Posts tagged Neighborhood Councils
LA City Council Confirms Grayce Liu’s Appointment to DONE GM
The LA City Council unanimously confirmed the Mayor’s appointment of Grayce Liu as the next permanent general manager of the Department of Neighborhood Empowerment on Friday. Grayce Liu was made interim general manager in August of last year after former GM BongHwan Kim left to take a position in San Diego.
Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa nominated Liu to serve as permanent general manager in December. In his letter to the City Council he wrote, “Her (more…)
L.A.’s Neighborhood Councils Flex Their Muscles
From the L.A. Daily News, January 24, 2013
A recent fight over a proposed $3 billion bond issue for street repairs illustrated the growing influence of neighborhood councils in Los Angeles City government, as they exerted enough influence to keep the measure off the ballot for now.
The success in that case represents an evolution for the councils, which at their inception a dozen years ago were seen as potentially powerless because they held no real voting authority in city matters. But through wider participation and exerting a louder voice, observers say, they are now fulfilling the influential role envisioned for them when voters revised the City Charter in 1999.
“This is what it was meant to be,” said Raphael Sonenshein, executive director of the Pat Brown Institute at California State University, Los Angeles, and who served as the top aide to the appointed Charter Reform Commission.
“They were meant to be a strong community voice and weigh in on major issues. It might be annoying (to the City Council, but the whole idea was to create a different form of review and allow the community to weigh in.”
The street bond proposal from Councilmen Mitch Englander and Joe Buscaino provided the perfect vehicle for neighborhood councils to weigh in.
Englander and Buscaino proposed on a Friday afternoon to have the council vote the following week to place the bond on the May 21 ballot, without any formal staff reports and only sketchy details on the cost for the public.
Neighborhood council groups, starting with the Los Angeles Alliance of Neighborhood Councils, and supported by the Valley Alliance and others, called for a 60-day delay to allow time for review of the proposal. City Council offices began receiving telephone calls of protest from homeowners. The public outcry forced the council to (more…)
Mayor Villaraigosa Appoints New DONE General Manager, Grayce Liu, from within Department’s Ranks
From the Daily News:
Former DONE GM, BongHwan Kim, with new Interim GM, Grayce Liu, at a recent VANC meeting
Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has tapped Grayce Liu, a senior project coordinator in the Department of Neighborhood Empowerment, to fill the general manager’s job now that B.H. Kim is leaving to take a job in San Diego.
Liu will be named interim general manager and given a chance to see how she does in the sensitive post.
Kim had brought steadiness to the job of dealing with the 95 neighborhood councils in the city, riding out threats to dissolve the department into another agency and seeing its funding slashed dramatically.
