Here's what happened to the Laurel Canyon residents:
(Daily Breeze)
Today is Wednesday, December 21, 2005
Originally published Wednesday, December 21, 2005
Updated Wednesday, December 21, 2005
'Photo op' angers residents wanting the council's attention
When Laurel Canyon residents finally got their turn to speak to the L.A. City Council, there were exactly three council members in their seats. This is business at usual.
By David Zahniser
Copley News Service


For weeks, Los Angeles City Controller Laura Chick has promised that her plan to audit the Los Angeles Unified School District will not distract her from her other duties at City Hall.

The same could not be said, however, of Los Angeles City Council members, who were so focused on promoting Chick's audit -- and appearing with Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa at a signing ceremony for Chick's proposal -- that they left the public to address 12 empty seats during Tuesday's council meeting.

Only three of the council's 15 members were still in the room when a group from Laurel Canyon made their way to the podium to describe their fears of a major hillside collapse caused by development and excavation.

"We're not being heard by anyone," said retiree Don Garrison, moments after he spoke at the podium. "We're making our comments to a bunch of empty seats."

The council's indifferent response to the public has been a hot-button issue for years among neighborhood activist community volunteers. Earlier this year, an appellate court judge forced council members to hold a new hearing on a zoning issue because too many of them had been caught on videotape getting out of their chairs, talking on the telephone or chatting with aides before a vote.

Under the public meeting law known as the Ralph M. Brown Act, the council cannot meet unless it has a quorum -- which in Los Angeles is 10 out of 15 members. However, council members are considered present at a meeting even if they are in the nearby hallway, restroom or press conference room.

Garrison and nearly two dozen of his neighbors waited four hours for the chance to speak on a residential development project planned for their neighborhood, which is expected to result in the removal of 200,000 cubic feet of dirt.

While he praised Councilman Tom LaBonge for finding a representative of the Building and Safety Department and listening to the group's testimony, Laurel Canyon Association board member Jim Nelson said nearly everyone else behaved in a manner that was humiliating and embarrassing.

"It didn't feel good at all," he said.

Councilwoman Wendy Greuel, who spent the most time out of her seat during the Villaraigosa press conference, said she thought that council members were going to come in and out of the signing ceremony so that they would be able to follow the meeting.

"I apologize to those individuals," she said. "We tried to peek in and hear part of it as it was ongoing."

Even when a Building and Safety Department official discussed the issues raised by the group, the council had only eight members in the room -- shy of the legally required 10-member quorum. The council approved the hillside dirt-hauling route on a 13-0 vote.


Councilwoman Janice Hahn described the council's handling of the matter as wrong, saying either the press conference should have been delayed or the council should have held a 10-minute recess so that no one would have been ignored.

"We were very disrespectful to the public," she said.

Garrison agreed, saying the experience "left a bitter taste."

"We sat there and listened through four hours of the other business," he said. "And when it came time for us to be heard, they went into the other room for a photo op."