Hello, George:

Please publish this anywhere within either The Palms-Village Sun or The Westmar Sun as you see fit.  On an unrelated note, I want to sincerely thank you for your input at the last MVCC meeting.  Your insights from being on the Palms N.C. Organizing Committee really helped us finish Rob Kadota's enormous redo of the MVCC bylaws.  Bylaws are tedious and frightfully difficult to create, but are a necessity to creating entities like neighborhood councils, and I appreciate your help.

Thanks,
Ken

Hi, George:

In this letter to The Westmar Sun, I will not suggest that my opinions are reflective of anyone else within the MVCC [Mar Vista Community Council] or WVCA [Westside Village Civic Assn.] boards to which I was elected — I suspect my opinions are shared by others within the region, but I now speak only for myself.

As someone who doggedly adheres to the principles of allowing opposing views to be aired, and to finding compromises between those opposing views whenever possible, I must now comment on what was an unfortunate and self-defeating effort with your petition crusade.

Even before I was Outreach Chair for the MVCC, I had a lot of interest in being as inclusionary as possible for Westside Villagers who desired closer access to the now-certified Palms Neighborhood Council.  I also felt a great deal of sympathy for the Palms region, which has been ignored by the city for too long and needed some organization and representation.

At first, I was impressed by the efforts on behalf of you and Richard Leib to begin a debate on whether Westside Village belonged in a Palms Neighborhood Council — Westside Village is just so independent that I question whether its residents are focused on any region outside its immediate borders, making any neighborhood council inclusion a thorny issue at best.  Your issue-raising was originally on the mark, and it did represent many Westside Villagers living in the southern edge of the neighborhood.

Then came the petitions.  It's a free country, so it's your right to speak on what you believe — but how you choose to speak can make a big difference, since history shows that every action promotes a reaction.

Your petitions said some horrible untruths, George — regardless of the legality of placing the petitions on stop signs and in people's mailboxes rather than their front porches. The petition's suggestion that "Mar Vista Politicians" (whoever they are) were trying to take over Westside Village schools, fire and police stations was absurd and inflammatory.  What was next — was the MVCC going to steal and enslave the firstborn children of Westside Villagers, too?

The MVCC, as with all neighborhood councils, has enough challenges trying to define what it can do for its Stakeholders (particularly those who reside at its borders) without inflammatory and untrue statements such as those included on your petition flyers. 

The new Palms Neighborhood Council will have the very same problems that the MVCC contends with, George, and it doesn't need a manufactured war of your creation with Mar Vista to detract from the business it so desperately must tend to.  Furthermore, I find the timing of your efforts as profoundly unfair to the rest of the Palms N.C. Organizing Committee, who probably don't want such a black eye and a distracting issue to tarnish their initial outreach efforts.

Your petition effort changed everything, George — you "toilet-papered" and disrupted our neighborhood, and it initiated a series of panicked phone calls and e-mails of frightened and confused residents who heretofore were just getting used to becoming part of any neighborhood council. 

Such panic and discord ended my previous efforts to entertain your views and those of Richard Leib, as the two of you unwittingly chose to assume the role of "warmaker" against your neighbors in Westside Village. 

Yes, there are those in the southern portion of Westside Village who relate more to Palms, but most of Westside Village bonds to the region adjacent to Sepulveda, National and Sawtelle — and that meant affiliation not to Palms but to the MVCC.  Did you and Richard stop to think that if Westside Villagers have a hard time relating to regions west of Sawtelle, that it would have an equally hard time relating to regions east of Overland — or even Motor?

I stand by my statements on "building bridges" to the Board of Neighborhood Commissioners at the meeting when Palms was certified.  I showed the commissioners your flyers, and the flyers the WVCA board created for its recent Westside Village Festival.  Your flyers created rifts, while ours tried to explain what homeowners associations and neighborhood councils do for confused residents who are new to these concepts.

You left the BONC meeting before I had a chance to speak and support Palms's certification — please recognize that the WVCA and MVCC boards, for which at times you seem to have some personal vendetta, have really gone out on a limb to support Palms N.C. certification.  The WVCA Board has voted in a motion of support for the new Palms N.C. at a previous meeting, and the MVCC delayed its busy meeting last week so Board members could write in statements of support of Palms to BONC and attend the first part of the meeting.

Beating Westside Villagers over the head to make a point won't get it done, George — if Westside Village someday views an established Palms N.C. as a better organization to belong to than the MVCC, then maybe we will see an appropriate and civil discussion on the issue.  Until then, I would hope that you could try to use your excellent Web site (and even your harshest detractors can't deny it IS excellent) to build more bridges and not burn them.

Most sincerely,
Ken Alpern

P.S. An enlightening conversation with Rita Moreno of DONE (rmoreno@mailbox.lacity.org) at the BONC meeting suggested that your petitions have no influence on BONC changing neighborhood council borders between Palms and Mar Vista.  Such border changes must be initiated and approved both by the elected boards of both Palms N.C. and the MVCC, as well as by the residents that would be affected by such a change.

P.P.S. Please inform your readers that since Palms and Charnock schools are considered part of a BONC-approved overlap zone between the MVCC and Palms Neighborhood Councils, that any Westside Village residents who wish to be a stakeholder of both N.C.'s can do so simply by playing a significant role in those schools.

I am grateful to have learned of this "loophole," and hope you can promote it, because we need more school volunteerism, and I really, really, really want those living in the southern edge of Westside Village to affiliate with the Palms Neighborhood Council if that is their sincere wish.

Six Directors of the Mar Vista Community Council just HAPPENED to show up in the same place in Palms around 6:15 p.m. on Tuesday, Dec. 14, the very evening that the Los Angeles Board of Neighborhood Commissioners was asked to give its stamp of approval to the new Palms Neighborhood Council.

MVCC Chair Tom Ponton just TOOK IT UPON HIMSELF to delay the start of the MVCC Board meeting the same evening from 7 to 7:30, the first time this has ever happened.

First Vice Chair Bill Scheding just HAPPENED to get up in front of the board and tell the commissioners that when the MVCC was forming, "there was a question of what should we do with Palms, because there was nobody actually looking at the Palms area . . .. So at that point, we discussed it. . . , and we said, 'Let's let them go.'"

MVCC Director Ken Alpern just HAPPENED to be there with a sheaf of fliers (which I had prepared to advocate that Westside Village get a divorce from Mar Vista) that he brandished in front of the commissioners, complaining they were "completely false and inflammatory."

Maritza Przekop, MVCC's Urban Planning Chair, just HAPPENED to show up to castigate the efforts of some 200 MVCC Stakeholders in, as she put it "redesigning the boundaries of Palms." But she said "we" support Palms' certification. That's funny, The Sun doesn't remember seeing that item on any Board or committee agenda. Who is the "we"?

Alpern answered this very question in front of the Board of Neighborhood Commissioners:

"I'm staying here, representing my fellow Board members elected of the Mar Vista Community Council, which is meeting tonight. We tried to stay here late; we were delaying our monthly Board meeting to give our support of the Palms Neighborhood Council, so I am just going to stay here; the others have to form a quorum."

That's funny again; when was all this representation and delay and support discussed? Was it on any public agenda? Did the MVCC board ever give notice that it was going to take a stand one way or the other on Palms' certification? Was what Alpern said "completely false," or was he just exaggerating for the sake of effect?

Nobody can believe all this just HAPPENED without even a phone call or an e-mail or a smoke signal, any one of which would be a total violation of the state's open-meetings law, the Brown Act. (Official decisions have to be made out in the open, after public notice and the opportunity for public comment.)

In order to find out the extent of this hanky-panky, The Sun has asked all MVCC Board members for copies of all Board e-mail correspondence, on all topics, for the Dec. 7-14 period because, frankly, we are tired of playing games.

The city attorney, we understand, is studying the request.