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Health & Fitness

Patch Blog: Just Say 'Know' More and 'No' Less

Journeying through the 'civic process,' coming full circle, and yet ending up in a different place than I started - sort of.

"Learning is finding out what we already know, doing is proving that we know it, and teaching is reminding others that they already know it as well. We are all learners, doers, and teachers," says the WiseGuy.

If indeed as the astrophysicists and astromonomers attest, we live in a spiraling universe, I guess it's no wonder that a guy could travel full circle and end up somewhere else than where he started.

Last November, in just such an exercise of learning, doing and teaching, in a spiraling universe, I wrote a Patch commentary, lamenting the increasingly vitriolic tenor of the public discourse in West Hollywood. The issue de jour that drove me to my keyboard was the Plummer Park redevelopment plan.

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While I was sympathetic to the objections of residents to some of the major components of the plan, I was and remain more than a little concerned about the drive-by demagoguery, name-calling, and ill-will that seems to permeate every issue of concern in West Hollywood these days.

Is it just a sign of the times or is there an underlying pathology in West Hollywood’s unique body politic?

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As a member of the Eastside Project Area Committee, I was also perplexed that the PAC was largely sidelined in the years long planning process for the Plummer Park’s “extreme makeover.” Not only did I feel out of the loop on something that in my estimation should have squarely been on the PAC’s plate, I also felt like I had personally failed in my responsibility to represent the legitimate interests of Eastside residents. 

At the time I wrote the commentary, I wasn’t at all sure that my fellow PAC members felt the same way about our limited role in such a pivotal and pricey project or if they shared the concerns that were emerging from the Protect Plummer Park (PPP) movement.

As I mistakenly recalled then, the PAC’s only requested action on the matter as it turns out was to “receive and file” the project plan, not to “approve or comment on” on it.  However, lest I take any solace of reprieve from an accusation of blindly rubber-stamping an obviously done deal, I also noted that most of the periodic updates we had received were relative to the financing of the project in the context of the State Legislature’s and Governor’s drive to eliminate redevelopment agencies altogether.  

At no time do I recall anyone questioning the issuance of $125 million in municipal bonds, about which I know absolutely nothing. What I do remember in reference to the bond funding was a general sense of relief among PAC members that the Plumber Park project wouldn’t be scuttled despite loss of the original redevelopment funds.

Realizing the huge disconnect between what I had experienced during my two years on the PAC and the sentiments of a large sector of the Eastside community, I took the opportunity in the follow-up blog-a-logue to publicly encourage PPP folks to come to the Dec. 6 PAC meeting and share their concerns, which they most graciously did. 

After several leaders of PPP spoke and Allyne Winderman addressed the issue, I raised my concerns about a seemingly flawed and inadequate process given our very reason for being and made a formal motion, which passed unanimously, that the PAC request of the City Council an opportunity to “review and comment” on the redesign, which by that point was already in the offing due to the tireless dedication of the folks at PPP.

Whatever satisfaction I may have expected from my rather modest effort to actually do my job as a PAC member was quickly tempered at the next Council meeting, when “reconvening the Design Subcommittee” and sending the plan “back to the drawing boards” actually translated to “passing-the-bucks” (a million of them) back to the original architects.  Got to love those cost-plus contracts. 

My remaining satisfaction evaporated at our Feb. 7 PAC meeting, when it was reported that the motion was not listed in the minutes, because it was a violation of the Brown Act to vote on something that hadn’t been included on the agenda and pre-announced.

It’s an outrage, I tell you. Who is this Brown fellow anyway?  Just another corrupt out of touch politician from some political dynasty, I’ll bet.

Actually, to quote Wikipedia: "Ralph Milton Brown (September 16, 1908 – April 9, 1966) was a member of the California State Assembly representing the 30th District (Modesto) from 1943 to 1961 and serving Speaker of the Assembly from January 1959.  He is best known for writing the Brown Act, California's first sunshine law, providing for increased public access to government meetings, which was enacted in 1953.

Whether Tuesday’s PAC meeting will indeed be our last meeting remains to be seen. While some reassuring words were offered, it seems no small irony that the substantive request of the PAC’s attempted eleventh hour intervention for “review and comment” will never come to pass. Indeed, history may well record that in the immediate aftermath of the Eastside PAC finding its unanimous voice of dissent on the matter, it was dissolved.

Most of the evening at this weeks PAC meeting, however, was taken up with tributes and fabulous farewells for Allyne Winderman, the godmother of the Eastside PAC, who is leaving her Weho city post as the Director of Rent Stabilization on March 8. 

With the recent demise of Redevelopment Agencies across the board and the West Hollywood City Council voting at its last meeting to absorb the existing assets, liabilities, and in-pipeline projects of the West Hollywood Community Development Commission, a general overhaul of the PAC is more than likely than not, as the Council begins to rethink redevelopment citywide.

That culpability for the PAC’s demise belongs to the State Legislature and the Governor will be little consolation to the local civic process as West Hollywood’s largest citizens advisory body breathes its last and the Eastside once again faces the prospect of returning to its “red-headed stepchild” status, which some will see as tragic, some may see as a blessing, and which Jeff Prang told me on Tuesday morning is in fact a fallacy, the City spending four times the money on the Eastside as it does on the Westside.

So what have I learned that the “wise man” suggests I already knew?

What was clear to me then and is even clearer to me now, thanks to the education I’ve received from many of my fellow residents, is that after 25 years the public process in our little 1.9 square miles has not kept pace with the burgeoning interest, participation, and democratic expectations of an increasingly sophisticated and engaged citizenry.

What is clear to me now that wasn’t so clear to me last November is that the controversies around the Plummer Park Plan and other hot-button issues of late are not important based solely on the substantive merits of the projects in question, but are in fact symbolic surrogates for the collective psychology of the citizenry and the evolution of its self-image as masters of West Hollywood’s destiny.

That’s why a blog-a-logue about heritage trees in Plummer Park can suddenly morph into a discussion about term limits and who is profiting from high cost municipal bonds. Why a fountain dedicated to a lovable curmudgeon is suddenly an embarrassing boondoggle, why a world-class library that any city in America would be proud to call their own is berated as little more than an over-sized vanity plate for a “corrupt founding father.”  And why a 21st century performing arts venue is derided as a space ship.

It’s not necessarily that the community doesn’t want a world-class library or a 21st century performing arts facility or a fountain with Sal’s name on it. And it’s not necessarily that the residents are opposed to paying for them, but if they are going to pay for them, the community needs to feel ownership, and ownership requires a buy-in, and a buy-in requires a legitimate voice, and a legitimate voice requires an authentic process worthy of peoples’ time and effort.

Put simply, the people of the “Creative City” want to have a genuine hand in the “creating,” not watch from the sidelines as things they love are bulldozed to make room for things they’ve had no hand in designing -- or worse yet -- are diametrically opposed to the input they did offer -- and the bills for which will arrive on their door steps.

Another thing I’ve learned that I already knew, but is certainly worth reminding others of that they know too, is that politicians and their staffs -- as well as those loyal oppositionists with the temerity and fortitude to hold their feet to the fire -- are some of the hardest working, most dedicated and underappreciated public servants we have.

Whether you’re a political insider or outsider, if you want to make a real difference in the world, the challenges are the same: kong days, short nights, nonstop reading, and the endless meetings, pone-calls, e-mails, texts, blogs, and tweets that characterize the post-modern “town square.”

From obsequious allies who oppose half of what you stand for -- to the professionally disgruntled who wear veracity like a cheap suit in a three dollar whorehouse -- to the Monday morning arm-chair activists who will throw any bomb but themselves, you’re damned if don’t and if you do, damned harder. 

No misstep goes un-noticed, and no good deed goes unpunished. Such is the “plight of ife” for the 1 percent who actually occupy our local body politic.

They say all politics is local, and that all political struggle really boils down to geography: places, the people who occupy them, and how they are secured and maintained.

And no matter the place, no matter the occupants -- be it a drag bar in Greenwich Village, a family-planning clinic in the Bible Belt, a small neighborhood church in a Gay Mecca, or an oasis of God’s green creation in the Jumbo-tron urban enclave that is West Hollywood, civility is not just about what folks say, but also about what they don’t say and perhaps more importantly, what they do and don’t do.

In the absence of an open authentically interactive public process, which allows the public to know more and say “No” less, we will never be able to forgo “winner take all” majoritarian fiat for the hard work of community consensus building and avoid the risk of every quality of life decision from becoming a convenient surrogate for the understandable frustrations – if not the high-octane acrimony -- about a form and function of local government that on its face seems unresponsive and, at times, increasingly self-reliant for its legitimacy.

Civility and the language of diplomacy are both ends and means, but neither are adequate substitutes for actually listening and responding in a tangible way to what the people want and don’t want.

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