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No. 2 / December 2003
Paper copies of the news and opinion pages are printed and distributed at the monthly meetings of the board of directors of the Mar Vista Community Council. You can also get copies at the Mar Vista branch library.
You can help in the distribution of The Westmar Sun by sending the e-mail links to your friends or printing out pages for everybody in your block or apartment building.
The Westmar Sun is dedicated to all of Mar Vista, Westdale and North Westdale, rich and poor, high and low, tenants and home owners, drivers and pedestrians, children, dogs, widows, widowers, cats of course, bicyclists, leftists, rightists, centrists and no-ists.
| The board of directors of the Mar Vista Community Council will meet at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Jan. 13, in the Mar Vista Recreation Center, 11430 Woodbine Ave. |
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SHOULD WE WORRY
ABOUT THIS
OLD BRICK BUILDING?
See the Opinion Page for one answer.
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VISUAL ARTIST IS CHOSEN FOR
VENICE-INGLEWOOD FIRE STATION |
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Noted photographer, filmmaker and visual artist Deborah Lefkowitz has been chosen to do an installation at the new Fire Station 62 on the southeast corner of Venice Blvd. and Inglewood Ave.
If her first foray into a fire station installation is like any of her other work, Mar Vista residents are in for a pleasant surprise.
Lefkowitz's site-specific works have been featured in museums and galleries in the United States and abroad, including the Robert Else Gallery in Sacramento, the University of Judaism''s Platt Gallery in Los Angeles, the Robert V. Fullerton Art Museum in San Bernardino, the Memorial Union Art Gallery at UC Davis, the UCR/California Museum of Photography in Riverside and Galerie Am Scheunenviertel in Berlin.
In 2001, she received an Artist's Fellowship in New Genre from the California Arts Council.
As a documentary filmmaker, Lefkowitz has addressed the relationship of historical time and personal memory. An in-depth discussion of her award-winning documentary, Intervals of Silence: Being Jewish in Germany, is featured in the newly published monograph Women Making Art: History, Subjectivity, Aesthetics by art historian Marsha Meskimmon.
Carrie Roche of the city's public arts division said that 1% of the construction cost of the $4.5 million fire station will be used to pay Lefkowitz's fee, materials and labor.
Barbara Corry, a director of the Mar Vista Community Council, was a member of the city panel that on Nov. 4 chose the artist from four candidates.
Fire Station 62 was built in 1950 at 3632 Centinela Ave. It is overcrowded and its main systems are antiquated. The site is inadequate to allow training and is too small to accommodate a replacement standard fire and paramedic.
The city has not yet decided what to do with the old station.
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"In the Shadow of the Hourglass," an installation at Chaffey College, was a unique work, created on site. Combining fabric sculpture, halogen lights, dimmers, and computer-programmed lighting control technology, Lefkowitz transformed the gallery into a theatrical stage setting in which viewers become the actors.
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Community Council Board Directors Claim The Sun Is Infringing a Copyright
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Two directors of the Mar Vista Community Council are claiming that The Westmar Sun has no right to publish the minutes of the council's Board of Directors meetings because they are 'copyrighted.'
One of the directors has contacted the owner of The Sun's Web host in Culver City to ask
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that the host remove copies of the minutes from The Sun's Web site. The host has refused to do so.
The Sun takes the position that all Council minutes are public records and may be freely copied by anybody interested.
The Sun has asked the two directors under what authority they claim that the minutes of
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MVCC Board meetings are copyrighted.
There were no responses to that question.
Click here to read this amazing exchange of e-mails.
Go here to see The Sun's index of these controversial minutes.
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| Why isn't The Sun using the names of the two directors at this time? It's not our intention to embarrass anybody, especially those who are giving of their time and effort to make Mar Vista and the Westdales a better place to live. Nevertheless, the public has a right to know what their representatives are up to. |
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Westmar Sun brings to light two sets of Board minutes and one budget document;
one set of minutes is still missing, and so are the records of the community's first election of its
Board of Directors.
A request to the MVCC secretary by the Mar Vista Sun has resulted in the posting of the May 21 and Sept. 30 minutes of the Board of Directors on the official council Web site. They had been omitted before the last week in November.
These and other Board minutes, indexed by The Sun, can be read here.
The May 13 organizational meeting, at which officers were elected, was not recorded by the council secretary, since she hadn’t been elected yet.
The Sun has asked the city's Department of Neighborhood Empowerment for an official record of that meeting. |
A rough outline of how the Community Council intends to spend $6,780 has been sent to the Westmar Sun by the council secretary. The budget document, adopted by the Board of Directors on Sept. 9, was supposed to have been an Attachment B to the board's minutes here, but as of Nov. 24 it hadn't been attached.
The Sun is thus presenting this public document to the public for the first time.
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Executive Committee (*)
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0
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| Budget & Finance |
0
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| Election Committee (printing, refreshments, promotional) |
$500
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| Transportation Committee (printing, refreshments) |
$500
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| Outreach Committee (Festival subcategory: MVCC brochure, promotional, printing. Stakeholder meeting subcategory: Printing, stationery, refreshments, misc., distribution of flyers. Web site domains and hosting subcategories.) |
$3,780
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| Urban Planning / Land Use (photography, printing, maps, refreshments, Stakeholder meeting) |
$1,000
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| Petty cash |
$500
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| Safety and security committee |
$500
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| TOTAL |
$6,780
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(*) Will somebody explain to The Sun just what the Executive Committee does? It's mentioned in the MVCC bylaws, and it was established by the Board on May 21, but there is no indication just who is on it or what it does. Anyway, it doesn't cost much, whatever it is.
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| COUNCIL NEWSLETTER PROPOSAL GETS SOME FORM |
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A working group has OK'd the idea of a newsletter for the Mar Vista Community Council.
The people present at the meeting chaired by Evelyn Dravecky agreed that the newsletter should reflect the interests of the community and provide "information that people can use all year 'round," as Dravecky put it.
The group worried about how to distribute the newsletter in apartment buildings and some
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mentioned the need to have all or much of the text translated into Spanish.
Distribution would be a problem, the group agreed.
“It would be nice to guarantee that one thing got to everybody in the community [at least] one time a year,” Director Amanda Seward said emphatically.
The group agreed to meet again on Dec. 11.
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| Zoning Hearing Scheduled on Taco Bell Reconstruction |
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Taco Bell’s request for a conditional-use permit and zone variance for its new facility at Venice Blvd. and Inglewood Ave. will be heard by a city zoning
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administrator at 10:30 a.m. Thursday, Dec. 18, in the West Los Angeles Muncipal Bldg., 1345 Corinth Ave. Details here. |
| City won't be planting trees at Little League play field |
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The city's Department of Recreation and Parks has turned down a request to plant new trees on Department of Water and Power property on Grand View Blvd. at Indianapolis St.
The city leases a large portion of the land to the North Venice Little League, which has built two fields there. Some of the land is also leased to the nonprofit Ocean View Farms organization for a community garden.
The property is bounded on the east by Grand View
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Blvd. and on the west by Centinela Ave., just opposite the Santa Monica Airport.
In a letter to Lisa Gritzer of Councilwoman Cindy Miscikowski's office, Supt. Kevin W. Regan of Recreation and Parks said the principal reason for the turndown was the cost of maintaining the trees from year to year.
Nearby residents were irked that the city removed trees that had been on the property.
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