Editorial
Activists, God
bless em. They're the tripwires of our community. Wary of overzealous
developers and ready to act at a moments notice. Their senses alert us to
things some of us never see coming. They are the protectors of the
voiceless, the powerless, the winged, the scaly and the furried creatures
that inhabit our open spaces. They are the protectors of our neighborhoods
and they at times can bring city planners and politicians to their knees
and force them to show their hands or capitulate.
Activists help bind the community against common foes. They are necessary and important for without them we would have airport runways where our living rooms now stand. Single family homes would disappear and in their place we would see apartments rising into the sky.
Without the activists, the Herons and the Least Terns would no longer nest and raise their young for our young to see. Without them we would not have soil to run our toes through, only concrete to plod upon. Activists can take a HWY and turn it into a BLVD. A BLVD and turn it into an AVE. They give us reason to stay in our communities and reason to hope.
Not all activists are equal though. There are the good ones and there are the careless ones. The good ones come with a vision of the future and what the community might look like with careful guidance. They do what is necessary to protect that vision. These are community people that can proudly wear the label Activist.
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Then there are the careless Nopes. Nopes aren't activists. There're simply tripwires. Nope to this, Nope to that. They react without a vision guiding them. They look for ways to assert themselves over others. They lead us down paths we later wish we hadn't followed. Sometimes their successes can result in palpable failures that affect communities for years on end because they lacked vision.
In the Osage of area of Westchester a hapless property owner once proposed a Starbucks coffee boutique on La Tijera nearby 80th street that would require some variances. The mere mention of a variance alarmed the local activists who went to work and whipped up the populous with visions of traffic jams, crowded intersections and noise. The community awoke, it trusted the Nopes and like a five-ton hammer, it smashed the hopes of the local entrepreneur.
Today, in place of a little coffee boutique where patrons MIGHT have quietly sat outside on a patio and sipping on lattes we may just get a 'carwash' instead. No variances, no permits necessary. The result of activists without a vision and forethought. Nopes.
This lack of vision and carelessness takes on many forms and could it happen again? The local Westchester Lutheran School was forced to move its middle school back to the elementary school campus when the church they were formerly located received a new pastor who decided to develop it’s own pre-school program. Today, even with both middle school and elementary school students back together on the same campus, the school remains far smaller than its nearby public school brethrens.
For a couple of years Westchester Lutheran had been mulling over replacing its tiny little 50’s style classrooms with classrooms more comparable in size to it public school brethren. Classrooms that would give the students more elbow room. With the middle school students back on the campus, the renovation became even more imperative. The school then decided to request the required permits and variances.
The mere sight of a permit application sticking to a telephone pole raised the antennae of some of our local activists as it should have. What happened next was predictable. The good ones chose to look first and see if it stood within the model they envisioned for the community. They saw a project that would benefit the children and the community, and had no impact on traffic. When they saw that it fit their model, they turned their attention to other things.
On the other hand this dozen or so Nopes led by Gary Gooderum and Susan Vegter, went to work armed without a vision. They printed up flyers describing a scorched earth Westchester if the Lutheran school were allowed to tear down and replace its tiny little classrooms. They took advantage of the small pre-school located on the south end of the property and used it's 3 and 4 year olds to inflate the enrollment numbers by almost 30%. They accused Moms walking their children on the nearby streets of lowering their property values and increased vandalism.
They saw congestion on 77th St. and decided it was the schools job to solve it by having them move the entry to Sepulveda Blvd thereby creating gridlock there instead. The Nopes poo-poo’d the dangerous condition this would create for parents who would twice a day have to drop off and pick up their children with one eye on a Sepulveda school entrance and the other in their rear view mirror while airport commuters bear down on them at 50 mph.
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A couple of the Nopes are veterans of the widely supported 'No Sepulveda Widening' campaign so you would think that they would know better, but logic became one of this movements first casualties. Their suggestion was to add a 10 foot wide, 360 foot long turn-out on Sepulveda. Oddly enough, these same activists a year ago were against parking pockets in downtown Westchester business district because they argued it was widening Sepulveda! A Sepulveda entry would change nothing since the majority of the schools parents all live to the West, East and South and to enter the school on Sepulveda they would have to continue to drive through the very neighborhoods the Nopes claimed had too much traffic.
Since Nopes are not led by a vision, would public opinion be important to them? Absolutely not. Once they have tasted power the next thing they demanded was to shut down the Mobil station on the corner in spite of the convenience it offers the community. Did their neighbors get a chance to weigh in on this? Of course not, why let public opinion get in the way?
Over the past Summer the church-school has made many attempts to reach out to the Nopes. The original school plan had a three story building along much of the length of the property. The school held two community meetings with residents asking them for their input. At the second meeting the school came back with a revised plan that lopped off one of the floors making it 2 stories and kept the building under the allowable height limit. They also added additional parent parking. But the Nopes refused to even acknowledge the changes in the plans and upped the ante. Now they wanted the gym removed from the renovation plan arguing that the sports activities would create severe congestion to the community. Never mind that this is not a high school with bands, dozens of cheerleaders, coaching staffs, hundreds of spectators in the stands cheering them on. This is a tiny little middle school with an 8 girl volleyball team and a basketball team with 8 boys!
During this meeting Councilwoman Cindy Miscikowski suggested a task force where the school should come together with representatives opposing the schools renovation as a task force to find some places of agreement and look for solutions. The school agreed and a meeting was set up later for October.
Over the summer the Nopes stepped up their campaign by fraudulently claiming that the school was including a pool on one of its petitions. In the local Argonaut they claimed the school was running a snack shop and that it had three driveways on 77th Street and even went so far as to say that the school is not a community school because some of the kids come from Playa del Rey! (Note to self: Advise Neighborhood Council to take the Playa del Rey out of the name and redraw the boundaries because the Nopes say that they are not part of our community!)
When the task force met in October, Councilwoman Cindy Miscikowski began the meeting as a moderator and explained her vision of the task force. Within minutes the Nopes interrupted the meeting and stepped outside. A short time later they reappeared and simply declared that since their demands would not be met with the task force, they would rather take their chances and go directly to the zoning commission. They then abruptly walked out.
Today the Nopes are on a roll, bent on a selfish vision that ignores common sense and broader community interests. They continue to demand placing families in harms way on Sepulveda Boulevard, a designated Class 1 superhighway. They claim that kids from Playa del Rey are not from the community. They insist that the church break its long term lease with the Mobile station operators and close down the station. They falsely portrait the schools renovation as an ‘expansion’ (think LAX) and they insist that the school has 600 students in spite of the facts. They’ve floated a lie that the school runs a “Lutheran food and snack shop” and they continue to insist that the school plans to build a 750 seat theater. Recent petitions they’ve been circulating around the community falsely suggest that the school also wants to build a pool. An element that has never been part of the renovation plan.
The Nopes are out of control, Could they soon reward Westchester with another carwash?