ATWATER VILLAGE NEIGHBORHOOD COUNCIL CO-CHAIR GOES TO CITY HALL TO PETITION THE BUDGET & FINANCE COMMITTEE TO RECONSIDER ITS DECISION TO SLASH NEIGHBORHOOD COUNCIL YEARLY BUDGETS FROM $50,000 TO $11,500
AVNC Co-Chair Leonora Gershman-Pitts, along with other neighborhood council (NC) leaders, attended the Budget & Finance Committee meeting at City Hall to ask that their earlier decision to slash operating budget for NC's from $50,000.00 to $11,200.00 be reconsidered.
Click here to view video of May 12, 2009 Budget & Finance Committee meeting
(Jump to "Public Comments", Leonora is the 3rd speaker)
Leonora brought a prepared two minute statement to the meeting but was only allotted one minute to speak. The following is the full version of her statement:
" Thank you for giving us the opportunity to speak today.
I am here to ask you to please reconsider gutting the budget for the neighborhood councils in the City of Los Angeles. We fully understand that, given the city’s budget crisis, we all have to make sacrifices, but we are asking you to only reduce our funding to no less than $45,000 per year. What the Atwater Village Neighborhood Council does is fill in the blanks where the city is unable.None of our money goes into equipment or office space. With the exception of a little help for note taking and bookkeeping, ALL of our funds go directly to the community.
We have helped the Friends of Atwater Village fund our famous murals, which discourage our two local gangs from defacing our community. We have hosted a Community Day and health fair in Chevy Chase Park, announcing to the Toonerville gang that this was OUR neighborhood too. We created and fund our Farmers’ Market every Sunday, bringing nutrition and healthful knowledge to two thousand people a week. We have funded after-school programs, bought books for our library, bought pencils for our schoolchildren, who were using crayons to complete their homework because their parents couldn’t afford to buy them supplies, and the teachers couldn’t afford to supply them anymore.We purchased brush boxes for our firefighters, who saved our village during the Griffith Park fires a couple years ago.We put out a quarterly newsletter filled with important information about our river, our parks, our city, and our village.
We funded a parking study which will greatly influence our small businesses, giving them an opportunity to thrive. Every December, along with our Chamber of Commerce, we host and fund our annual Tree Lighting on our magnificent Redwood tree on Glendale Blvd. This year, we were able to reach out to four thousand people at the Tree Lighting, giving them pamphlets with all the information they need to be informed citizens of the city of Los Angeles.With the great involvement from our stakeholders, our hard work has made our little village the type of place where young families want to move. Because of this, our property values have skyrocketed - and remain strong in this downturn - bringing much needed tax revenue to the city. Our small businesses, although struggling in the recession like everyone else, benefit from our work, which has engendered a pedestrian - meaning walking - clientele. Our merchants hire locally and our stakeholders shop locally, and all of that money goes right back into the city of Los Angeles.
Our neighborhood council is the eyes and ears and hands and feet of the city council in Atwater Village. We are a functioning board of volunteers, some of us working almost full time to benefit our community, with no benefit to ourselves except a sense that we are making our village better. Please reconsider gutting our budget. I understand that there may be councils who do not give back as much as we do, but in a little village like Atwater, where we struggle with gang violence, economic hardship, and an evolving demographic, the neighborhood council plays a vital role in keeping our village safe and secure. I guarantee you that every dollar spent by the Atwater Village Neighborhood Council comes back to the city tenfold, in tax revenue, civic pride, and an informed and enthusiastic citizenry."