Eagle Rock Neighborhood Council to Protest Impending Budget Cuts

The Eagle Rock Neighborhood Council voted unanimously Tuesday to write to Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s budget team to protest impending cuts to the budgets of neighborhood councils citywide and requesting that the budget of each council be restored to $50,000 annually.

The ERNC vote also included an appeal to the mayor’s budget team to restore full funding for the Department of Neighborhood Empowerment, which oversees neighborhood council elections and is facing cuts to both its budget and personnel.

As the mayor's budget is being released on April 19, it’s the duty of the ERNC to protest the cuts, ERNC Vice President David Greene said at the monthly board meeting of the council at Eagle Rock City Hall.

Greene explained that Neighborhood Councils face a de facto cut to their budgets because the cash-strapped City of Los Angeles has proposed that the councils pay 20 percent of their $37,000 yearly allocation for their elections in the spring of 2014.

Normally, it’s the City Clerk who pays for neighborhood council elections, Greene said, adding that the proposed 20-percent cut would be pooled rather than spent directly on the election of a particular council.

News of the likely 20-percent budget cut a little more than two weeks ago was both a surprise and disappointment to the ERNC. The proposed nick follows the failure of the Measure A sales tax increase in last month’s municipal elections.

As it is, annual funding for every neighborhood council has been trimmed from $50,000 to $37,000 (over the past four years), Greene pointed out.

The ERNC’s protest may well be a case of “spitting in the wind,” Greene said, implying that City Hall may well ignore the ERNC letter. Nevertheless, the council would be remiss not to protest, Greene said.

Copies of the protest letter were sent Wednesday to the mayor and the City Council, Greene said. The letter read as follows:

Dear Mayor and Councilmembers:

The Board of Directors of the Eagle Rock Neighborhood Council (ERNC) passed the motion below at our general board meeting on April 2, 2013:

Whereas, over the past few years, the City has cut the budget of the Department of Neighborhood Empowerment (DONE), to the point where it is incapable of performing all the functions mandated in City Charter Section 901, and

Whereas, if the City's proposal to require Neighborhood Councils to subsidize the City Clerk's and DONE's 2014 election budgets through a 20% funding cut is implemented in violation of Section 20.36 of the Administrative Code, the ERNC will be unable to perform all the functions required of it by Sections 907 – 910 of the City Charter, and

Whereas, if the Neighborhood Councils' budgets are cut even further in the Mayor's budget for the next fiscal year, the ERNC will be unable to provide the services that Eagle Rock has come to rely on,

Whereas, the all-volunteer Directors of active and engaged Neighborhood Councils like the ERNC assist, and often perform the same duties as, salaried City employees, thereby providing the City with potentially over $500,000 in free labor per NC every year,

Therefore, the Eagle Rock Neighborhood Council moves:

- That the City fully fund the Neighborhood Councils' 2014 elections, without taking 20% of the NCs' budgets,

- That the City impose no further across-the-board cuts to Neighborhood Councils' annual budgets, and restore the ERNC's annual funding to $50,000, and

- That the City fully fund the Department of Neighborhood Empowerment, so that it can perform the functions required of it by the City Charter.

Note: The text of the ERNC letter has been updated since this article was initially posted.