Empowerment Congress Sets Example for City

In a South Los Angeles City Council district, some of the city’s least-known leaders are conducting one of its loftiest experiments--a flirtation with neighborhood governance known as the Empowerment Congress.

The 6-year-old brainchild of City Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas and community organizer Anthony Thigpenn, the Empowerment Congress consists of the most vibrant network of neighborhood councils in Los Angeles.

Although the congress has no formal powers and only advisory status, its success in drawing people has led to crowds that are considered eye-popping in civic circles. Some 700 people attended its recent annual meeting on a rainy Saturday. And that alone has put it at the center of charter reform debate.

Some members of both commissions trying to rewrite the city’s 1925 charter say they regard the Empowerment Congress as an inspiration and as a possible model for a citywide network of neighborhood councils aimed at addressing what many of them see as the central ill of Los Angeles civic life--a sense of alienation from local government that manifests itself in periodic secession movements.

Ridley-Thomas has advanced the Empowerment Congress within the City Council as a model for reform, introducing legislation to create a Department of Neighborhoods that would assist each part of the city in forming its own network of advisory councils. One area of controversy: Ridley-Thomas wants the councils’ boundaries to conform to those of the 15 City Council districts. Otherwise, he says, they will become too unwieldy for council offices to service.

Competing visions are being offered by City Councilman Joel Wachs, who would encourage formation of advisory neighborhood councils in each of the city’s 103 designated neighborhoods, and by others who want neighborhood councils built into the city’s decision-making, rather than advice-giving, structure. Their main goal is to give the councils authority to make local zoning decisions.

Even those who favor decision-making councils look upon the Empowerment Congress with admiration, as a pioneer. John Shaughnessy, the founder of an organization called the Neighborhood Councils Movement in Los Angeles, told one of the charter commissions recently that, given the current government structure, Ridley-Thomas “did in the 8th District the best that can be done.”

A look at what he has accomplished with his still-evolving experiment provides some insight into the strengths and limitations of an advisory model, with one caveat about the degree to which it may be replicable in other areas.

As political scientist Xandra Kayden observes, the diverse but mostly African American population of Ridley-Thomas’ sprawling district “actually is a population that is most likely to look to government to help and to be comfortable working in organizations. You might not find quite the same thing on the Westside, where people might think they could do it themselves and don’t need an organization to help them get access, even though they feel more disenfranchised.”

Ridley-Thomas, an academically trained social ethicist and former head of the local chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, has a fluid, wide-ranging relationship with his Empowerment Congress. It is partly his political machine; partly his boss.

When he wants to round up people to attend a news conference for a show of support, he taps the Empowerment Congress leadership to make calls.

Each year, he shares copies of the mayor’s proposed budget with the leaders of the congress, polls them on their views and tailors budget amendments to allocate more money for things they want: $3 million for more sidewalk repairs; $400,000 for more stray animal sweeps.

When the leadership told him several years ago it wanted more supermarkets for the chronically underserved district, he “got on it.” Since the riots in 1992, the district has averaged nearly a new supermarket per year.

Like all City Council members, Ridley-Thomas is something of a mini-mayor for his district, with wide authority over land use. And like all of them, he represents a constituency so large--250,000 people--that he is a remote figure to most of those he is supposed to serve.

To make his district somewhat more manageable, he subdivided it into four Empowerment Congress areas of roughly 60,000 people each. Periodically, each of these areas invites its block clubs, church groups and other organizations to assemblies at which anyone can run for two-year terms on the congress. Some run at-large; others from even smaller geographic sub-areas of 20,000 people.

Ridley-Thomas fills out the ranks of those elected with appointments of experienced people who have already served elective terms and with representatives of businesses or nonprofit groups, who may work but not live in the community. He also appoints people to topical advisory councils, on issues such as public safety, that function district-wide.

All told, there are about 100 members of these councils who, in practice, tend to be self-selected. As one of them, architect Victor Jay Nahmias, put it: “Somebody will say, ‘Why don’t you do this?’ and we’ll turn it around and say, ‘Why don’t you lead the effort?’ ”

A Voice for All Neighborhoods

The central mission of the Empowerment Congress is to offer all comers a chance to learn more about working the levers of city government so that they can make it work better for their neighborhoods. But because Ridley-Thomas’ district is so large and economically diverse, different neighborhoods have different priorities.

In the relatively poor southeastern portion, where streets of tidy homes interweave with depressingly bleak commercial strips, a priority is to close alleyways to dumpers and criminals.

Elizabeth McClellan, a retired supervisor of teachers aides who lives on East 91st Street, recalled watching a man who had the audacity to pull up in a recreational vehicle and empty his sewage tank in the alley behind her house. She also recalled prostitutes and drug users in the alley, where some of her neighbors trimmed their backyard fences with razor wire.

Today, thanks in part to McClellan’s hard work, the alley is closed to traffic and has become a garden spot. “When you look at this as an outsider, you say this is just a little alley with some grass and flowers in it,” McClellan said last week. “But it is more than that to us. When I used to go to bed, I couldn’t sleep at night.”

The alley conversion to a mini-park was a pilot project of the city, the Empowerment Congress and others--the first of many alleys that the city has since agreed to gate as a result of residents’ petitions.

Before Ridley-Thomas, “no public official ever said to this community: ‘You do have power. Use it,’ ” said McClellan, an elected representative from her neighborhood. “The Empowerment Congress is a baby. It has not done anything spectacular. But it has the potential.”

In the more prosperous western part of the district, which contains one of the nation’s most affluent concentrations of African Americans, many residents are affronted by a lack of high-quality shopping.

Three years ago, when Cincinnati-based Federated Department Stores was struggling to decide whether to close a reportedly unprofitable Broadway that it had just acquired or convert it to a Macy’s, the Empowerment Congress saw an opportunity to make this point. Contending that the performance of the store at the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza would improve if the quality of merchandise were upgraded, the Empowerment Congress collected 3,000 signatures and turned out 200 people for a “Make it Macy’s” street demonstration. The city offered Federated a $3-million, no-interest loan to fix up the store, and Federated agreed to stay.

But the mall’s owner said recently that the loan remains untapped, and a disappointed Romerol Malveaux, an Empowerment Congress leader, said the store has not upgraded its merchandise.

Last month, the Empowerment Congress wrote Federated again, asking for an explanation. Federated did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Joining Forces With Other Groups

In alliance with other community organizations, the Empowerment Congress is also waging a long-term struggle to use nuisance abatement laws to keep the district’s disproportionately large number of liquor stores in line or shut them down. Three stores have been closed so far, Ridley-Thomas’ staffers say, and many more are operating under restrictions imposed by zoning administrators who conduct formal hearings at which they hear evidence that owners condone drug use, loitering and violence.

The Empowerment Congress’ southwest neighborhood council is monitoring a liquor store at the corner of Florence and Normandie avenues, one of the epicenters of the 1992 riots.

During a pep rally-like speech at the Empowerment Congress’ annual meeting in late January, Ridley-Thomas drew enthusiastic applause as he recounted the closing of another liquor store that had been the center of so much violence that it was nicknamed the “Bucket of Blood.”

“We won’t tolerate that kind of disrespect in our neighborhoods,” he said.

That annual meeting, at which anyone who was interested had a chance to question the city’s top administrators who had been invited for that purpose, pointed up one of the Empowerment Congress’ shortcomings--its failure to attract Latino interest proportionate to the district’s fast-growing Latino population. Portions of the district, particularly the northern area that stretches to the Santa Monica Freeway, serve as a port of entry for many Latino immigrants; the Latino population as a whole exceeds 30%. African Americans comprise more than 60%.

Although the Empowerment Congress has some Latino officials, offers Spanish language classes and provided Spanish language translation services at the conference, attendees were overwhelmingly African American.

Outreach is encouraged by the Empowerment Congress leadership. At a recent district-wide public safety council meeting, the African American chairman publicly congratulated an African American member who had persuaded several Latino families to attend an Empowerment Congress event.

But outreach is uneven. No list of Empowerment Congress meetings is available to the public at the organization’s hub, the Constituent Services Center, on Vermont Avenue just north of Manchester. The center replaced Ridley-Thomas’ old office, which was burned during the riots, and serves as a mini-City Hall with representatives of many city agencies.

The process also is hampered by an apparent reluctance to give credit by name to other organizations that have helped the neighborhood. Father Bill Delaney, co-pastor at St. Agnes Roman Catholic Church and a co-chair of the predominately Latino Southern California Organizing Committee, said he was irked by a recent Ridley-Thomas-staff-produced video on the Empowerment Congress. The video claimed credit for the Empowerment Congress along with other unnamed groups for a long struggle to persuade a chain to open a supermarket at Adams Boulevard and Vermont Avenue, but it failed to cite the role of Delaney’s group by name. “We were largely responsible for construction,” the pastor said.

Because the Empowerment Congress is the creation of Ridley-Thomas, who was elected to a second term in 1995 with 89% of the vote, a key question is whether it will be sufficiently entrenched to survive after he leaves office. He is up for reelection next year and, if he wins, will be term-limited out in 2003.

Although the congress has some characteristics of a booster club for him, it has not succeeded in mollifying all of his opponents.

A group of Baldwin Hills homeowners who attend Empowerment Congress events is angry about Ridley-Thomas’ support of plans to build what he and city engineers call a necessary new sewer line through the area. Some are convinced that the line is actually a racist plot to build more in-line capacity to store sewage under a predominately black neighborhood, which they fear will make them increasingly subject to foul odors.

Some members of the Leimert Park Merchants Assn., which has circulated cartoons of Ridley-Thomas depicting him as Napoleon, say they disagree with specifics of his revitalization plans for the area, which is becoming a sort of reincarnation of the old Central Avenue hub of Los Angeles’ black culture. “He treats us as children,” said Faadil Asadullah, who owns a West African fabric and clothing store there. “ ‘Here’s what I’m going to do for Leimert Park. Take it or leave it.’ ”

A homeowners group, said one participant, “ripped him up one side and down the other” at an Empowerment Congress meeting about his hopes to replace a stretch of South Figueroa Street motels that caters to prostitutes with homeless shelters and halfway houses.

There are also complaints about constituent services similar to those that can be heard all over town. District resident Maria Zamora said she has had repeated problems with stray dogs in the street and with neighbors selling marijuana. But when she calls Ridley-Thomas’ office for help, “sometimes they respond, sometimes not.”

Said Ridley-Thomas, who commits $300,000, or a third of his annual council budget, to the Empowerment Congress project: “Man, it’s a lot of work.”

One question charter reformers must decide is whether the work is worth it.