The Bureaucratic Ax Of Idiocy Hits LA
Latest victim of the bureaucratic ax of idiocy: The LA City Attorney kills the volunteer-staffed, grant-funded, free mediation program to resolve LA residents' disputes. (The Dispute Resolution Program.)
I've been a part of this program since September, volunteering every Wednesday. I have been resolving case after case after case in my mediations.
I just won a big award on Friday night -- my supervisors called me "fierce" about mediation and "the embodiment of everything a mediator should be."
Bullshit reasons for killing the program, by the way, as you'll see from my piece.
See my op-ed in the LA legal newspaper, The Daily Journal, in both print for today and online: "Preserve LA's Dispute Resolution Program"
Please share, especially on Twitter, and tag @CityAttorneyLA and me: @amyalkon
Excerpt from the piece:
There's little that LA's politicians are as good at as shoveling millions of tax dollars into projects with little or no value for the residents of this city (save for those employed as lobbyists). For example, this past August, the Los Angeles City Council pledged to fork over $600 million to build and run a streetcar on a four-mile loop in downtown Los Angeles -- a route already covered by the city's DASH buses.When LA bureaucrats aren't wasting our money on useless programs, they're starving and/or killing programs that actually serve our community.
The latest victim of the bureaucratic ax of idiocy is the Dispute Resolution Program, which, for 30 years -- since Avis Ridley-Thomas founded it in 1989 -- has been providing free mediation for Los Angeles residents. Mediation is a confidential, voluntary process in which a neutral third party, the mediator, de-escalates conflict and facilitates communication between people to help them resolve their disputes.
In the Los Angeles program, after getting participants to hear and understand each other, mediators help them collaborate to write an agreement for how they'll go forward -- peacefully and often even amicably, sometimes after years of doing battle. This makes for fewer cases clogging the courts and it can even prevent crime, through proactively addressing conflicts before they escalate into violence.
The LA Dispute Resolution Program is grant-funded and has only a skeleton fulltime staff (just three staffers and a clerical support person on the payroll). The rest of the staff is unpaid volunteers -- dozens and dozens of committed volunteer mediators including me: writers, lawyers, retired law enforcement personnel, and successful businesspeople, all looking to make a difference in our community.
We volunteer mediators help resolve seemingly intractable problems between neighbors, landlords and tenants, bosses and employees, consumers and businesses, and quarreling family members, among others.
Continued at the link...
This is the City Attorney himself, Mike Feuer, who is running for Mayor. First time I'd met him.
For the record, our supervisors in the program are amazing human beings -- they had this foisted on them, the death of the program.
My fellow volunteer mediators and I are rising up to try to have the program unkilled. This op-ed is just one of our initiatives! More are in progress! If this program is savable, we will save it.
RELATED: The LA Times op-ed I wrote about mediation right after my training, before I'd mediated any cases.
So, they kill a nearly cost-free program that, among other things, can help ease tensions between all the homeless folks festooning the sidewalks out there as well as stop borderline gangstas from killing each other, while going forward with a $600 million loop of early-20th-Century style transportation downtown.
Look on the bright side, Amy. At least, if the program is killed, you won't have to worry about running into the rats that occupy City Hall anymore (either the two-legged or the four-legged variety).
mpetrie98 at June 17, 2019 12:38 PM
Your linky is borked. Try this:
https://www.dailyjournal.com/articles/352987-preserve-la-s-dispute-resolution-program
I'd like to see the numbers run, but I suspect that in the long run, this is more beneficial to the served community than not.
I R A Darth Aggie at June 17, 2019 1:26 PM
Why does anyone who is able to leave remain in LA? Yeah I know it's beautiful. But at some point the beautiful weather is not enough to compensate for the corruption, incompetence, and unreasonable cost of living.
Jay at June 17, 2019 2:30 PM
Thanks -- re: link. I'll fix. I'm zonked. Was on Dr. Drew and Leeann about this a couple of hours ago, and there's more!
Amy Alkon at June 17, 2019 3:29 PM
You must have been too effective. What a shame.
El Verde Loco at June 17, 2019 5:02 PM
El Verde is right—you all made the city legal dept look bad
KateC at June 17, 2019 5:10 PM
Such a program is useful and helpful and therefore doesn't increase government power or "authority" [sic]. So, of course, from their perspective, it needs to die.
Kent McManigal at June 17, 2019 7:21 PM
Glad you got a pic and a trophy and a smiling picture before this happened.
There are a number of women in life my who I wish had recorded this kind of achievement in recent years.
Crid at June 17, 2019 8:54 PM
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