UCLA students and faculty are preparing to play a larger role in Westwood as they campaign ahead of Saturday’s inaugural Westwood Neighborhood Council election.
The elections will take place at the Westwood Recreational Center on Sepulveda Boulevard from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., after which 19 of 63 candidates will be selected as council members.
Members of the UCLA community are running for a number of seats on the council, including the student director seat, the seat reserved for faculty and staff, the nonprofit-based seat, the rental positions and the at-large director seats.
“I think that people should realize that all of the stakeholders in Westwood should make a difference,” said Jann Williams, chair of the transition committee for the Neighborhood Council.
The council is designed to include homeowners, business owners, rental residents, religious communities and educational communities in Westwood.
Although there are independent candidates, a large number have formed slates, or groups with similar platforms that pool resources, to bring in diverse voters.
The slates range from Westwood Bruins, made up of three current and former members of the urban planning graduate program, to Team Westwood, which has at least one member running for every position. These two groups have done the majority of their marketing using social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook, sending out e-mails through listservs and handing out fliers or business cards throughout Westwood, according to their members.
Both slates also have websites that list their candidates and platforms.
“Really, it’s just who you know and who’s going to be around and available and willing to vote,” said Mike Stajura, a public policy doctoral student and member of Team Westwood who is running for a seat as rental residential group director.
Between the two slates, in terms of numbers, lies the Westwood Coalition, a group of four undergraduate student candidates joined with five members of the Westwood community, including UCLA history professor Margaret Jacob, said second-year economics student Brent Gaisford, who is running for a rental residential group director position.
“They all seem like very smart good people who want to improve Westwood, so it made sense to run as a slate,” Gaisford said, adding that the groups will be able to share resources and vote for each other.
In addition to e-mails and campaigning door-to-door, the Westwood Coalition has a group on Facebook, Gaisford said.
There will be four or five cars going back and forth from the intersection of Gayley and Strathmore avenues to the elections, Gaisford said, along with a slice of pizza afterward for those who vote.
The neighborhood council is funded by the city and will be able to communicate with the city to address problems in Westwood, said Teofilo Ruiz, a history professor at UCLA and member of the neighborhood council transition committee.
Until now, the homeowners associations had been the primary communicators between the city and stakeholders in Westwood, Ruiz said. The neighborhood council provides another outlet for people invested in the community, such as students who want to bring back the Village’s former vibrancy.
“We want this neighborhood council to come into being. We want everyone who works or studies in Westwood to have a voice,” Ruiz said.
But since the elections are taking place after spring quarter is over, there will be a smaller number of students and faculty available to vote. Furthermore, absentee voting is only permitted for people with religious or physical impediments, he said.
However, Ruiz said the city clerk scheduled the elections, and the council either had to take this date or wait two years for an election.
“Obviously not as many student voices are going to be heard. I think the demographic of voters is going to be older than if (the election) was in the school year,” said Madeline Brozen, a member of Westwood Bruins who is running for the student director seat.
The transition committee has taken steps to ensure equal representation on the council, Williams said.
The ballots are designed so that each voter can only vote for eight candidates, Williams said. There are three different ballots; the options for seats 13 through 19 appear on all the ballots, but each voter must choose whether to vote for homeowners, business owners or renters seats, Williams said.
This system is to prevent one group from dominating the council, Williams said.
She added that other neighborhood councils warned the committee that groups opposed to the creation of a neighborhood council will often elect themselves, and then not attend any meetings, preventing progress.
This ballot system ensures that there is a quorum of eleven people, which is the minimum number needed to conduct meetings, Williams said.
“In terms of the ultimate outcome, we’re going to end up with 19 people who care about Westwood, but I think it’s important that we try to get some UCLA representation,” Stajura said.