I hope this newsletter finds you well. We had a great Neighborhood Council Budget Day last Saturday with over 200 Neighborhood Council leaders at City Hall learning about the City budget and electing their new Budget Advocates. Big thank you’s to the attendees and the City officials who supported the event: Mayor Garcetti, his Budget and Innovation guru, Deputy Mayor Rick Cole, and his awesome team, Councilmember and Chair of the Budget and Finance Committee, Councilmember Paul Krekorian, City Controller Ron Galperin, Board of Public Works President Kevin James, and CAO Miguel Santana. Of course, appreciation must also go to our outstanding Budget Advocates from last year, Co-Chaired by Jay Handal and Joanne Yvanek-Garb, our dedicated Board of Neighborhood Commissioners, who led the breakout sessions, and our super staff, led by Policy Director, Joseph Hari. The Mayor’s Office, Budget Advocates and EmpowerLA have created a Budget Day Survey to get your input about the City budget. Please take a few minutes to give us your feedback. For more information on Budget Day, see below.

With a day’s rest, our Commissioners were back to work on Monday, finalizing an update to the Neighborhood Council Posting Policy. I know some folks have been confused with the changes so the Commission has put out a FAQ on the changes and how the Department will be updating all bylaws automatically the next few months to incorporate the update. The Commission also made a few changes to their Neighborhood Council Board Member Code of Conduct Policy, which will be up for discussion and possible action at their September 2nd meeting in the North Valley. If you would like to submit public comment on this policy, please send it to Janet Lindo at Janet.Lindo@lacity.org.

Last night, I was happy to see our fledgling TUX (Technology User Experience) Team NationBuilder ambassadors from our 12 service regions at the launch of the NationBuilder training. Many thanks to them for stepping up to be the Neighborhood Council leaders on NationBuilder in their regions. NationBuilder is an exciting tool to bring all of your stakeholder communications together in one place, and we’re happy to offer the Neighborhood Councils the opportunity to use it to grow their stakeholder contacts. I want to really appreciate our Outreach and Communications Director, Stephen Box, and his team, Sevak Paramazian and Jose Galdamez, for working with NationBuilder this past year to get us to this point. I also received a lovely surprise yesterday from Sevak and our TUX Team logo creator, Arin Abedian, when they presented me with their handmade version of our TUX Team logo with a flashing heart at my actual office location in City Hall. Thank you!

I’ll be stopping by Park Mesa Heights Community Council’s annual Unity Fair tomorrow in South Los Angeles so if I don’t see you there, have a wonderful weekend!

Best,

Grayce Liu,
General Manager
Department of Neighborhood Empowerment aka EmpowerLA