERE, Local 11. Together, they comprise the progressive activist wing of Los Angeles politics, fighting to make themselves heard in a city hall dominated by land developers and downtown business interests.

The janitors wore purple and gold (Lakers colors) and red and black t-shirts. We walked west on Seventh Street toward downtown. We stopped at the forbidding glass and concrete fortress of a city building, headquarters for the city housing department. Officials had refused an invitation to speak to the marchers and the appearance of the building conveyed a simple message: Keep Out. Security guards reinforced the message.

We crossed the bridge above the Harbor Freeway, the highway that permits people to travel from downtown to the harbor without noticing the poor South L.A. neighborhoods on either side. We passed the Wilshire Grand hotel, passed Roy’s the hot restaurant famous for small but delicately prepared dishes at high prices. We passed shops and went through an underground mall, with more stores. Office and store workers on their lunch hours watched the marchers. Perhaps they realized they had more in common with the marching men and women than they did with their bosses in the executive suites.

The rich own the buildings and run the law firms, accounting companies and other enterprises in them. Affluent property owners who, in some cases, have been given valuable exemptions from city building laws are developing new apartment houses and tearing down older ones.

In addition to better wages for janitors, the marchers asked that every apartment unit torn down be replaced by an equally affordable unit. They also want stepped up enforcement of laws against illegal eviction and an increase in the number of building inspectors in the Westlake MacArthur Park area. Finally, they’re asking that the city, state and federal governments make more money available to build affordable housing.

Next time you walk or drive through the area and see the apartments or consider the working conditions of janitors at your market or in your building, you’ll have to agree this agenda makes a lot of sense.

I found my friend Abner Lee dead in his West Los Angeles condo the other day. It looked as though he had died as he’d lived, alone.

A neighbor and I called the paramedics, but, even to us, it was clearly a case for the coroner. He had no family around nor friends close enough to claim his body. A paramedic said he had been dead three or four days.

Abner was my tennis coach. I thought it was unusual when he didn’t show up for our weekly session at the Cheviot Hills-Rancho courts. He was compulsively punctual and would harangue me if I were just a few minutes late.

I called him, but nobody answered. I left a message. He didn’t call back, also unusual. I called a few more times during the weekend. There was still no answer. I dropped by his condo, which is near my house. His buzzer was connected to his voice mail. Same message.

The thing about condos, I discovered, is that they are so well protected that they are inaccessible to outsiders, even well intentioned ones like me. I checked the garage under the building. His black Mustang wasn’t there. That was odd. In our conversations, I’d learned that he never went anywhere except to the tennis court, Ralph’s or a fast food place. I didn’t know that most of the cars were behind the building. I couldn’t have checked anyway. The only entrance to the rear parking was through the well-locked building. There was no way to get in.

I talked to several people at the tennis courts, but none of them had seen him in several days; they thought this was odd. I returned to the condo a few days later, encountered one of the residents, and explained the situation. We walked back to the parking spaces and found Abner’s car. Then we walked back inside and tried the door to his condo. It was unlocked. We went in. Abner was on his bed, eyes closed, clearly dead. He was wearing his warm-ups. The television was on. His tennis shoes were neatly placed at the side of the bed. His phone was by his side. Maybe he had tried to call for help.

I feel terribly sad that he had died alone like that. He had been teaching me for about three years, and we got to be friends. He was a good teacher He broke the game down, and made the student work on each part of the serve, the forehand, the backhand, the volley and everything else. He was gruff, to put it mildly. Some of the players at Rancho didn’t like his method or his manner. They had been playing for years and didn’t want to go back to basics. I had only been playing for a decade and wasn’t very good. I was willing to try anything. He improved my game, and when I went to Arizona to watch the baseball teams during spring training, I noticed that the coaches used exactly the same method as Abner, breaking down each step of a pitch, a swing and all the other moves. And they did this with pros who had been playing the game since little league.

When we talked about current events, Abner – who was African American – was filled with rage at the way black people, especially men, were treated. He grew up in Baltimore, had gone to college to study art and had been an elementary school teacher. There were paintings in his condo, sensitive portraits of people. I was intrigued that a tough guy like Abner could do such work.

He’d quit teaching to join the pro tour. He didn't make it and, like others in the same boat, became a tennis teacher. For most of them, it’s a hard way of earning a living, and Abner was always short of money. He was also overweight and a heavy smoker. In his late 50s, he’d already suffered a couple of heart attacks. Maybe that’s what killed him.

If there’s a lesson in this particular LA death, it’s for people like Abner, who live alone and who don’t have family and friends around. Find someone you trust. Give him or her a key. If you’re not in good health, arrange for someone to check in with you regularly. What we all have to keep in mind is Los Angeles, despite its great weather, is a lonely, big and indifferent city.

Two recent pieces of writing from the bowels of the Los Angeles Times tell much about the state of the newspaper and Los Angeles journalism.

One was a terrific Times story on the crisis in LA Country's health care system. The other was memo from Times editor Russ Stanton on an editors' "retreat" at a site near the beach and far from those dependent on county health care.

First, the health care story by Garrett Therolf, Mary Engel and Jean-Paul Renaud, which was prompted by the resignation of yet another county health director. The story went much farther than that, examining the impact of the failing system and, in particular, what has happened since Martin Luther Jr. hospital in South Los Angeles closed.

I can just hear Times owner Sam Zell screaming, "Why in the - - - - - - -hell do you need three - - - - - - - reporters to write a story about one - - - - - - - hospital." Sam, a noted authority on newspaper staffing and erectile dysfunction drugs such as Viagra, had previously questioned why six or nine reporters are needed to cover the Iraq war.

The fact is that it takes three excellent reporters to dig into the subject and explain the impact on those Los Angeles residents who do not dine at the hottest Westside restaurants. The story examined the odd plan to reopen King, having it operated by a small Long Beach hospital with ties to Los Angeles County Supervisor Don Knabe. The impact of King's closing has been devastating:

"Based on a variety of health indicators, the South Los Angeles area remains among the most disadvantaged communities in the nation. More people die of lung cancer, stroke, diabetes and heart disease there than in any other place in Los Angeles County."

The Stanton memo on the editors' retreat was also enlightening in that, unlike the story by Therolf, Engel and Renaud, it was so vague. Like all "retreat" documents, it was heavy on "values."

He defined the values:

"--What we want to keep (our ambition, integrity, critical thinking)"

Aren't you supposed to do that in any job?

"--What we want to eliminate (dwelling in the past, arrogance, silo mentality)"

No more dwelling in the past? History is bunk. No more boring anecdotes from veterans about the '92 riot, pre-Villaraigoa mayors, Valley secession, long-term poverty. In fact, no more veterans.

"--And what we'd like to create (greater focus on, and interaction with, readers; a more entrepreneurial environment, increased operational flexibility)."

Stanton is right there, and he is correct on one of the solutions, which will mean more hard work and stress in the newsroom:

" We will train all editorial employees in new skills in every medium in which we work (print/web/TV/mobile/radio); launch two or three coverage teams focused on a specific topic (for example, and only for example, immigration or health care)…"

But what Stanton didn't address was the cutback in the staffs of the Times and the Singleton papers in the San Fernando Valley, Long Beach, Torrance and the San Gabriel Valley. You can hold retreats and greet each calamitous cutback with positive clichés. But as Sue Cross, senior vice president of global new media at the Associated Press, told the USC Annenberg Online Journalism Review:

"You can go read about news issues in more sources than ever before… but what are being lost are some crucial things. One is in investigative and watchdog journalism. …The second area that I think is being lost is consistent day-in, day-out institutional coverage. City government. County government. State government; You are seeing beats combined as newsroom resources are cut down. You also are seeing people are going in with less expertise. Seasoned beat reporters are, in many cases, leaving the industry.”

Such reporters are as important as county supervisors or council members or mayors. That's why cutbacks at the Times and Singleton papers are a civic disaster.

One of the best ways to cover city hall is to get out of city hall. Instead, wander through the many fund raising dinners where the real clout is on display.

I thought of this recently when a couple of well-connected friends told me about a gold plated dinner at the Beverly Hilton.

It was the annual roast for the American Diabetes Association, put together by two of city hall's influential lobbyists, Arnie Berghoff and Harvey Englander. Berghoff's daughter has diabetes, and his conception and promotion of the event have done much to finance research on the disease and to raise childhood diabetes higher in the public consciousness. I think it's a great cause and actually served as master of ceremonies for the first two roast dinners.

But like all these fundraisers--either for charity or for political campaigns--this one has a purpose beyond raising money. The events give lobbyists and their corporate employers a chance to connect with the mayor, city council members, their staffs and various important department heads and city commissioners.

My friends told me that the hot spot at the diabetes dinner was the special pre-dinner VIP reception, where only the most generous sponsors and their guests were admitted. One friend didn't make it inside and had to buy a drink at the hotel bar. The other was more fortunate.

They told me that the biggest sponsors were the corporate developers of two huge development projects. One was the firm behind the 5,553-home Las Lomas project just north of the intersection of the Golden State Freeway and the 14 Freeway. The other was NBC Universal, which has proposed $3 billion worth of homes--2,900 of them-- along with new production facilities, restaurants, stores, a hotel, an entertainment center and other features at Universal City.

At the VIP event, I was told, representatives of the two firms socialized in pleasant, comparatively intimate surroundings with the elected officials and others who will decide the fate of their projects. So did other business chiefs, assorted big shots and lobbyists.

This kind of gathering is common practice and there is nothing illegal about it. Nor should there be. We already have too many laws.

But as I finish the last four months of my City Ethics Commission term, such events fill me with a sense of futility. We work like mad to make sure that city politics are played on a level field. The world of fund raising dinners and high-powered developers and lobbyists guarantees the field will never really be level.

How much more can be dished out to the beleaguered journalists of the Los Angeles Times?

A Pulitzer Prize winning reporter, Chuck Phillips, and his editor, Marc Duvoisin, have to apologize for a story based on what appears to have been phony documents. Then, there are the musings and rantings of the owner, Sam Zell, who, according to Variety, said of the newspaper:

"The challenge is, how do we get somebody 126 years old to get it up. Well, I'm your Viagra."

Even though I left the place several years ago, I still hang out with its reporters and editors occasionally.

I think they're incredibly dedicated not only for slogging along but for doing some fine work for a paper that once seemed indestructible but now looks like a house of cards. They are trying to do good journalism while facing murky futures. Those that are staying are experiencing the trauma of good friends and colleagues leaving on buyouts at the end of the month.

Of all their trials, none is worse than the reign of the Viagra Man. He fires off e-mails to the staff demanding new ideas, trying to give the impression that the scattered and disparate employees are a single team, and he is their fiery, inspirational coach.

I don't know about Sam, but the Times doesn't need Viagra. It needs journalists who can go to work each day without worrying about looking for a new job or whether they'll wind up with any money in the Employee Stock Ownership Program that Zell used to buy Tribune Co.

I still don't understand the deal, or what will happen to the employees' retirement benefits if the company defaults on its debt payments and goes into bankruptcy. It looks as though the workers are taking all the risks while Sam is assured of walking away rich as ever.

Instead of silly pep talks, Sam ought to fire off some e-mails providing transparency on the ESOP deal.

The City Council seems to be listening to the neighborhood councils and the City Ethics Commission.

The council is considering a proposal that would require stringent financial disclosure by neighborhood council members. The disclosure would be mandated when a neighborhood council proposed legislation, which in city hall is known as a council file. Any member of a neighborhood council which introduces a file would have to fill out the same disclosure form required of all city officials, including commissioners.

The neighborhood councils objected to the disclosure proposal, introduced by Council President Eric Garcetti and Councilmember Greg Smith. Neighborhood council members felt that the stringent requirements for volunteers would discourage people from participating in the councils. The ethics commission agreed.

Faced with such opposition, the City Council put off a decision. Instead, the council referred the disclosure issue to its Education and Neighborhoods Committee. Later, the committee members unanimously indicated support for a modification of the Garcetti-Smith proposal. The committee probably won't make a decision until sometime in March.

The Garcetti-Smith plan doesn't make sense. We commissioners and other city officials have power to take action so we should disclose our financial holdings. But neighborhood councils are advisory. Even if a neighborhood council introduces legislation, the council can ignore it.

We ethics commissioners strongly made that point in a letter to the city council signed by our executive director, LeeAnn Pelham, but reflecting all of our sentiments

We said that we understood the need for "some level of disclosure." But "the commission also expressed its concerns that any proposed disclosure requirements be proportional and balanced so as not to inadvertently chill public participation in the neighborhood council system, which is still in the nascent stage."

The letter also said " a neighborhood council's ability to introduce a council file does not imbue it with any decision making authority over any matter of public policy affecting either its own interests or those of other city residents…the city council retains complete discretion and authority to decline consideration of any proposed council file."

I hope that argument will resonate with every city council member while the neighborhood councils fight for a more practical system of disclosure.