There has been some hassle recently over where Palms should put its boundary markers. 
The Outreach and Communications Committee of the Palms Neighborhood Council came up with a list that included some dubious locations, and the Council's Representative Assembly kicked the list back to the committee for further study.
On this matter the Palms Neighborhhood Council received a May 2 e-mail from Ken Alpern, who is a board member of both the Mar Vista Community Council and the Westside Village homeowners assn.
My name is Ken Alpern, and I co-chair the Mar Vista Community Council (MVCC) Urban Planning/Land Use Committee — most of you probably know me from previous meetings.
I want to again congratulate the Palms Representative Assembly on the work you've done to make your new Neighborhood Council thrive, and I wish Pauline Stout the best of luck in her new role as President of the Representative Assembly.
I regret that my work obligations and an evening lecture prevent me from attending tomorrow night's meeting, but I'd like to mention a few issues relating to your agenda and to developments in the Palms region:
1) As pertains to Agenda Item #6.C.vii.:
I look forward to seeing "Palms" signs in the Palms region as part of a new era of economic development and neighborhood pride.
However, I will let the Westside Village Civic Association Board President speak for herself, but I recommend posting any new "Palms" signs out of Westside Village. Regardless of the history of the region, there is a growing sense amongst Westside Villagers of being their own community, and hence the benefit of allowing Westside Villagers to choose to be active with either or both the MVCC and Palms NC.
I urge any "Palms" signs at National/Overland (National Blvd. or National Place?) to be located on the SE corner (as is currently listed on your agenda) and not the SW corner (as was previously described on the agenda listed on the Palms-Westside Village Sun website).
There may have been a typo or some clerical error, but as much as I look forward to new "Palms" signs in the region, I think that the Palms NC should advocate for signs within its own boundaries.
Outreach Committee Chair Mario Bruhwiler replied on May 3:
I have examined our choice of Locations and realized that the wrong location was put into the agenda and that it is the Southeast Corner, since these signs are to be at the Entry Points into Palms. We want to have all of our residential stakeholders to know they have live in the Palms area and visitors or passers-by to know they are in the Palms area.
As chair of the PNC Community Outreach and Communication Committee, I would like to extend my own appreciation for the civil e-mail you have sent to us because it was a clerical error on my part and not an attempt to trespass upon the Westside Village portion of the Mar Vista Council boundaries. And I would invite the President of the Mar Vista Neighborhood Council to realize our intentions as being a first step into creating a sense of community for Palms.
I might add, it is quite coincidental that this is the 80th anniversary of the founding of the Mar Vista area, since it was exactly 40 years after the founding of The Palms, back in 1886. Let's help make L.A. a better place to live by developing a common goal for our respective areas and continue to reach out to our communities to get more and more neighbors involved in our respective communities.
To all of this we respond:
How do we know that we Westside Villagers think of ourselves as being our "own community"? Has anybody asked us? There are 12,000 residents in this area, after all. How many have been surveyed?
Have Mar Vista and the WV homeowners group ever responded favorably to the proposal that the city's Human Relations Commission foster just such a survey? Council member Bill Rosendahl has been trying to arrange a meeting "just to talk" since October 2005. Go here for details.
Who is dragging their feet in accepting the offer of the commission to mediate this dispute?
Well, it is the small group of homeowners who some four years ago forced all of us into the Mar Vista Community Council. And we mean small group — no more than 20 on the homeowners' Board of Directors.
(Mar Vista is the council where one of the hot topics of conversation these days is fixing up Venice Blvd. way over near Grand View Blvd.
(We wish the Mar Vistans well, but what does their fix-up project have to do with our Westside Village, our post office, our fire station, our Palms Middle School, our Palms-Westside Village Neighborhood Watch? Or our Trader Joe's — both of them.)
As for the so-called "boundaries" of Mar Vista, we have recently found yet another map that places our Village squarely within Palms. To all the maps listed in the S-U-P-E-R Web site, you can add a new one, this from the 2006 YELLOW BOOK recently distributed all over the Westside.
That blue Palms marker on the map, straddling Military and Tilden north of Palms, has been put there by MapQuest based on Tele Atlas Data — two reputable companies that apparently can't agree that Westside Village is its "own community."
As you probably know, The Palms-Village Sun Web site covers Westside Village as well as the rest of Palms. We have 772 names on our mailing list, a sizable number of them being in Westside Village. At your request, I have not been sending you e-mail messages about the new stories on our site, but you can always find our latest offerings about Westside Village at