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Thursday, Mar 28, 2024

Neighborhood Advocate

As a member of the new Commission on neighborhood councils, lawyer Lee Kanon Alpert Will have a big say in the way charter reform Reaches the grassroots level A former board member of Valley VOTE, the group pushing Valley secession, Encino real estate lawyer Lee Kanon Alpert is now one of three people who will oversee the future structure of the neighborhood councils outlined in the new city charter. While Alpert has been a vocal booster of change for the Valley, he has also been a longtime city insider. For the past 20 years, he has been on Councilman Hal Bernson’s advisory council, serving as president for the last decade. Alpert also is an active volunteer at Cal State Northridge and with a number of Valley groups. Last month, he was named recipient of the 41st annual Fernando Award, given to the Valley individual who best exemplifies the spirit of volunteerism. Most of his roles have been relatively low profile and local to the Valley. While he’s been approached about running for political office, Alpert says he prefers to spur change from behind the scenes. His appointment by Mayor Richard Riordan to the Commission on Neighborhood Councils will be one of his highest-profile roles to date. As one of three people on the commission, Alpert will no doubt have a dramatic impact on how much more power the Valley and its neighborhood groups see from charter reform. Question: How did you get involved with Councilman Bernson’s citizens advisory council? Answer: The first politician I met and actually I should call him an elected official because politician has sort of a bad connotation was when I moved to Northridge about 20 years ago, and that was Hal Bernson. He had started this organization called the citizens advisory council. Q: Are you still on the Valley VOTE board? How did you get involved in that? A: I was on the Valley VOTE board for a short time. I was concerned about the direction it was taking. It appeared to be just a pure pro-secession movement, regardless of what we do to the Valley and the rest of the city. I got involved because I was asked to get involved by some members of the board. We worked with the people very well and then the focus in the bylaws changed to something I was much more comfortable with, which was let’s do a study. I just had so many other things that were on the agenda, and I felt like we accomplished what I set out to do. I did support Valley VOTE and still do in their efforts to get the study done, because I think it’s important and should be done. Q: So what is your view on secession? A: I want to see what the study shows first. Q: From being involved in city government on a council advisory board, how do you think L.A. is doing? A: I think there are real problems with large government. They become too large, they get carried away, and nobody knows what anyone else is doing. There are ways to restructure it and make it better, to make people more accountable. Q: Do you think charter reform will be the answer? A: I think there’s an opportunity there, a real opportunity to make things work. In that instance, if it works, then being big could be much more of an advantage than being small in terms of some of the grants we get, some of the dollars we have. If the Valley secedes, for example, we’re probably not going to have any income from the airport (LAX). We won’t have any harbor income, which generates billions of dollars a year. We have to realize we’re going to be losing those resources, if the Valley secedes. I think the economic issue is real important and we need to take a look and see what happens. Q: Have the pending changes coming with charter reform taken the steam out of the secession movement? A: Oh no. It has not taken the steam out of it because nothing’s really happened yet. We don’t know how the regional planning councils are going to work, we don’t know how the neighborhood councils are going to work. Our commission will be presenting a plan, hopefully within one year, and then the City Council has six months to tinker with it. So we don’t know what it’s going to look like. You’re looking at two years before it really goes into effect. Q: What will you do on the Commission on Neighborhood Councils? A: Our role is really to structure the neighborhood councils. We’ll try and take all the information in and look at what has worked in other cities and what hasn’t. Seattle, Minneapolis they’ve had really successful neighborhood councils that have worked, and it has helped government and people feel more in tune to it. We want to get the information from Washington, D.C., where it’s been a dismal failure. I want to look at that, maybe even more than I want to look at the successes, because that’ll tell you what things are happening. Our focus is to try and bring all the community into neighborhood councils and develop what they’ll actually look like. Q: Are there any lessons you learned from being on council district advisory boards that you want to incorporate into neighborhood councils? A: I’m looking at our advisory councils being a very good model for neighborhood councils. Now, the only negative about our advisory councils is that the City Council districts are very large. Maybe there shouldn’t be one Chatsworth council, maybe there should be three. Encino, for example, is very different when you go south of (Ventura) Boulevard and north. So maybe Encino will have five councils. What I’ve learned is that, if these are really going to be effective and take care of the potholes in the street and signage problems in communities and issues that impact a community, it doesn’t always impact a whole council district. That’s what I think was one of the benefits I learned in working with the larger advisory council: If you want to accomplish fixing the potholes and the things that just impact a specific community, it’s easier to do it if you just have a neighborhood council for that little community. Q: What do you think the neighborhood councils will look like? A: I’d be shocked if there weren’t 100 neighborhood councils in this city. Maybe there’ll be 150, maybe 200. The best structure that I think works, that I think the charter is trying to say, is to truly define a community and make that a neighborhood council. I can tell you what we won’t have, and I will fight against, is any neighborhood that goes over a mountain. Right now you go into Cindy Miscikowski’s district and she’s in West L.A. and over the hill and they have different needs in West L.A. than those in the West Valley. That is not a neighborhood. The same with (Mike) Feuer’s district. I think what we voted for is really having neighborhoods. Q: How did you come to Los Angeles? A: I received a scholarship my senior year (of college) to come out to USC, so I took it. I had hoped to be a great athlete out here but I found out quickly that wasn’t to be. It was primarily an academic activities scholarship. So I came to USC, had a good time out here and met my wife. And ended up staying. Q: Why did you go into in law? A: I really enjoyed education. I came from a family that had a relatively poor financial background in Michigan. I enjoyed teaching and working with children, which was my primary focus. I taught for a little bit at Miller High School out here in the Valley. I decided I wanted to go to law school because you could just kind of see on the horizon that teaching, which should be a really well-emphasized, well-paid career that people hold in high esteem, unfortunately has never reached that type of plateau. I sensed that if I went into teaching, I would have lost everything I wanted to gain for myself and my family. Lee Kanon Alpert Position: Attorney Company: Alpert & Barr Born: Detroit, 1946 Education: Bachelor’s in education, USC; law degree, Loyola Marymount University Most Admired Person: Richard Riordan Personal: Married, two sons

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