ASNC At Odds Over Shakeout Spending

The ’s Hermon Local Issues committee will meet on Saturday to discuss what some neighborhood residents are calling “an important issue of accuracy.”

The agenda features an action item to “to protest and appeal” a decision by Treasurer Judy Knapton to file expenses related to Hermon Shakeout: The Play——as specific to the community to Hermon.

Joseph Riser--a Hermon resident who sits on the ASNC--said that Knapton’s categorization of the Shakeout expenses as Hermon-specific, rather than attributing them to the ASNC’s public safety committee, paints an unfair and inaccurate picture of the council’s expenditures.

“It needs to be fixed in the interest of accuracy, fairness and reporting,” Riser said.

Knapton declined to comment for the story.

Riser said that though the event was held in Hermon, it was approved by the board in August through a request by the at large public safety committee. Requests for shakeout funds never went before the Hermon Local issues committee, Riser added.

“If an expense is at large, it goes to an ad hoc or budget committee. [Funding requests for Hermon Shakeout: The Play] did not go to the Hermon local issues committee,” Riser said. “If it had been for one community, it should have gone to one community. It's the very basic concept of the direct democracy that neighborhood council’s were created for.”

Wendi Riser, who runs the All Things Hermon newsletter, said though the Shakeout was hosted in Hermon, it was open to all community members.

A list of shakeout participants shows that trainees who participated in the event came from numerous NELA communities, including Highland Park, Mount Washington and Monterey Hills.

“Will those trained emergency responders be rushing into Hermon to save us when something big and bad happens, disaster-wise?” Joseph Riser asked.  “Nope, they'll be pulling people out of the rubble in their own communities, using the skills honed in these drills.”

Though the ASNC’s five communities don’t have budgets, Riser said attributing at large expenses to Hermon unfairly reinforces the notion that the small community receives too much funding.

“There's an effort by a couple of board members to budget by community and move away from subject based budgeting, which the community has supported” Riser said. “This has been an effort to paint an unfair picture of how much the community of Hermon receives.”

In July, Knapton said the current system, though which the ASNC spent their budget based on a community survey, is flawed.

"The current budget survey is not scientific," Knapton said. "Community members were asked to pick their priorities from a pre-determined list."

Riser said it would be unfair to try to split the ASNC’s budget for community based projects—approximately $27,000 this year—evenly among the five communities the council represents.

“You would need some rocket science algorithm to make it fair,” Riser said. “It would be like having a 3-year-old, a 6-year-old and a 18-year-old and deciding you’re going to feed them all the same amount of food. You’d stave the 18-year-old and you’d make the 3-year-old sick.”

The Hermon local issues committee meets at 9 a.m. on Saturday, Nov. 12 at the Hermon Church Fellowship Center, 5800 Monterey Road.