Ill-Founded Opinion
While I appreciate fair and accurate coverage of Pacific Palisades Community Council’s activities, the mix of erroneous reporting and ill-founded opinion in the May 17 edition did a disservice to the community.
I’ll save space by not reciting my personal laundry list of where the Post went wrong. It’s far more important that the PPCC’s actual role and purpose is correctly conveyed.
As clearly stated in its Mission Statement read at every meeting, PPCC provides a forum for community discussion and acts as an advocate to government on issues where consensus is reached, as reflected by a two-thirds vote of board members.
Similar to other neighborhood and community councils, PPCC serves as an advisor to decision-makers, i.e., it does not make policy or rules. PPCC has been serving in this capacity for 45 years.
Any changes in the organization’s long-stated mission in order to expand its role (if that is a new direction favored by any of the officer candidates) would have to come via a two-thirds vote of board members.
It’s also important for the community to know that the role of the chair is to advocate and support positions taken by the board, even if he or she holds a different opinion or perspective; in fact, under governing parliamentary rules, in the normal course of meetings, the chair does not vote, does not make motions and should not inject his or her personal opinion.
Whether a candidate has new or different opinions is simply not relevant to his or her duties as an officer; if members or others want the council to adopt different policy positions, this can be accomplished by the election of area or at-large representatives who may vote (or by sound arguments persuade other members to vote) on issues in a particular way.
The critical factor in the choice of officers is not personal views, but whether the candidates are qualified to continue the organization’s effective administration and to advocate the board’s positions. The team I support is exceptionally well qualified, indeed the best qualified, to do so.
As I stated publicly at the last PPCC meeting: In the end, it is voting board members—no one else—who will exercise their judgment about PPCC officers for the coming term.
Christina Spitz | PPCC Chair Emeritus and Candidate for Secretary
In Defense of New Ideas
Change is inevitable. We’ve all heard it, but resist conceptualizing it.
Glance back to 1972 when Pacific Palisades Community Council first convened and heard from Councilmember Marvin Braude that we could be influential if we were “reasonable but forceful.”
Back then, we took the bold step of requesting city funds to provide an ambulance at Los Angeles Fire Department Station 69 and learned the Village Green had been acquired for $46,000 for the purpose of development into a public space, and we asked for public input.
Today we take so much of the above for granted, but we have to remember that these were all new ideas at one point. We need only reach out to the Pacific Palisades Historical Society or our own neighborhood historian, Randy Young, to learn how much things have changed through the decades and even stayed the same.
Palisadians have persistently come together to preserve essential elements of Palisadian life, maintaining a down-to-earth style of small-town goodness that has kept our neighborhoods unique and our village charming. I hope that never changes.
What is changing is the community discourse that seems to want to mimic the national stage. People who should have everything in common, anchored together by an unyielding commitment to preserve a distinctly beautiful community, insist on dividing along arbitrary lines of us and them. A civil outreach of a neutral hand to bridge a divide is often slapped by a bristling reminder that we are segregated among those who would have things stay the same and those who would welcome change.
When I first began my term as chair of PPCC, I suggested live streaming our bi-monthly public board meetings for greater public engagement. While many welcomed this 21st century idea, others who opposed the newness of an untested idea resisted. I deferred to the wisdom of the elders and ceded.
Similarly, in so many instances, the wisdom, indeed the clutch of those who claim the experience of the past as the roadmap for the future, has won the day. Other ideas that found their way to the back burner were the spring art festival and hyper-local grantmaking.
Digital outreach and surveying of constituents on the part of area reps were rebuffed. Allowing runners-up in area elections to take the 2nd Alternate role after each election was dismissed, a monthly digital community newsletter never happened and a community garden somewhere centrally accessible to bring the community together were abandoned.
This was all during my tenure and falls squarely on my shoulders as underachievement. But it also raises the broader notion of how we embrace new ideas.
This year, as I term out, the nominating committee I appointed (stacked with independently minded members with diverse points of view) came up with a balanced set of nominees for officer positions that both nod to the protectionist old and extend a welcome to the populist new.
I use these words not lightly. Protectionism is great, to a degree, after which it becomes exclusionism, and populism is the insurer of public engagement, until it becomes mob-rule.
But there is a balance that can be held by thoughtful people working together in earnest volunteerism, seeking to protect only that which we resolve as a community is worthy of protecting. Each time we think of change, we need not refer to the bedlam at the end of a slippery slope, and each time we hearken back to the comfort of tradition, we need not presume that new ideas are unwelcome.
Our aim should be to work together, find our common bonds and march toward modernity in lock step without rancor but with respect—respect for the ideas that brought us this far and will take us into the future.
There’s another old saying worth acknowledging: Change or perish.
Maryam Zar | PPCC Chair
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