I hope our newsletter finds you well. On Saturday, Mayor Eric Garcetti, Councilmembers Mitch Englander and David Ryu and Board of Public Works President Kevin James joined a wonderful lineup of VIPs, including Commissioner Josh LaFarga of our Board of Neighborhood Commissioners and Bureau of Sanitation Director Enrique Zaldivar, to honor our Clean Streets LA Challenge Awardees on Saturday.  It was a standing room only event, and I was happy to see some of our Neighborhood Councils get honored for their hard work. Many thanks to all involved, particularly our Neighborhood Empowerment Advocate Octaviano Rios for supporting the Clean Streets project for EmpowerLA.  Check out his article on the event below.  The project was so successful that the City will be doing it again so stay tuned.

On Tuesday, I was excited to open up Neighborhood Council Civic University 1.0 with our BFF, Dr. Raphael Sonenshein, Executive Director of the the Pat Brown Institute of Public Affairs, Cal State Los Angeles.  We had 173 participants, including 30 youth!  HUGE thanks to Mayor Garcetti’s Office, the Board of Neighborhood Commissioners and our EmpowerLA staffers, Mike Fong and Tom Soong, for making this amazing workshop happen again!  

We filed our report back for online voting (Council File 15-1022-S2) this week with a recommendation to continue the online voting and voter registration build out for all of the Neighborhood Councils for the 2018 elections  We also made additional recommendations for systemic changes to Neighborhood Council elections, which I know will cause lively debates citywide, but that I hope will make our system as inclusive as it was meant to be when it was created.  Please take the time to review our report and weigh in with a Community Impact Statement as a Neighborhood Council or via public comment as a stakeholder as soon as possible so your opinion is counted.  

Don’t forget on Monday, the Board of Neighborhood Commissioners will be holding their retreat in the North Valley City Hall from 10am – 2pm, and we’ll be holding a Leadership Academy Ethics and Open Government Workshop with the City Attorney’s Office the same evening at the Braude. Also, our first Neighborhood Council Film Liaison Town Hall will be next Thursday.

Have a wonderful weekend!