
Photo by Rich Schmitt, Staff Photographer
Slowly, purposefully and beautifully, pockets of land in Pacific Palisades are being transformed into a landscape that reflects the true native California portrait. And for his efforts in envisioning and implementing new landscape designs in Potrero Canyon and at the corner of Temescal Canyon and PCH, Dave Card will receive a Community’s Council’s Golden Sparkplug Award. He will be honored at the annual Citizen of the Year banquet on April 24. Card has had his eye on Potrero Canyon for more than a half century, scrambling in and around the wild and wooly canyon as a child. He’s probably the only Palisadian who, while on his paper route, witnessed the 1958 landslide that saw a portion of the notoriously unstable canyon slump off onto Pacific Coast Highway. This history played a small role in Card’s interest in participating on the Potrero Canyon Community Advisory Committee (PCCAC) over two years ago. As chairman of that group’s recreation subcommittee, he conducted numerous public meetings in order to gather input and to seek consensus for the long-planned park on 40 acres in Potrero Canyon. That plan, calling for 7.9-acres of riparian habitat along with native vegetation and hiking trails, was approved by the committee in January, and reflects Card’s determination and passion for what he does. Card’s landscape expertise and knowledge are invaluable, but equally important was his low-key tenacity and negotiating skill in achieving consensus among the 16 diverse community representatives and numerous city departments. ‘I learned as a bankruptcy lawyer that people with an iron butt usually win the negotiation,’ Card says. ‘If you’re rational, patient and ask for what you want, you usually prevail.’ For 30 years, Card represented Security Pacific Bank and Bank of America, working out problem commercial loans, until he retired in 2004. ‘After 30 years doing lawyer work, that was plenty for me,’ Card says. ‘I’d always wanted to do landscape architecture; I even looked into it while I was an undergraduate at Stanford, and there just weren’t any programs.’ He says that he started planning his ‘escape from the bank’ in the late 1990s, when he enrolled in the landscape design certification program at UCLA. He graduated in 2003 and ‘never looked back.’ Card and his wife Cristine, whom he met at PaliHi and married in 2/4/68, have lived in the Palisades for 30 years. They have two sons, Mac, a poet in New York, and Zac, a broker with CB Richard Ellis commercial real estate brokerage house in Los Angeles. It’s no wonder that Card focuses his altruism on his hometown. ‘Public service is always beneficial to all concerned,’ he says. ‘I like to help out in my community, meet people, see people–it’s fun.’ His first foray into community service was encouraged by Perry Akins’a motorcycle buddy, who not only persuaded him to join Rotary, but to take on the pumping station landscape project. Anybody who waits at the signal at PCH and Temescal can’t help but notice how unsightly the pumping station and surroundings are, and Akins proposed that Dave try to camouflage it with something beautiful. Card took on the design, created a palette of California native plants and other drought-resistant shrubs and has even applied his own muscle to clearing and preparing the 90-ft. area. He worked with both the L.A. Department of Recreation and Parks and the Public Works Bureau to secure approvals and water. He also obtained funding from Rotary and community benefactors and recently won a grant from the Junior Women’s Club to fund a solar-powered irrigation control system. ‘It’s rare for one individual to have played a key leadership role in two projects coming to fruition in the same calendar year,’ PCCAC chairman George Wolfberg wrote in his nomination letter. ‘The unrelenting, public-spirited work by David Card has resulted in a major community-wide benefit.’ With his energy and good humor still in tact, Card is pleased to be so honored and ready to turn his attention to landscaping improvements at PaliHi’if the funding comes through.
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