Squabble at Van Nuys Council: When Democracy Goes Crazy By JACQUELINE FOX Staff Reporter Board meetings have been scheduled, but no one is attending. Reports have been drafted but rendered useless because their crafters have refused to back them on an official basis. And, with each day that passes, the long-awaited feeling of so-called civic empowerment gives way to more anger, more disenchantment with city hall and more divisiveness between neighbors. Welcome to the Van Nuys Neighborhood Council District, where a contentious battle rages over the results of the council’s February election for seats on its governing board. To put it in context, a handful of losing contenders for seats on the Van Nuys council’s board of directors are challenging the results of the election. They say voters’ ID’s were sporadically checked and that some candidates were conducting polling place no-nos, including yanking voters off the streets without first ensuring they lived in the district, much less cared about what went on there. The debate was supposed to be resolved, many thought, by the Los Angeles League of Women Voters earlier this month when the group was asked to study a complaint submitted by the challengers and present an opinion. Based on the complaint, the League recommended a new election be held. But because it was never asked to, nor does it desire to, serve as the official arbiter for the election, the league was told to hold on to its recommendations and that was the end of that report, for now. Enter the Los Angeles Neighborhood Legal Services, (NLS), based in Pacoima, which is weighing whether it’s up to the task of resolving the dispute. Don’t count on it, says Jim Leahy, who served as interim chairman of the council prior to the election but did not run for a board seat. According to Leahy, part of the roadblock in resolving the dispute has to do with who gets to choose the judge and jury. Guidelines by the Department of Neighborhood Empowerment or DONE, which oversees the council system, say it should be up to the council members. But with an election hanging in the wind, no one can decide who those members are. As a result, DONE representatives are working to facilitate the next steps, which is also creating controversy. “We can’t move on this because we don’t have anyone in place,” said Leahy. “We’ve scheduled meetings to talk about it, but no one goes. So DONE is making these recommendations to elected candidates, which means the challenged candidates are being given the right to decide their own judge and jury, and this is creating the appearance that we are not going to ever get an impartial group.” In addition, said Leahy, who supports holding a new election, challengers and some stakeholders have expressed concerns about the NLS getting involved because it is so heavily financed through the city’s coffers. “I think as a general rule, our stakeholders have a lot of respect for the work they do,” said Leahy. “But some are very concerned by the fact that they are funded almost entirely by city funds.” Established in 1965, the NLS is partially funded by the city, state and federal grants and partnerships with community organizations. The agency’s primary goal is to provide low-cost legal counsel to the poor. Whether the NSL could act as an impartial arbiter, may not be an issue. NLS Director Neal Dudovitz said although no decision has been made on whether to arbitrate the disputed election, his group has concerns as well. “I can’t really say much about the process at this point because of course we were just recently informed of our potential role in this,” said Dudovitz. “But I can say that generally the NLS’s function is to be an advocacy organization on behalf of low-income communities. So the request (by DONE) is to ask us to do something different from what we would normally do.” Meanwhile, DONE General Manager Greg Nelson has fielded criticism for not taking the League’s report more seriously and for calling it merely a collection of “recommendations.” But Nelson said he told the league to hold on to its findings until they can be turned over to an official arbiter should one ever be chosen because to put them into DONE’s hands would only cause further speculation. Guiding representatives He insists DONE is only trying to guide the council representatives, not determine policy. “We didn’t want this (report) to just be sitting around here, we wanted it to be in safe hands until we could find another group to resolve the election,” said Nelson. “We never said the League was the final arbiter, we never contracted with them and never said that their report would be the final word.” Nelson said there was no specific time frame for getting a decision from the NLS, but that he and everyone involved wanted to resolve the election as soon as possible. Meanwhile, the fallout from the Van Nuys council election has prompted some changes, albeit minor ones, in some DONE policy. Nelson said he is preparing a final draft of a revised voter guide for neighborhood councils and that, if necessary, the city ordinance on councils may have to be changed to include certain uniform rules that would apply to all councils, even though the initial goal was to let each of them operate as autonomously as possible. “You know, it just may be that, because this is all so new, that we will find ourselves having to change the ‘one-size-fits-all’ policy and create some new uniform laws and regulations for councils across the board,” said Nelson. “We certainly recognize that, if empowerment is going to mean anything at all, it means that the councils have to be given the maximum amount of flexibility to govern themselves. But is there one thing or two about how things have been done that may be uniformly bad? Maybe.”