Dear Ken and Steve:

Thank you for sending me the agenda for the Tuesday meeting of the Mar Vista Urban Planning/Land Use Committee. I would appreciate your reading this e-mail aloud or otherwise sharing it with the committee under Item V-b, "Concept Plan Subcommittee Update."

I have no intention of bringing anybody from Westside Village to your meeting, based upon the shabby treatment we have received from your organization in the past.

As you know, not only am I the editor and owner of a Web-based news and feature outlet called The Palms-Village Sun (with more than 700 addresses on the mailing list), but I am a civicly active stakeholder in the Mar Vista Community Council district, having lived in Westside Village for more than 11 years and having taken part in many of the MVCC Board and committee meetings. I am also one of the organizers of a drive to allow Westside Village to leave the MVCC and join with the rest of Palms in our own neighborhood council. We now have 278 signatures.

As you are also aware, Westside Village was joined involuntarily with Mar Vista even though the MVCC has since stated in a brochure that "Westside Village is not within the traditional boundaries of Mar Vista, but is an adjacent neighborhood."

There were only 13 signatures (at 12 addresses) from Westside Village on the original petition to form a Mar Vista neighborhood council [see map], and there was no posted notice anywhere in the Village about the plan to link our neighborhood with the communities on the other side of the freeway.

There was no outreach to the long-existing Palms-Westside Village Neighborhood Watch, and of course a meeting of the Westside Village homeowners assn. endorsing the idea was not open to the vast majority of residents who are not members of that group..

Based upon these undisputed facts, I must renew my strong protest against the inclusion of Westside Village in the "Concept Plan," which I prefer to call a "Conquest Plan."

I first brought this protest to the attention of an MVCC Urban Planning Committee meeting at Clover Ave. School on Sept. 9, 2004, but my motion to exclude Westside Village from the "Concept Plan" was ruled out of order by then-committee Chair Maritza Przekop. Several members of the Westside Village community were thereby prevented from speaking.

As you may remember, in spring 2005 the subject of Westside Village's relation to Mar Vista was the subject of an advisory vote by MVCC stakeholders, which answered yes to the question "Should Westside Village (Zone 1) be part of Palms Neighborhood Council instead of Mar Vista Community Council?" The vote was 124 to 115.

The MVCC Board decided to do nothing about changing the situation "at this time," and "will not consider a border change until the matter has been appropriately and thoroughly discussed and a true consensus is reached by the stakeholders."

As you also undoubtedly know, the city's Human Relations Commission has been contacted to provide some kind of liaison in reaching a decision about how to bring about this appropriate and thorough discussion.

Based upon all of these facts, I respectfully ask your committee to remove Zone 1 from the proposed "Concept Plan" since there is absolutely no indication that anybody over here (with the exception, perhaps, of the Board of the minority-group homeowners assn.) is at all interested in such an idea.

Yours very sincerely,

George Garrigues
Editor and owner
The Palms-Village Sun