NORTHRIDGE COUNCIL MEMBERS TOO CANDID?

Byline: James Nash Staff Writer

NORTHRIDGE - One is a neighborhood activist who frequently needles City Hall over its failure to fix the Northridge swimming pool.

Another is a stalwart San Fernando Valley secessionist who unsuccessfully ran for a Los Angeles City Council seat this year. And another is a homeowner whose speech is peppered with salty language and who admits his politics ``are to the right of Attila the Hun.''

The three - Jane Lowenthal, Walter Prince and Charles Brink, respectively - are leaders in the formation of the Northridge Neighborhood Council.

And, say city officials and some of their neighbors, they are exactly the wrong people for the job.

On July 1, the would-be Northridge Neighborhood Council became the first of the more than 70 advisory panels in Los Angeles to be rejected in its bid for official status. The Board of Neighborhood Commissioners, which has certified 74 neighborhood councils from San Pedro to Chatsworth, voted unanimously not to certify Northridge.

In a special meeting Friday night, the organizers of the Northridge Neighborhood Council voted to appeal the decision to deny their certification to the Los Angeles City Council. They said they hope at least to stimulate a debate over what they consider heavy-handed meddling by the city department that oversees neighborhood councils.

``I am delighted that the Northridge Neighborhood Council, through its elected directors, unanimously voted for this appeal, and in the community's best interest we hope the L.A. City Council will help us resolve our differences,'' said Lowenthal, president of the unofficial Northridge Neighborhood Council.

Leaders of the Northridge group say City Hall is punishing them for speaking out on issues - from the shut swimming pool to the quality of city services in their community. They say the city wants to impanel neighborhood councils that are pawns for City Council members.

``The thing they don't like about Northridge is that we want to be a voice for the people, not a voice for City Hall,'' said Brink, the vice president of the Northridge Neighborhood Council in formation. ``They don't want us to ask why the hell the pool isn't open or why it takes 12 minutes to get a cop out here.''

Officials from the city Department of Neighborhood Empowerment, which oversees the network of neighborhood councils that were spawned by a 1999 charter reform measure, scoff at the charge. Other neighborhood councils include plenty of City Hall critics, they say, including leaders of the Valley secession campaign.

DONE officials say the Northridge organizers failed to reach out to people who work, live and own property within the boundaries of the Northridge neighborhood group area, which includes the California State University, Northridge, campus and about 59,000 residents.

In remarks to the Board of Neighborhood Commissioners before it rejected Northridge's certification, DONE General Manager Greg Nelson said the Northridge panel's leadership has been in disarray. Also, he said, neighborhood council organizers have shouted down his staff members, and one even tried to shove a DONE staffer during a particularly heated confrontation.

``The leadership has had a great deal of trouble working with the staff,'' Nelson said.

Organizers of the would-be Northridge Neighborhood Council said the trouble began a couple of years ago when they insisted on running their meetings in a ``town hall'' format, giving the public - rather than just neighborhood council board members - a vote on issues. DONE resisted that idea, which the organizers took as a sign that Los Angeles' experiment with neighborhood democracy wasn't truly intended to bring power to the people.

DONE has also balked at organizers' demands that voters in the neighborhood council election be registered beforehand. The system of preregistering - which doesn't require that people be registered voters or even U.S. citizens to vote - was meant to prevent fiascoes like the Van Nuys Neighborhood Council election, in which people were pulled off the street to vote for candidates, the Northridge organizers said.

Nelson, however, said the preregistration requirement would deny too many stakeholders the right to vote.

Prince, a longtime leader of the Valley secession movement who ran unsuccessfully for a Los Angeles City Council seat this year, said Nelson is attempting to limit neighborhood councils' power through demands on how the councils should be organized.

``He wants to cookie-cutter everybody, and that's not the way it should be,'' said Prince, a former president of the Northridge group. ``You can't take 60 or 80 or 100 diverse groups and say you're all supposed to operate the same way. That's not the right way to do things.''

Lowenthal, the group's current president, said the Northridge council is suffering for the outspokenness of some of its leaders, including her. Lowenthal has criticized new Los Angeles Councilman Greig Smith over delays in fixing the Northridge pool. Lowenthal has suggested that Smith opposed certifying the Northridge Neighborhood Council, an allegation that Smith's chief of staff, Mitchell Englander, denied. But Lowenthal maintained Friday that she's willing to work with Smith.

Lowenthal said DONE officials have stated that she and other organizers were not the ``right people'' to lead the neighborhood council.

``That word, the `right people,' is so offensive,'' Lowenthal said. ``It's as if to say that Greg Nelson or DONE or the Board of Neighborhood Commissioners gets to decide who the right people are.''

Lowenthal said the Northridge organizers were held to different standards than the Porter Ranch Neighborhood Council, which was certified on the same night that the Northridge group was rejected. Three of the 13 Porter Ranch organizers are city employees, and the group does not have a history of battling City Hall.

But not everyone in Northridge trusts Lowenthal, Prince and Brink to lead a panel that is supposed to advise city officials on neighborhood issues.

A group of local activists concentrated in the upscale neighborhood of Sherwood Forest has been publicly opposing the group's certification, saying the Lowenthal-led organizers have alienated many in the community.

``This is not a group that should be certified as a neighborhood council,'' said Steve Slutzah, a Sherwood Forest resident who was involved with the neighborhood council in its earlier stages. ``They make it very uncomfortable for people who want to participate. Jane is looking for some type of platform to be outspoken about her beliefs and her political agenda.''

Retired Rep. Bobbi Fiedler, who also lives in Sherwood Forest, said that despite the ``town hall'' proposal, the Northridge organizers insisted on maintaining control in the hands of a small group of people and never reached out to the broader community.

``Bad judgment, mistreatment of people who came to meetings, the desire for total control - that's what kept them from getting certified,'' Fiedler said.

Lowenthal denied any mistreatment of people at meetings or attempts to monopolize the process, but doesn't apologize for the contentiousness of the process.

``Democracy is messy,'' she said. ``Whether we're quiet or polite or fun to be with shouldn't matter. We're here to get the people's work done.''

James Nash, [phone]

james.nash(at)dailynews.com

CAPTION(S):

photo, map

Photo:

(color) Formers of the would-be Northridge Neighborhood Council - from front left, Char Faber, Willie Langley, Jane Lowenthal; back left, Walter Prince and Charles Brink - stand outside the closed Northridge pool earlier this month.

Hans Gutknecht/Staff Photographer

Map:

NORTHRIDGE COUNCIL AREA

SOURCE: City of Los Angeles 

Gregg Miller/Staff Artist