If the majority of representatives of the city’s 88 neighborhood councils have their way, the salaries of all Los Angeles elected officials would be cut in half.

About 100 community activists involved in city-funded and charter-mandated neighborhood councils convened a “Neighborhood Councils Action Summit” at Los Angeles City College last Saturday as an alternative to this Saturday’s city-sponsored Congress of Neighborhoods, slated to be held at City Hall.

What looms here is a very exciting battle of the neighborhoods against the hand that feeds them — the city of Los Angeles. The renegades, fed up with attitude and lip service from do-nothing city officials, shunned the upcoming City Hall congress and held their own, themed “Less Talk, More Action,” which featured daylong debates, discussions, votes and calls for action on six specific issues they want enacted as city policy.

Issue No. 1, dubbed the “Half-Off Initiative,” was the boldest and most controversial of the six, and I was delighted to accept the summit organizers’ invitation to moderate the discussion of this question: “Should neighborhood councils promote and support efforts to qualify for the 2010 ballot, using the initiative process, a city charter amendment that would cut in half the salaries of the mayor, city attorney, city controller, and members of the city council?”

Proponents of the Half-Off Initiative, led by Doug Epperhart, former president and current board member of the Coastal San Pedro Neighborhood Council, argued three basic points for its undertaking: 1. At $178,789 per year, city council members are the highest paid in the nation, and probably the highest paid municipal legislators in the world, 2. There is no evidence that this rate of pay has produced better qualified or more capable, accountable, productive or caring elected officials, and 3. The city council members‘ salary is about four times greater than the median income of a family living in the city of Los Angeles.

Opponents of the question, led by Bill Christopher, former president of the of Board of Neighborhood Commissioners, argued mainly about the near impossibility of acquiring on an initiative petition 239,442 valid signatures within 180 days. He questioned the citywide appeal of such a measure and offered other means by which the neighborhood councils could get the attention of their elected officials.

I asked the representative of the 8th District Neighborhood Council (Councilman Bernard Parks’) if he anticipated any difficulty in getting his residents to sign a Half-Off Initiative petition. He said he envisioned no problems at all getting signatures on it.

After a lengthy debate from both sides, the delegates voted “Yes” to the question and agreed to take the matter back to their neighborhood councils for further discussion, and they formed a Half-Off Task Force to formulate an action plan. I then left, because my work was done.

The other five issues taken on at the summit, in the same manner as the first one, were about an independent ratepayers’ advocate within the DWP, a cyclists’ bill of rights, the sidewalk repair backlog, fundamental city budget reform and marijuana shops.

Greg Nelson, a long time denizen of City Hall, was the prime mover of Saturday’s action summit. Nelson, the chief of staff to former City Councilman Joel Wachs, was the general manager of the Department of Neighborhood Empowerment from 2001 until he retired in 2006. Nelson was the department’s second general manager and the one under whose watch the citywide network of neighborhood councils came into existence. He decries their present condition — their shift in focus from the needs of the neighborhoods to the needs of City Hall.

“The city’s program for [this Saturday’s] neighborhood congress does not even list the items to be discussed or the people who will discuss them, and that is wrong,” Nelson said. “For our summit, we listed well in advance the issues we wanted to deal with and who would lead the discussion so people could know what to expect and decide if they’re interested in attending.

“But the city’s program lists only that the mayor will speak,” Nelson continued. “That’s what this is all about. The mayor. He is surrounded by people who are obsessed with gathering hordes of people around him wherever he goes. And I suspect that Saturday’s City Hall congress will be another session of preaching — most likely about the city’s financial woes — by the mayor and presentations by department heads hammering out a program that meets City Hall’s needs, not our needs,” Nelson said.

“We spent less than $800 on our summit — and not a penny of which was city money — and we had about 100 people,” Nelson continued. “The budget for Saturday’s event is projected to be anywhere from $20,000 to $37,000 — all of it city money and if the city got the same bang for its buck that we got, then 160,000 people will need to show up at City Hall Saturday.”

I called the Department of Neighborhood Empowerment to get comments on the budget figures and other congress issues, but no one answered the phone. I left a message, as the recording instructed, and no one called me back.

Nelson continued: “The reason we held our action summit is because we just feel that there is a better way to actually get things done in this city than to convene a congress of neighborhoods designed to put a lot of people in a room for the mayor.”