Here's more about one of our current issues:

Losing the Services of our Park Rangers

EDITOR'S NOTE: Here's the latest info about an upcoming meeting on this issue, and a report from the meetings that have already been held:

Upcoming Community Meeting -- Park Rangers PUBLIC MEETING Monday Oct 4th 7 pm Lake View Terrace Rec Center 11075 Foothill Blvd Lake View Terrace, CA 91342 The General Services Dept. will present their plan that moves the Park Rangers from Rec and Parks and places them as special security officers (essentially police officers) within GSD in a new city department called the "Department of Public Safety." Although neighborhood councils and public groups (including the GGPNC, HUNC, AVNC, ETI Corrals, more) have been asking to be included in the development of this process since Feb 2004, the public has had ZERO input. Please come listen, and ask the important questions the public should have been able to ask before this plan was developed. Sponsored by the Lake View Terrace Improvement Association and the Foothill Trails District Neighborhood Council

Meetings already held

There were two meetings that took place recently -- one was the RAP Commission's Safety Task Force and a second the RAP Commissioners meeting. In addition the Echo Park / Elisian NC sponsored an event.

If you don't want to dig through the details of the meetings, the bottom line with respect to them is:

The City is still moving forward with the August 14th plan and is not going to respond to the public's concerns in any concrete way before implementing this plan come January 9th.

The process to date has not included input from NCs and is therefore effectively in violation of the City Charter.

NCs should consider insisting that the City abandons this inappropriate process and starts again from the beginning, including NCs in the process per the City Charter. The City's insistance on hurrying this process makes no sense.

If this plan goes through as is currently happening, once again the public will be having this done to us as opposed to us having any voice in the process.

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DETAILED SUMMARY

Representing the public:

Gerry Hans (GGPNC PROS, HUNC)
Kristin Sabo (GGPNC PROS, Amir's Garden, FTDNC)
Mary Ellen Crosby (Friends of the Park (O'Melveny Park) )
Phyllis Hines (Hansen Dam PAB, FTDNC, LVTIA)

At both meetings, General Services Division presented their consolidation plan that takes the Park Rangers from RAP and makes them public safety officers in GSD.

For complete text see:
http://www.wildwildwest.org/images/Gen_Services_Report.pdf http://www.wildwildwest.org/images/Gen_Services_Report_Attach.pdf http://www.wildwildwest.org/images/Gen_Services_Report_images.pdf

Representing General Services was their general manager, an assistant general manager, and two senior lead officers in uniform, one of whom states he was a Park Ranger for five years sometime in the past.

SAFETY TASK FORCE MEETING SUMMARY

Presiding were:

Commissioner Hammond
RAP Assistant General Manager Jim Coombs
RAP General Manager Jon Kirk Mukri

The meeting lasted approximately 45 minutes. This is the first actual input beyond letters we have had even though we have been asking for and sending in input since February, 2004.

This was the first time the public was asked to attend this task force, although it is a Brown Act committee.

When presented with the fact that the GGPNC has a paper trail demonstrating that we have asked to be included in the process since Feb of 2004, Commissioner Hammond admitted that the entire process was a "bad process" and that by the 1999 Charter, the input from Neighborhood Councils was supposed to have been included from the beginning. Unfortunately, the commissioner's ultimate solution to this "bad process" was to finish it anyway (implemented January
2005), and then ask for community input about "how it is going" in June, 2005.

In both meetings, GSD kept harping on some perceived fundamental "problem" with the Rangers, as if there was some intrinsic issue with their service to the public that simply must be handled for the good of the community. The implication was that GSD was the group to handle this problem. The tone in which this was stated often bordered on arrogance and was definitely presumptuous.

The actual problem is this: there is low recruitment and retention within the Park Ranger corps. Why? Rangers are $11,000 underpaid annually compared to other comparable positions within the City, they are not allowed to use their required police training on the job
(they are not allowed to be armed), and (as was stated by a RAP official), their job requirements are "high" -- four years of college. This is the nature of the intrinsic "problem".

When presented with just some of the community's concerns, GSD responded with "no problem - can do" each time. Absolutely no concrete methodology for analyzing or acting upon these concerns was presented. We are supposed to take their word that all concerns will be handled. And to those in attendance, GSD's verbal mismanagement of statistics from their own report certainly did not instill confidence in their ability to deliver.

When pressed on lack of detail in the plan, one of the GSD officers kept falling back on the fact that he was a Ranger for five years as an acceptable response. The other prevalent response was that GSD would use the experience of the current Park Rangers to educate GSD on what they need to know. However, "what they need to know" should have already been included in GSD's fact finding process for their plan, and GSD presumes all current Rangers will pass the training and exam and move over to GSD. This is not a reasonable assumption.

Effectively, the entire slant of the GSD presentation is one of "police officer", not "community policing" as our Park Rangers currently perform. When asked about the non-security functions a peace officer Park Ranger performs, the ex-Ranger in GSD said privately that peace officer Rangers do not perform any functions that "interpretive" Rangers do, ever. This is definitely a false statement, per the current Rangers themselves and per what has been my personal experience.

This indicates that even the ex-Ranger in GSD at some level does not currently have a handle on what Park Rangers do (their tradition of service above and beyond the call of duty), and what we, the public, want and need them to continue to do.

The firefighting function of the Park Rangers was brought up. GSD said, not surprisingly, "no problem" -- they would all train to be firefighters. Once again, a "yup - can do" answer, and zero detail on who, what, where, when, why, and how.

When asked, General Manager Mukri stated that he was not concerned about budgetary reasons as the impetus for this process, but he is concerned about it for security continuity/communications reasons.

Apparently the budget money for the Park Rangers has not yet been transferred to GSD but is in some sort of holding account. This smacks of holding the funding ransom as leverage to make RAP to move the proposal forward.

The uniform issue came up ("Park Rangers probably shouldn't have the visual appearance of the LAPD"). GSD said they were "working on it".

A representative from the Mayor's office spoke up at the end. She sharply implied that because NCs have been asked to get involved in the Mayor's Budget process, this constituted our "being informed" of this loss of service, implying we had no grounds upon which to complain because we had been "informed". All representatives from public groups in the room voiced strong, absolute disagreement.

See the DONE message about the Mayor's Budget Day presentation on July 31st, 2004 at: http://www.lacity.org/done/budget_day_05_06.htm

The union rep for the non-Senior Rangers made an extensive speech about how the union was working with GSD and the Rangers and ensured us this would work out for the betterment of the public. However, the union does not represent the interests of the public so his assurances do not mean anything and one wonders why he continues to do this (he also did this after the Sept 1st RAP Commissioners' meeting.)

Point in fact is that our "union", the group representing the public, is the NC system and we are not being allowed any input.

Commissioner Hammond ended the meeting with "we hear you, but..." and "let's all meet six months after this has been implemented to see how it is going." In the opinion of the GGPNC PROS Committee members present, this is not acceptable.

GENERAL COMMISSIONERS MEETING

GSD once again made their presentation, and this time omitted any numerical statistics.

Commissioner Roos was obviously not convinced the GSD plan would allow the Rangers to continue their service as needed in LA's Parks and prodded the GSD reps quite a bit about it.

Commissioner Roos and General Manager Mukri did all the questioning. The other commissioners did not ask any questions or comment.

Commissioner Roos stated that he liked the idea of auxiliary volunteers who are qualified helping out the Rangers (a la the current mounted firefighter patrol idea).

Eight members of the audience spoke. All of the above from public groups, three off-duty Park Rangers, and a representative from the group that holds the Griffith Park concert series. The GGPNC PROS Committee representatives once again presented the RAP Commissioners with the fact that the public is not being included and we have been asking since February, entering copies of the paper trail into the record. General Manager Mukri pointed out that there were still lots of problems to be ironed out in this process, and I stated that if the public had been involved since the beginning, these problems would probably be far fewer. He concurred. After the speakers finished, there was a large round of applause for the Park Rangers and the excellent service they consistently provide the public.

The Ranger Consolidation part of the meeting ended here. A one sentence summary of the outcome could be written as:

"We're sorry about the bad process and the lack of public input, but we're going forward anyway."

What do the NCs want to do about this??

Best,

Kristin Sabo
ksabo@wildwildwest.org