Tonight’s meeting at the Vera Davis McClendon Center brought into sharp focus the breakdown of the City’s process and the unresolved tensions surrounding the building’s future. The Vera Davis McClendon Center has always been more than a building. For generations it stood at the heart of Oakwood, a place where Black and Brown community groups built programs that mattered in the daily lives of Venice families. The center once housed gang intervention work, youth programming, immigration assistance, recovery meetings, cultural programs, food aid and one of the neighborhood’s only stable places for low income residents to gather. Those services were possible in part because the center received roughly $800,000 a year in Community Development Block Grant funds through the FamilySource Center run by the Latino Resource Organization. Vera Davis was one of the last remaining public spaces where the long displaced Black and Brown communities of Oakwood could gather and receive support.
By 2018, the City was reassessing the building’s future. A briefing prepared that year shows that when Mike Bonin met with Stan Muhammad of the HELPER Foundation, he had initially intended to allow the Latino Resource Organization to continue operating the FamilySource Center at Vera Davis. During that meeting, HELPER requested space in the building as well, and Bonin agreed to rent them a small portion of the facility. LRO later made the decision to move the Westside FamilySource Center to the West LA Municipal Building in 2019, where they continued serving low income families across the Westside, including Oaxacan immigrants, families connected to Nora Sterry and Saint Sebastian Parish, and residents of Mar Vista Gardens.
A fact often forgotten is that Mike Bonin intentionally avoided activating Proposition K at Vera Davis because doing so would have displaced community-serving programs that were still active at the building. A 2020 Bureau of Engineering memo makes clear that Old Fire Station 62 on Centinela was recommended as the site for the Junior Arts Center specifically to prevent displacement. A later memo that same year repeated that recommendation.
The landscape changed when the Community Investment for Families Department issued the 2023 Request for Proposals for FamilySource Centers and removed the Westside as an eligible service area. LRO warned Traci Park’s office eight months before the deadline that they were about to lose nearly one million dollars in funding. Staff confirmed that Park was informed. She took no action to preserve the funding or advocate for a Westside service area. The Westside FSC closed. Only after the closure did Park publicly criticize CIFD, despite the record showing that she had advance warning and failed to intervene. The loss of the FSC removed the last consistent stream of anti-poverty resources linked to Vera Davis and left the community without its long-standing service hub.
With the FSC gone and Prop K funds now in play, the building was transferred under the Department of Cultural Affairs for renovation. Prop K requires the site to operate as a youth focused arts center. Under a transparent and functional process, that requirement would trigger an open request for proposals in which qualified youth arts organizations could present their vision and the community could evaluate them through a public and accountable process.
Instead, what unfolded has been defined by irregularities and confusion. Public meetings required under Prop K have been marked by cancellations, shifting committee rosters, incomplete communication and repeated procedural failures. The first meeting of the Local Volunteer Neighborhood Oversight Committee was held in October 2024. At that meeting, participants raised concerns that the name “Vera Davis McClendon Center” might be removed during the transition and warned that removing the name would deepen the sense of erasure already felt by the Black and Brown communities who built and relied on the center. Naming is not a cosmetic issue. It is fundamental to how a community understands and retains its history. The fact that these concerns were raised early shows why accurate documentation of that meeting is essential.
After that first meeting, the City made two attempts to schedule a second meeting, including one for August 11, 2025, but both were cancelled for procedural violations. When the City scheduled a third attempt for November 17, the same problems persisted. The agenda did not include public comment time, did not list or attach the materials the committee was expected to review and was not posted with adequate notice. Many residents only learned of the meeting through Councilmember Traci Park’s newsletter rather than through official channels like the Venice Neighborhood Council.
At the November 17 meeting, the disconnect between the City’s process and the community’s expectations became unmistakable. Eight people sat on the LVNOC even though Prop K rules only allow seven. When Councilmember Park arrived, community members spoke up to say they did not want the center converted into a children’s arts center and instead wanted it restored as a resource hub rooted in the building’s history. Park did not appear to anticipate the intensity or clarity of this pushback. She offered brief remarks that sidestepped those concerns and implied that she had directed the City to form the oversight committee when in fact such committees are required under Prop K. She then left the room before anyone could directly question her or challenge her statements. Rather than easing tensions, her appearance only highlighted how far removed the official process, and Councilmember Park, has become from the needs and priorities of the community.
Emails show that residents have been asking for basic information for months, including where to find minutes from the first meeting and whether subsequent meetings were even happening. On October 20, 2025, the day of a scheduled LVNOC meeting, no legally compliant agenda was posted. Community members questioned whether the City was violating the Brown Act and again requested information. No clear answers came. The only confirmation was that flyers had been posted, which do not satisfy state open meeting laws.
Correspondence also shows that City staff were still making corrections to the LVNOC roster on the afternoon of the meeting. Some email addresses were wrong. Some names appeared and disappeared. The Vera Davis notes document at least three different rosters circulated over a single year. The most recent roster still included eight names, not seven. Residents had no way of knowing who was officially serving, much less who had authority to vote.
In an email last month, Bureau of Engineering staff member Ohaji Abdallah acknowledged that minutes from the first meeting had never been uploaded and said they would be prepared when time allowed, describing them as a low priority. He said the first meeting focused on naming and future operations and framed both as outside LVNOC’s purview. That is incorrect. The Department of Cultural Affairs has made clear that the LVNOC exists precisely so the community can weigh in on the character, naming, use and programming direction of the center. Without minutes, none of that early input exists in the public record, even as the City continues pushing ahead.
These ongoing procedural failures are especially troubling given the building’s history and the displacement that made this transition possible. The Prop K process requires consistency, documentation and public oversight. What the community witnessed tonight was the opposite. The center that once anchored Oakwood’s Black and Brown families is now subject to a process that bypasses transparency, ignores long-standing community requests and reduces public engagement to a formality.
What is happening at Vera Davis reflects a deeper failure in a neighborhood already reshaped by decades of gentrification and the loss of the families who built and relied on the center. The transition to a new model was already necessitated by that displacement. To carry out the transition through confusion, shifting narratives, procedural irregularities and limited public input only adds to the harm. A process that should restore trust instead risks repeating the very erasure that made this transition necessary in the first place.