Are We Just Against City Hall or Do We Stand FOR Something?

How can it be that no matter our initial introduction to the city’s inner workings – no matter the issue – most of us end up with the same impression: that the city has a process in place that is designed and implemented in a manner that purposely frustrates the will of its citizens?

For those of you not up to speed with the ongoing community discussion, you might want to go back and read my first blog,

Running on Autopilot

I would suggest that most of us thought the city was running fine on autopilot until something affected us personally, something that wasn’t consistent with our idea of what we thought our city represented. Yes, we were fine with what was being done in our name until it was done to us.

Many of us individually took our first steps to express our concerns, expecting our voices to be heard and respected. And slowly we began to see that the process was a thing unto itself, with little regard for citizen input.

But once this dawns on you, one of two things happens: (1) you give up and go away feeling too small or too worn down to continue believing you can change anything or (2) a sense of indignation sets in and you become determined to take a stand.

I hope a majority of us have ended up in the second camp—We’re indignant and determined to take a stand!

But do we want to take a stand on the same things?

Before we can go any further as a community, we need an answer to that very simple, but important question. Before we can fight together, we have to be united on what we want.

Will we disagree with one another more than we disagree with City Hall? Or can we truly come together with a common sense of purpose, respecting each other with broad tolerant values the way our predecessors did?

So, let’s see how we come down as a community on basic issues. I’ve put an opinion poll together. All you have to do is answer "yes" or "no" to some basic questions about what you support for our city.

If you consider yourself part of the community and want to have a voice in its future, I strongly encourage you to at least complete the simple poll.

Take the so you can be part of this Democratic experiment. Then you can choose to be redirected back to this blog if you want to join the discussion.

Chime in

It would also be extraordinarily helpful to all of us if you’d take a few extra minutes to comment on the values you find most important or just to express what makes West Hollywood special to you. We really need a chorus of voices on all these varied issues.

Don’t be intimidated. We’re just a group of neighbors chatting over the fence. A couple of words or fully thoughtout opinions and suggestions are welcome here. Your thoughts might be dismissed at City Hall, but here people are actually listening.

I’d just ask everyone to try to be as general as possible in comments on specific topics, instead of getting into the weeds, so we won’t lose folks who aren’t as attuned to the “fine print” as some of us are. It’s important for everyone to be able to follow along and comment. I promise to do my best to follow that path myself, tampering down my inner detail-oriented nerd. (Smile)

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Will we pass the test?

Encourage all your WeHo friends to answer the poll questions and let's see where this takes us. The better the participation, the better we’ll know how closely aligned we are as a community.

And remember, City Hall is definitely listening in on this conversation and carefully gauging our enthusiasm and solidarity. Will we become a force to be reckoned with or will we relegate ourselves to the landfill of “chatty cathys” who came before us easily bulldozed and forgotten?