Save the date: May 19, 2012 from 8:30 to 4:00 at 5930 Franklin Avenue.

For those who are living in an HPOZ, this is an event you don't want to miss. Don't forget to sign up early - tickets are $20 up until May 13th, then the price rises to $25. This is a great collaboration between Planning and the LA Conservancy, the power behind our preservation efforts.

To order tickets from the LA Conservancy, go to LA Conservancy 10th Annual HPOZ Conference. To view the flyer, click the file below.

Wilshire Park Association has voted to sponsor the Boulevard Heights National Register Project. As a 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation, donations are tax deductible, and we qualify for grants available only to non-profits.

Boulevard Heights was the original name for the tract established by Robert McGarvin and Marcus Bronson in 1905. The two blocks of Bronson between Wilshire and 9th have been nominated by residents for the National Register. For details about what the National Register is, what the benefits of designation would be, and how to participate or to help fund the project. go to the Boulevard Heights website.

Residents of the nominated blocks are helping to update our 2008 HPOZ Survey information to submit to the California Office of Historic Preservation as part of the required data. The bar for national designation is high, and the case has to meet very specific criteria to qualify. Architectural Resources Group, the firm that vetted our HPOZ Survey and the other two Triplets (Windsor Village and Country Club Park) has agreed to fine-tune and vet all the information. As usual, their seemingly limitless generosity has make this project possible. For details on the costs and the process, see Boulevard Heights: ARG to the Rescue

On March 14, a grant proposal will be presented to the Greater Wilshire Neighborhood Council to help fund this project. Please save the date and lend your support. If you would like to contribute, please go to the Wilshire Park Association home page, click the "Donate" button, and specify that you want to contribute to the Boulevard Heights National Register Project.

Wilshire Park Association held its first Board meeting of 2012 on Wednesday 2/22. Lorna Hennington was unanimously elected to continue to serve as president for another year - thanks Lorna!

WPA would also like to welcome Biniam Kibreab and Marqui Hood, who accepted the executive position of secretary.

David Donley will continue as treasurer, Robby O'Donnell will continue as vice president.

The Triplets HPOZ Board is now hosting a website dedicated specifically to issues of interest to residents of the Country Club Park, Wilshire Park and Windsor Village HPOZs. The site features useful links to City Planning resources and contacts, meeting minutes, agendas, calendars, city and county records, the individual Historic Context Statements and Preservation Plans for each HPOZ, as well as links to photo archives and primary source historic documents from the LA Times, the Library of Congress, and much more.

Please take a minute to explore the Triplets and meet the board members. Go to The Triplets HPOZs.

If you have comments or suggestions about how to improve this site, please feel free to add them below.

After long consideration and discussion, GWNC has officially resolved to request that the Redistricting Commission place the whole of Greater Wilshire Neighborhood Council (GWNC) in Council District 4.

A little background: in an effort to enhance GWNC's ability to effectively represent residents as an official city-sponsored body, GWNC decided that being unified in one Council District would do a lot to compensate for some of the recent moves that have divided the area, specifically the California Redistricting and the new Police precinct lines that have split several neighborhoods. GWNC made a formal request to the Redistricting Commission, submitted maps, and sponsored a concerted letter-email writing campaign to request that GWNC be included intact in one District. After hearing public opinion at a series of fifteen redistricting meetings held throughout the month of January, the Redistricting Commission released its first draft, which put us intact into District 5. Our first request was granted. For more details on GWNC's first resolution, please go to Redistricting Update - Important Meeting 2/1/2012 at the Ebell and the article about the meeting in the online version of the Larchmont Chronicle.

Now GWNC would has voted to refine their request further by specifying a preference for District 4. The reasons are complex - there are political and demographic components that are not immediately obvious, including such diverse issues as where the Councilman lives, historic preservation, how moving a boundary in one District impacts all Districts, "Communities of Interest," the Voting Rights Act, and much more. After addressing all these issues and considering all the consequences, intended and unintended, GWNC voted on the resolution below, which passed unanimously. 2/8/2012 GWNC Resolution

Now is the time for you to support GWNC by adding your voice to their resolution. And there are several ways to do this:

• Sign the online petition below - we will forward the list of signatures to the Redistricting Commission.
• Print and sign the attached letter and send it to the Redistricting Commission Form Letter to the Redistricting Commission.
• Submit an online public comment about your "Community of Interest" to the Redistricting Commission at Redistricting Public Comment
  
• Write your own letter or email and submit it to the Redistricting Commission. redistricting.LACity@lacity.org
  

Attached is the meeting agenda for the Country Club Par/Wilshire Park/Windsor VIllage HPOZ.

Meetings are held on the first and third Tuesdays of every month at the Wilshire United Methodist Church at 7:00 p.m., unless there are no cases scheduled. Meetings are open to the public.

In walking around Wilshire Park, it's hard not to notice the orange-bagged phone books on every porch. Some of them will sit there for weeks and even months. Sometimes they are delivered in stacks. People don't even bother to pick them up, and most of those that are picked up never make it through the front door, but go directly to the trash. Let's face it - if you are reading this, you don't use a phone book, and don't want that ad for bail bonds staring at you for a whole year. It's a waste of paper, creates litter, is immediately out-of-date, and is far less convenient than an internet search. It's fine to recycle these unwanted directories, but wouldn't it be a lot better if those books were never printed in the first place? There's a solution: OPT OUT.

In response to loud complaints about unwanted and wasteful directory deliveries, phone companies have created an online opt-out site.  If you don't want phone directories, go to Yellow Pages Opt Out, create an account (email and password), put in your zip code, and you will see the available phone books that you are eligible to receive. You can request specific books, if you still want one or would like a targeted directory, or opt out of each book individually or all at once.

The system is not perfect - it's new - but it's a start, and may lead to the policy of opting in, instead of opting out. And it's the right thing to do.

Here is a nice article about what San Francisco is doing to reduce phone book waste, including an analysis of the big lie that the Yellow Pages tells the people who buy ads in their directories.

Greater Wilshire Neighborhood Council's request to be intact in one Council District has been honored by the Redistricting Commission in their tentative map, released to the public late last week.

As those of you who have been following the process know, the Redistricting Commission has been listening to the public for several weeks, gathering various opinions, many of them very aggressively promoted, about how the new City Council lines are drawn. Greater Wilshire Neighborhood Council, as it has been, is in three Council Districts, 75% or so in CD4, Wilshire Park and Windsor Village in CD10, and a small rectangle in CD5 in the northwest corner (see the map above). Greater Wilshire Neighborhood Council, a community that has recently been further split by the Police Precinct lines and again in the California redistricting process, sought to be unified to give us a stronger and more effective resident representation. At their last meeting, the GWNC Board officially adopted the resolution that GWNC's main focus in redistricting is to be intact, a concept that takes precedence over which Council District we would be in. This turned out to be a winning strategy.

The Commissioners heard us and agreed, and moved all of GWNC into Council District 5 in the first draft map. This was a bit of a surprise, considering that only the northwest corner of GWNC was initially in CD5, and CD4 was the presumptive new CD. Current CD5 stretches to the west, encompassing the Carthays, Westwood and other similar areas. Current CD4 reaches north to Los Feliz and Griffith Park and on into the Valley.

While we did get what we asked for, for us in Wilshire Park, this is a bitter-sweet victory, since we are all aware that CD10 has done a lot for us, including supporting the formation of our HPOZ. We owe Sylvia Lacy, Andrew Westall and Herb Wesson and the rest of his staff so much - how do we ever thank them enough? Without them, we would not be the wonderful neighborhood we are.


This first draft is controversial and still subject to change. The Redistricting Commission will be gathering more public input through the end of February in a series of meeting, the first of which is right outside Wilshire Park on Feb 1 at the Ebell. Most of you have already received a paper flyer announcing the meeting and encouraging you to come.

Timing is critical here, since there is still the distinct possibility that we could be "traded away" in all the flurry of the process. For now, regardless of your ultimate preference for a specific CD, the general strategy of GWNC is to remain neutral about which CD we are contained in, to avoid risking being split up. When the maps are adjusted and the recommendations are sent from the Redistricting Commission to the City Council at the end of February, that would be the time to appeal to the Councilmen in whichever district we might call home.

So that you are well informed about the process and what it could mean to Wilshire Park, please go to these various links.

• http://www.redrawla.org/ is an amazing tool, and offers links to the City Redistricting site - a good starting place to explore the entire process.
  
• LA TIMES Interactive Current and Proposed Council Districts shows an excellent "before and after" interactive map (above)
  
• To see the original districts, the draft map released late last week, and what other communities are suggesting, go to http://www.redrawla.org/?q=gallery&re_area=lacity
• To see Greater Wilshire Neighborhood Council's website and review their official position on redistricting, go to http://www.greaterwilshire.org/site/?q=node/426

And please, make sure that you attend the Wednesday 2/1 meeting at the Ebell. Think "Squeaky Wheel:" other groups will be showing up in an organized show of force, and without your support, GWNC could be split up again to satisfy their louder demands! If you can't stay for the entire meeting, please come and fill in a speaker card that expresses your support for keeping GWNC intact.

The agenda for the Triplets HPOZ Board Meeting is posted below.