Interim DONE GM Slammed in Management Study on Eve of Confirmation
Explosive inside information from the Department of Neighborhood Empowerment comes to the Sister City on the heels of the confirmation of interim General Manager BongHwan Kim to take the post vacated by the sad passing of previous GM Carol Baker Tharp.Insiders tell the Sister City that in the last month Kim hired management consultant John Wisor to assess the work of the supervisors in the office. Wisor recommended a confidential survey of the rank-and-file, and asked them to rate their supervisor. According to the survey, 42% of respondents (17 people) did not rate their direct supervisor, but instead rated and commented on Kim in order to "send him a message about how dissatisfied they have been with his leadership, or lack of it."
Wisor issued the following statement to the Sister City. He did not respond to our request for an interview:
"I was hired to conduct an employee opinion survey and report results to the management and staff of DONE. I am no longer associated with them. They have all my reports and comments and I know that the management team is reviewing the data and determining action steps in response to the various reports."
The DONE staff members who responded to the survey were highly critical of Kim and other DONE senior managers found serious concerns with respect to accountability, distribution of work and management's - including Kim's - lack of the needed skill sets to manage the department. DONE employees also complained that management rarely takes and implement suggestions; that the only such recommendation implemented in the last year was that of a "morale club."
Our insider had told us that the results of the survey have been suppressed while the confirmation process continues. Kim is scheduled for confirmation by the City Council on Tuesday.
Wisor was reportedly paid $1000 by DONE for his work. You can read a summary of his report at MS2 by clicking here.
"It was difficult to tell the man who hired me that he was the problem."
Management Consultant John Wisor, regarding DONE Interim GM BongHwan Kim
The biggest bombshell of the Wisor study was not contained in the report but allegedly in an email from Wisor to an unamed DONE staffer, an email the Sister City has obtained a copy of. In a very candid assessment of Kim's ability to lead the department Wisor tells the DONE staffer that it was "difficult to tell the man who hired me that he was the problem." Wisor further stated that the DONE staffers he spoke with wanted to send a "direct message to him (Kim) that he was a failure in being a leader at DONE." Our insider said the survey results confirms the concerns of staff.
Reportedly, it's not only DONE staffers that are dissatisfied with Kim, but at least two members of the Board of Neighborhood Commissioners who doubt his ability to lead. On Friday, Commissioner Tsilah Burman resigned her post. Our insider said that Burman allegedly told others "that the appointment of BongHwan Kim by the Mayor to be the permanent General Manager of the Department of Neighborhood Empowerment was the last straw." Burman's resignation follows that of fellow commissioner Diane Middleton who also expressed concerns about Kim in her resignation letter.
Maybe there's still time to bring Kim Thompson or Huell Howser on board as DONE GM!
Labels: bonghwan kim, carol baker tharp, done, huell howser, kim thompson
Posted by Michael Higby @ 5/12/2008 04:00:00 AM
30 Comments:
If you find this interesting, you should read the info about ITA's GM and former Executive Officer at http://itarumblings.blogspot.com/
Pay particular attention to the older post listing the results of the "vote of no confidence".
Now there you go this is the Mayor Sam we know and love, not I Love Lucy, music, Britney Spears and Zuma Dogg nonsense. Stick to this and not the other and you will do a real service to Los Angeles!
Maybe this should pulled off tomorrow's agenda until some splainin can be done.
Naming Marcus Allen to replace Karen Sisson as CAO is also controversial, and will not help the Mayor any since he wants over 300 and the Daily News is already using him as their poster boy for greed in government. Plus that he's a lobbyist.
His reason for this unseemly amount of money, besides feeling he's worth as much as some others in that price range, is that his pension will be based on the highest salary he gets over a 12- month period. That's another reason for these crazy salaries, to guarantee giant lifetime pensions, and it must end.
Kim was hired to be the #2 functionary beyond a visionary community activist. That was the best he could have been.
This is the Peter Principle-Cubed.
Problem is, Mayor V. hasn't got a clue how to work with, for, or about neighborhood councils. He couldn't even make up a short list of people to fill that post, nor could his handlers. Most of his appointees to BONC, also, wouldn't know a neighborhood council from brass band.
The councils aren't generally made up of "yes" mean and women, like the groups that usually follow Villaraigosa around adoringly. This is why he had to "create" a group of sycophants to go along with his cave-in on the Southwest/Autry museum situation, out of passive campaign contributors when the home councils in that area, Arroyo Secco and Highland Park, both voted heavily in opposition to the "consensus" he wanted people to make believe he had. He and one of the capitulators "invented" a "Southwest Society" as a one-issue non-NC facade to shut up and take orders, where the real local councils wouldn't.
Recall the multi-track train wreck when AV named his least-respected, most arrogant, and ever-belligerent subordinate from his CD14 days, Lisa Sarno, to be the acting GM at DONE after he booted head-in-the-clouds, non-manager Greg Nelson. The roof nearly caved on on NC activity then, when she donned her leathers and brought out the whips and chains to straighten out the NC activists.
Gee, do you think if DONE got their act together, we wouldn't have to suffer with the likes of Bradley and his "Diversity Coalition"?
Hello CBO's, NC's, NW Groups and Community Stakeholders:
Provided is the Glassell Park Neighborhood Council Community Engagement and
Leadership Forum (CELF) Flyer for the Public Forum scheduled for Saturday
May 24, 2008 from 9am-1pm to be held at the Glassell Park Community/Senior
Center located at 3750 North Verdugo Road (in back of Public Storage) in the
Glassell Park Community. Please feel free to distribute this flyer to your
friends, neighbors and associates.. The CELF Agenda will be forwarded when
made available to the general public. We apologize in advance for the
delay. Enjoy your day.
Bradley,
OUTR. & Comm. Committee Chairperson
(I apologize in advance if this is being sent truncated, scrambled, in
multiples, or with misspellings).
It isn't DONE's job to cast out the likes of NFN Bradley. It's the job of the community to breed leaders who can do that without turning every meeting there into a pissing match that drives all but the most hardened activists away.
No one has yet been able to mobilize more than a tiny handful of people there. And, both of the current factions appear to like it that way. They each seem perfectly happy being the "bigger" of the too tiny unrepresentative factions, just as long as they're the one in power this year.
Bradley's minute "diversity coalition" is no more non-representative of the broader Glassell Park community than it's tiny hyper-NIMBY predecessor board was the first few years.
Unfortunately, the pendulum doesn't swing back in forth in that inert community - it just launches over the top from one extreme group to the other. It's more catapault than pendulum, with the majority of the community in-between not even aware this is all going on.
Take a look next door, Glassell Park. Your poorer, working class, grassroots neighbor community of Cypress has buried most of its hatchets and the various sides of what was a horrendously split leadership there are working together to make positive change.
Do more than a handful of people really think this is important? Just askingt.
Take their $50,000 a year and fill some budget holes with THAT.
DONE should have been dismantled about the time the certifications ended (that would save a couple $$ million $$ a year right there). It still should be shuttered as a department.
Assign one or two of the better DONE-ers to each of the major departments that neighborhood councils work with regularly, as the NC liaisons, along the lines of how Planning wants to have one. As part of those departments, they'd know and understand better how they work, and be 10 times as useful to NC leaders than they are now as uninformed middle-men.
With their new budget cuts, all anyone is going to hear from them from July on is how "we can't help you, our budgets have been cut." Who needs that runaround 24/7?
Once reassigned, have all the liaisons report to a deputy mayor, on some dotted line from their department.
City Clerk is already going to handle elections, and that plus certifications and increasingly cookie-cutter "congresses" for expensive, orchestrated ignorance swapping were the only things DONE did much of anyway. Other matters were so bungled as to be embarrassing (decertifications that the GM had to apologize for, "required" ethics training that 2/3 of NC board members never bothered to take, orientations run by DONE staffers who knew less about the city that the NC people did).
Then, have BONC handle grievances -- they're just wasting time hearing reports from a DONE GM they have no control over anyway.
If anyone actually believes that DONE people as currently configured can provide any kind of meaningful training for NCs, then they probably also believe in the Easter Bunny.
As liaisons for major departments, they could oversee training on how to deal WITH that specific department and actually know what they're talking about for a change, without all the needless bureacracy that exists now.
And the best result -- that would also finally shut up defrocked NC "stage-mother" ex-GM Nelson, too. (And that would be "priceless" as they say). No one who failed as bad as he did to provide working foundations for the NC structure has any right critiquing and giving "advice" to the ones that follow.
If DONE had the ability to "deal with" people like Bradley, then they would also have the ability to "deal with" good and effective leaders who the Mayor or Councilmembers didn't like.
If, as the consultant, said, DONE management (meaning Kim) is evaluating how to respond the stinging criticism of his management, then why should the City Council and Mayor make him the permanent GM now? Let him continue as the interim, and that gives him 6 months to show that he can straighten things out.
1:38 - you make an intriguing suggestion. In my dealings with DONE I have not found one effective individual outside the late Ms. Carol. And sadly she had barely got started.
The most amazing thing I ever saw DONE do was tell my NC that they had no choice but to accept the bylaw amendment that says "You're s stakeholder if you say you are" though later I found out DONE had not required the same of other Councils. Incredible.
If each department has a "specialist" who dealt with Neighborhood Councils with respect to issues with that specific department that would work. You are right, the City Clerk can handle elections and working with BONC, certifications and de-certifications. Beyond that, let the various alliances handle training, they'd do a far better job than the city.
And as far as Greg Nelson goes I assume he could come do a training on how to talk like a pirate.
Of course it's never going to work out betweeen DONE and the community: Do you really think the mayor wants MORE input from the community. That's why all the conflict. You have people working for DONE who think it is supposed to be a useful community group, when the people in charge are there to throw a big wrench in the community. And it doesn't help when you have an interim GM who doesn't like to talk to people. He's not the type of personalble person you need in that position.
Keep wasting your time trying to fix the NC system...I'll see you in ten years and it will be the same discussions. Have fun running around in circles the way they want you to.
DO YOU REALLY THINK THESE CORRUPT, RACKETTEERING COUNCILMEMBERS AND MAYOR WANT PEOPLE LIKE STAKEHOLDERS GETTING IN THE WAY OF THEIR PLANS?
You people sit at these NC meetings, not even realizing Antonio has stacked the deck with his own boardmembers. And you don't even realize it. You should have seen the suckers at the Del Rey meeting who said that NC president is such a great guy. (Yeah, excpet he's running roughshot over your meeting and rights. But he looks and sounds really good as he's shifting the money where HE wants to shift it.
And then the mayor has these non-profit groups sit up and beg for money like a puppy...and people think it hasn't already been established up front.
um, DONE has had major problems especially looking at teh DONE Commissioners - has anyone looked into Daniel Gattica's appointment? The man served as Site Director with Chrysalis in Pacoima, was a buddy of Padilla's and then was "picked" to serve on the Board. He no longer works with Chrysalis, serves on the Board of Pacoima Partners (a non existant group) or is involved in any community issues but has moved on to work for a pharmacutical company and is still on the board. Yeah, Padilla's power from beyond the council grave is powerful.
Well I have seldom agreed with Mr. Dogg, but he nailed it at 2:44 PM.
Neighborhood Councils were conceived as a fig leaf of "stakeholder empowerment" to help Jim Hahn keep the Valley and the Harbor area from seceding from the city. Thus they were, and thus they are doomed to remain.
12:25
More serious comments on this than all the other posts on Mayor Sammies' combine today.
Does that answer the question?
4:01
Depends. That may be why they were created, but now they do exist. They have city charter text behind them, city money, and at least a couple allies on city council.
This is more than any other self-appointed "citizen brigade" has ever been able to claim, and these entities do work in other cities to varying degrees.
The rest is up to the NC people themselves. Power is never given up by those who already hold it, especially in a one-party town like L.A. But if even a few of the neighborhood councils just stay in the faces of their elected officials, over and over again, who knows?
It could become the local government equivalent of a dripping water torture that eventually begins to wear them down.
Is there a better idea?
Walter Moore for Mayor??
(Spare me having to LOL all the way down the page, again!) The Moore-ons that believe that are in the same psychological camp as the Ron Paul minions who think single digit returns in a Midwest primary is a "statement."
Probably time to fire up the secession engine but not with the VICA, VEDC, HOA clowns who blew it last time but the new generation of leadership.
Abby Diamond for Mayor of the Valley?
Definitely Joe Barrett for Sheriff. :)
For the record, most of the Cypress Park NC Broadmembers live in Mount Washington. And you see one of the former board members from the GPNC at their meetings. So much for Cypress Park doing anything on their own. Oh. that right, you can self affirm yourself in any part of the city and become a stakeholder in any NC.
Take a look next door, Glassell Park. Your poorer, working class, grassroots neighbor community of Cypress has buried most of its hatchets and the various sides of what was a horrendously split leadership there are working together to make positive change.
MS:
Each department does have at least one specialist who deals with NCs. It's a list that DONE should post on its website.
But that isn't enough. Someone still needs to show the NCs how to develop their political power, how to get after elected officials, and how to be good leaders.
4:01 is right, and that explains why Janice Hahn is the most visible proponent of NC's (along with AlarCON who doesn't give a damn about the people's voice, either, but since he has a bunch of easily manipulated illegals, he's gaming the NC system) -- Janice wants to keep her bro Jimmy's "vision" alive and PRETEND TO BE a voice for the people.
Which works to a large extent, since 99.99% of people don't follow local politics or realize how much, and how fast, decisions are being made that will change/ ruin their lives: from density with no parking for politcal pandering by all the Hispanics, Perry and various "community activists" favoring affordable/ mucho cheap housing, without concern for lowered prop values by the "rich" that they envy; to the refusal to enforce even the weak teeth of SP40 in order to further a pro-illegal agenda.
How many know that whites make up only 8.2% of LAUSD now, Blacks about 12%, Asians less than 4% -- while Hispanics, mostly illegal, the other 3/4. And with continued illegal immigration, "anglo" emigration, and their huge birthrates and radical agendas, the stats will be radically worse in just 5 years.
I tend to agree with the poster that it is up to the people of Glassell Park to drive Bradley and his "perversity coalition" from the NC process, the only problem is that everyone is just plain worn out from trying to expose the horrible things that have occured under Bradley's watch. One wonders just how far the current board could go before they would have any action taken against them, either by DONE or possibly a lawyer. So we are stuck with them for now. It really does not seem to matter in any case, they are known around the area the "Glassell Park Neighborhood Clowncil". The Bradley DRONES sit behind their nameplates and wait to see how Bradley votes and they raise their hands to agree. They mostly do not speak or have any ideas, they just seem to like the fact that they have a meeting to go to. In a few rare cases some board members have spoken out in opposition to Bradley and his outrageous ways, but they seem to fade back to braindead by the next meeting.
How anyone can speak in support of such leadership is appalling.
7:37
Absolutely untrue.
A few live in the foothills of Mt. Washington, in an area that both DONE and BONC said is NOT MW, but "greater" Cypress Park.
You're a liar, plain and simple! Your point isn't made, and the Glassell Park NC is still one of the city's biggest disasters and embarrassments in terms of NCs.
8:32 p.m.
And that would be? 25-year old snot-nosed DONE staffers fresh out of public policy schools back east?
I hardly think so. There's more experience in political organizing on any one NC board in the city than in all the staffers that have ever worked for DONE.
DONE is a waste as a city department. It serves no function but to perpetuate itself and confuse people who have to deal with it. No GM has ever had any impact on how NCs work, or improved their communication with the city.
Abolish DONE! Save millions more.
SO vote out the current GPNC board.
They voted YOU and your "drones" out with less than 100 stakeholders (out of 30,000).
Shame on you for even showing your face again. The last board was a hyper-liberal group of elitists who couldn't even get 1 percent of the population to vote them back in.
They sat on $100,000 for more than two years, refusing to communicate with their stakeholders in any meaningful way.
At least with the current "clowncil" people have actually heard of them - even if it's all bad.
5/12, 4:27 PM:
Well I joined up full of the same ideas you suggest. After 4 years of it, I left the city, having live in Los Angeles for 58 years. I swore to God that they would never wear me down, but they did in the end. Good luck to all of you.
5/12, 10:07 PM:
Janice Hahn, LOL. Or cry.
Oh yeah, before I forget:
Marcus Allen LOL too. Or cry.
The problem here is really that the Mayor created a circus environment in trying to find the right people to lead DONE, and now he has to deal with what came from it.
May Ms. Tharp rest in peace, but the Mayor and his team knew she had cancer when she got hired, and from what I hear around City Hall, she was hardly ever seen at DONE. So that left Mr. Kim to lead DONE, and he alienated himself from most of the staff, while also not providing the necessary leadership to keep DONE moving forward.
The Mayor and his team know all the problems with Mr. Kim, as various Commissioners and DONE staff members have spoken to them. At this point, the Mayor has bigger fish to fry, and they must feel that this problem won't be of much concern during the re-election campaign.
The sad thing is that this move might signify the beginning of the end for the Neighborhood Council System as we know it.
3:37
No way. It's not the end. It's the beginning. It's time for NC's to kick some butt. It's time to rise up or get kicked down. I think that the mayor is stuck with neighborhood councils and fighting them is a waste of his time and he is going to embrace them at election time, not fight with them.
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