CONSIDER THE IRONY OF THIS LAW.

Byline: Kimit Muston Local View

I admit I'm a skeptic of the neighborhood council system. I support the goals - according to the reformed City Charter, the councils are supposed to ``promote more citizen participation and make government more responsive.''

It's just the design.

Creating the Department of Neighborhood Empowerment to watch over dozens of neighborhood councils, each with its own elections and objections, all to achieve a more responsive City Hall? To me, this resembles having your tooth pulled by a proctologist.

Case in point: item 03-0002-S98 now being considered by that den of intellectual obfuscation, the Los Angeles City Council.

Item S98 asks the state Legislature to amend the 1953 Brown Act - otherwise known as the Open Government Act - so as to exclude neighborhood councils from its more onerous provisions, in particular the requirement that each council post an accurate public agenda 72 hours in advance of any meeting, then stick to it.

Now, I agree the Brown Act is a whole mouthful of law, maybe too big in all of its provisions for a little neighborhood council to swallow without choking.

As Kim Thompson, a longtime neighborhood activist in the Northwest Valley, explains: ``The Brown Act is killing neighborhood councils - we need to hire someone to take minutes, record votes and run around hanging three-page agendas all over town. This seems a bit much for a group of neighbors trying to do the best thing for their community.''

``If I weren't involved, I would be complaining about all that paper trash,'' she said.

Seemingly on the other side is Carol Ann Ziehler, an activist from Sun Valley.

Ziehler says her neighbors are ``opposed to any amendment to the Brown Act, as it was enacted to protect the public from backroom meetings.''

``Sun Valley was originally a rural and agricultural community. It has become the capital of gravel pits, dumps, wrecking yards, rock quarries, and masonry and tile companies,'' she said. ``Much of this has happened because the public was not notified of the huge impacts from these type of businesses.''

You can see why the neighborhood activists are of two minds here. The Brown Act has been their primary line of defense, but if they get involved in the councils, activists now find themselves limited by that same law.

Neighborhood activists have something in common with City Hall politicians. They both want to get around the Brown Act. This is known as irony.

I'd say we were attempting to reinvent the governmental-irony wheel here but it's too late - we're already being run over by the darn thing.

So I guess the Brown Act, which has worked for the last 50 years to limit the power of politicians to deal in secret and exclude the public from public business, is headed to the repair shop for some bodywork.

But do we really need to get rid of the 72-hour notification system for the neighborhood councils? Isn't there an easier, more practical way to do this?

Listen to Kim Thompson one more time: ``The problem with the Brown Act is that DONE mandates that we post five agendas. ... Posting five agendas seems ludicrous in a very small neighborhood like ours - why can't we just post all of them online? That is a really big question I think all the neighborhood councils have.''

I thought it was a good question, so I asked it of Greg Nelson, who runs DONE.

He told me, ``The Brown Act requires posting in only one physical location. That is to ensure that there is at least one place where everyone can go to see the agenda. We require five locations to ensure that people in the area have several places to choose from. But not everyone has access to the Internet, so the Brown Act doesn't allow that as one of the places.''

Yeah, but when the Brown Act was signed, Earl Warren was governor. In 1953, there were probably only a dozen computers in the entire United States. Now there are Internet connections in every L.A. city and county library, with helpful librarians willing to show you how to surf. I question whether anyone doesn't have access to the Net.

Since we're going to amend the Brown Act, why don't we try a small amendment first, like keeping the 72-hour notification provision but allowing the neighborhood councils to post their agendas on the Internet?

I'm sure DONE could provide space for this on its Web site. That's its job.

Or would that be too simple a solution?