After a mudslide in January 2005 that wiped out one lane on Paseo Miramar, neighbors requested the road be fixed, and city officials responded. Last Thursday, about 25 community members and city officials celebrated the construction of a new retaining wall, which will prevent future landslides from obscuring the road. ‘Community members had been complaining, so as soon as we got in office, we started working on it,’ said Councilman Bill Rosendahl, who won the election for the 11th District in May 2005. Wielding gigantic scissors, Rosendahl grinned as he cut a red ribbon last Thursday to unveil the new 110-foot wall to the public. The wall cost about $400,000 and was paid for out of the city’s general-fund budget. Construction work began in December and lasted through February. The Miramar Homeowners Association approached the city about the issue because the canyon road, located off Sunset Boulevard, is tight and curvy with limited visibility, said Bob Ramsdell, co-chair of the Miramar Homeowners Association. Drivers would round a bend and discover the road had suddenly changed from two lanes to one and there was an oncoming car. ‘It was a safety issue,’ said Audrey Ann Boyle, co-chair of the association. ‘It’s a narrow street, and we wanted to have it so cars could go by in a safe manner.’ There’s a favorite hiking spot on the top of Paseo Miramar that connects to Topanga State Park, so on weekends there was a significant increase in traffic, Ramsdell added. The new concrete retaining wall, with steel reinforcement bars, is 10 inches thick, 30-45 feet below the surface and 12 feet above ground at its tallest point, said Gary Lee Moore, city engineer. During the ribbon-cutting ceremony, Rosendahl teasingly tapped the wall to make sure it was secure, and Moore assured him it would prevent slides. ‘This type of retaining-wall system is commonly used in the industry,’ Moore told the Palisadian-Post. ‘We have designed similar walls in other parts of the city. One example is the retaining wall behind the Chinatown Library on the corner of Ord Street and Castelar Street.’ About 17 employees from the city’s Bureau of Engineering managed the project and approximately 32 workers from Calex Engineering Company constructed the wall, Moore said. Rosendahl said he is pleased that the wall was constructed this year because the city is facing a $400-million to $500-million budget deficit in fiscal year 2008-09. Rosendahl thinks if another year had passed, the project might not have happened. Ramsdell said he is grateful for Rosendahl and his staff’s efforts. ‘They had a lot of people making phone calls four years ago, when there were rains and slides throughout the city,’ he said. ‘They recognized that this was a danger and responded to us.’

When sisters Nancy Proano and Martha Willis heard that state legislators might close Will Rogers State Historic Park because of financial woes, they wanted to help keep the park open. The sisters were among approximately 300 volunteers who spruced up the park on Friday and Saturday as part of the ‘Will Rogers Never Met a State Park He Didn’t Like’ event hosted by the newly formed Will Rogers Ranch Foundation. The foundation organized the event to give citizens a chance to show their love of state parks, said Will Rogers’ great-granddaughter Jennifer Rogers Etcheverry. ‘We want to make people feel like this is their park,’ Etcheverry said. ‘Next time they come to Will Rogers, they can point out what they did.’ On Friday, Proano and Willis, who live in Culver City and Lake Balboa respectively, slathered their paint rollers with primer and brushed the interior walls of the park’s main barn. ‘I love this park,’ said Proano, whose hair was flecked with white paint. ‘It reminds me of my dad who has since passed away. We used to hike, have picnics and watch polo’ It would be a shame if they closed it.’ California State Parks has proposed closing 48 of the 278 state parks and reducing lifeguard staffing at 16 beaches in response to Governor Arnold Schwarzengger’s request that the department reduce its general fund budget by 10 percent. The state faces a $14.5-billion budget deficit. Salaries are the largest part of State Parks’ budget and the closures would allow the department to eliminate 136 positions, said Roy Stearns, communication deputy director for California State Parks. This means the department could reduce its general fund budget by $13.3 million. However, State Parks would lose $3.7 million in revenue generated by day-use fees at the 48 parks. State legislators will decide later this spring or summer about whether the parks will be closed. If they decide to close Will Rogers, the property would revert to the Rogers family. Betty Rogers, Will’s wife, deeded the 186-acre property to the state in 1944 with that stipulation. ‘The family doesn’t want it given back,’ Etcheverry said. ‘The family wants to keep it open as a memorial to my great-grandfather.’ To provide additional funding for the park, Etcheverry formed the Will Rogers Ranch Foundation with Trudi Sandmeier, whose grandfather was Will Rogers’ personal assistant, and Todd Vradenberg, a member of the Will Rogers Motion Picture Pioneers Foundation, which supports children and infants with pulmonary disease. Etcheverry is hopeful the foundation and state can partner to keep the park open. ‘We are working with California State Parks, and they are fully supportive of us,’ she said. ‘I am optimistic.’ The foundation is interviewing candidates for its board and will begin organizing fundraisers soon. Residents can become members for a fee ranging from $35 to $1,000, which also benefits the foundation’s efforts. Etcheverry hopes to raise enough money to restore the historic barn and all the rooms of the ranch house as well as open and operate a gift shop. On Friday, youth from the park’s Westside Riding School giggled and chatted as they cleaned the horses’ stalls inside Jim’s Barn (named after Will Rogers’ son). ‘I ride here, and I heard they might close it down,’ said Sophie Offer, a seventh-grader at Crossroads School. ‘I was really inspired to actually do something rather than just ride horses here. I wanted to help and make a difference.’ The 12-year-old has taken lessons from Westside Riding School instructor Dorte Lindegaard at the park for the past two years. Talia Lawrence, a 16-year-old at Wildwood School, also felt inspired to lend a hand. ‘I came here a lot as a kid for picnics and to ride horses. It’s a beautiful place with a lot of history and is one of the main reasons I decided to help preserve the parks,’ she said. Lawrence, a Mar Vista resident, started a campaign ‘Students Against the Closure of California Parks’ and created a Web site, www.saccap.synthasite.com, where she is selling buttons to benefit state parks. ‘These parks are indispensable to not only the people but also the wildlife,’ Lawrence said. On Saturday, Academy Award-winning actress Diane Keaton helped paint Jim’s Barn to show her support. Volunteers also restored the hitching rail that Will Rogers once used to tie his horse in front of his house in the early 1930s. They celebrated the completion of that project with a ribbon-cutting ceremony attended by Councilman Bill Rosendahl. He and Councilman Ed Reyes wrote a resolution against closing state parks and reducing lifeguard staffing that the Los Angeles City Council approved on April 2. Volunteers received free lunch, T-shirts and bandanas from the Rogers Motion Picture Pioneers Foundation for their efforts. ‘I’m impressed with the number of volunteers, but I’m more impressed with what they got done,’ said Randy Young, a Pacific Palisades resident and historian who helped organize the event.

Guttenberg Short Circuits On ‘Dancing With the Stars’ Call him the ‘anti-Carolla.’ For the first three weeks of the ABC competition show ‘Dancing With the Stars,’ everyone’s favorite erstwhile honorary mayor, Palisadian and comic actor Steve Guttenberg, seemed to have all the right moves’and to lead in the popularity department. Coupled with exquisite choreographer Anna Trebunskay, Guttenberg, 49, held his own, even as one of his competitors, smarmy radio personality Adam Carolla, lobbed barbs at the affable actor. For a moment in time, Guttenberg charmed America, and not an episode of ‘Dancing’ went by when he didn’t mention his parents back East ‘ the reason, as Guttenberg told the Palisadian-Post on March 13, that he agreed to do the show. But the tango edition of ‘Dancing’ got the best of the ‘Three Men and a Baby’ star. America had voted. Within the opening minutes of the April 1 show (no joke!), Guttenberg was eliminated, despite the fact that he had gamely mocked his own image portraying an aspiring rapper in a ‘Dancing’ April Fool’s skit. Could’ve been worse, as anyone who caught this week’s Carolla fiasco knows, witnessing Guttenberg’s shock jock doppelganger in Zorro outfit and moustache, beginning his routine on a unicycle (!) and dancing like Frankenstein’s monster in a Dracula costume. The judges were baffled…or perhaps merely pausing as America caught its collective breath from laughing so hard. This is dancing? America’s love affair with Guttenberg seems to be over’for now. But don’t count the Gute out. To paraphrase a certain cinematic cyborg famously portrayed by our Governor, ‘He’ll be back!’

Santa Monica resident Joe Mifsud was at Coastline beach, across from the Getty Villa, on February 16, when he saw a skull in the rocks. ‘Oh, my god, it’s a human skull,’ Mifsud thought and he later told the Palisadian-Post, ‘I knew it was real.’ He ran to his car, grabbed his cell phone and called 911 to report that he had found a skull. Then he waited. ‘In a little bit, I saw three red-and-white helicopters come over and I thought that they were coming because of my call, but they flew over,’ said Mifsud who works for Palisadian architect James R. Stewart. After 45 minutes, no one had come, so he called 911 again and repeated, ‘There is a human skull on the beach.’ The 911 operator told him that there was no record of his call. ‘Do you think I’m joking?’ Mifsud asked. ‘I just don’t call 911 for a prank. There’s a skull.’ The operator advised him to retrieve the skull, before it washed back into the ocean. Mifsud went to the rocks, found a stick and picked the skull up with that stick and continued to wait. Finally two Malibu patrol cars arrived. When the officers saw the skull, which was missing teeth and a lower jawbone, they called homicide. ‘They didn’t seem prepared because they didn’t have a bag to put the skull into,’ Mifsud said. He was told that the skull had to be placed in a paper bag rather than a plastic one because of contamination, so he got one out of his trunk and gave it to the officers. Mifsud was told the reason for the 911-response delay was due to the location of that beach, which is on the borderline of city and county call areas. LAPD Homicide Detective Mark Lillienfeld called Mifsud the following Wednesday and a coroner’s team went to the beach to meet with Mifsud, who showed them the location he found the skull. No additional bones were found. Los Angeles Sheriff’s Homicide Detective Mark Lillienfeld, who was in charge of the investigation, was contacted by the Post. ‘It looks real,’ he said, ‘but we don’t know if it’s real or not until the anthropologist in the coroner’s office takes a look at it.’ The skull was sent to the office the third week in February, but it took several weeks for a result because of caseload volume at the L.A. County Coroner’s office. According to Lillienfeld, it is the largest in the world, performing more than 10,000 autopsies a year– the next closest is New York City with 5,000. On March 13, Lillienfeld had the report. ‘It was an adult male, most likely African or Asian American,’ he said. ‘The longest amount of time the skull has been in the water is at least six months, but not more than two years.’ He said there were no marks on the skull that would indicate cause of death, so it was listed as ’cause of death unknown.’ The skull was sent to the California Department of Justice DNA lab in Sacramento to see if DNA can be extracted that can be matched to men who are missing or were unidentified.

Dr. Van Nguyen Melds Western And Alternative Medicine Here For Dr. Van Nguyen, M.D., opening her family and alternative medicine practice in Pacific Palisades last November 5 represented the culmination of a lifelong journey that began in Vietnam. When she opened Holistic Medical Clinic in the U.S. Bank building on Sunset, Nguyen had arrived at a place in life where she could expertly apply both conventional Western medicine and alternative methods to treating a broad range of ailments. ‘My practice is rooted in three parts: body, emotion and spirit,’ Nguyen says. ‘The body manifests symptoms because it is stressed by physical factors (germs, food allergies, nutrition), psychological factors, or spiritual factors. This is why it’s important to treat all three. And the magic of alternative medicine is that I can get all three parts to de-stress by using seven healing techniques.’ Call it a case of ‘practice makes perfect.’ Everything came together for Nguyen while she worked at a San Francisco-area general medical practice, after she received her degrees from UC Davis and the University of California, San Francisco. Until then, she felt dissatisfied merely applying Western techniques. ‘I’ve always been a seeker and interested in spirituality,’ says Nguyen, who spent her medical-school years traveling the world. After an early childhood in Saigon, Nguyen and her family”an aviation-engineer father, a pharmacist mother and a younger brother”left Vietnam, spent a year in Amiens, France, then settled in Garden Grove, where Nguyen’s parents resumed their white-collar professions. Nguyen slipped uneventfully into American life, with few negative memories of her Vietnam past. ‘My parents really sheltered me from the war,’ Nguyen recalls. ‘I remember sometimes we didn’t have rice to eat and we had no electricity after 6 p.m. But I was always surrounded by cousins and grandparents. ‘After Saigon fell and the Communists took over, they closed down private enterprise. So they shut down my mother’s pharmacy and she was sent to work in a balloon factory. Everyone was expected to be blue-collar workers because the Communists wanted to do away with class distinctions.’ Until that point, Nguyen’s father had worked as the head engineer at T’n Son Nhut International, Vietnam’s largest airport. ‘He was sent to re-education camp,’ Nguyen says. ‘He told me some horrific stories which made me think of them as similar to concentration camps. One day, for example, my father was sent out with other prisoners to collect land mines. Every day, for the longest time, he never knew whether that was the day that he would be blown to bits. Someone he knew would lose life or limbs. When he was released from the camp in 1979, he escaped by boat with the waves of boat people fleeing from Vietnam.’ His family later followed. In the U.S., after completing her medical residency, Nguyen joined a private practice in Sausalito, where she learned about alternative medicine. She moved to Los Angeles last August and began exploring locations as far south as Laguna Beach for her practice. But when she visited a friend who lived in the Palisades, she fell in love with this area. ‘I always say that the Palisades found me first,’ Nguyen says, chuckling. ‘It’s not only beautiful on a physical level, but there’s also a strong energy here.’ Like many people here, Nguyen became enamored with the psychological aspects of working in the village’-the small-town vibe; an oasis removed from greater Los Angeles. She is also impressed with her clientele, ages 4 to 80. ‘My patients are smart. They ask questions. They read. They want to be involved in their own health care. An educated patient is an empowered patient.’ Nguyen is board-certified in family medicine, including adult medicine, child care, women’s health, travel medicine, urgent-care services, and preventative medical care. She also practices alternative medicine, specializing in applied kinesiology, clearing emotional stress and traumas (NET), energy medicine, non-invasive allergy testing/allergy elimination (NAET), nutrition therapy, and Oriental medicine. ‘I’m probably one of the few doctors who combines the two,’ Nguyen says. ‘Western medicine asks, Why are you sick? Alternative medicine asks, Why are you not healing? ‘I have great respect for Western medicine,’ she continues. ‘It is a powerful tool to have around, especially for emergencies. If you break a bone, you’ll need a medical doctor. If you have a heart attack, Western medicine might be the only thing keeping you alive. It is in the realm of chronic conditions and disease prevention that alternative medicine shines. ‘Western medicine is still the best tool to suppress the symptoms. But you also need to get to the root of the cause of the illness, and that is where alternative medicine really comes in.’ At Nguyen’s practice, alternative medicine goes hand in hand with Western medicine. Once she identifies the client’s problems, she presents a full range of options. She can handle just about anything–from delivering babies and counseling autistic children to treating viral infections, chronic pain, migraines and acne–‘You name it, I’ve seen it! I never have a dull day,’ says Nguyen, who can also prescribe help and medicine to cope with anxiety, depression and phobias. In addition, people (especially young women) have been coming to Nguyen for help with weight-loss issues. Good nutrition is key, but not enough, she says. ‘You have to talk about digestion. You can be put on a diet until you’re blue in the face, but if you are not digesting properly, it’s not going to work. You’re not what you eat, you are what you can digest and absorb.’ After focusing on nutrition and digestion, ‘I start asking about the person’s emotional stress,’ Nguyen says. Nguyen uses herself as an example of how a person’s emotional environment can have a profound impact on one’s physical symptoms. ‘The best therapy for any kind of healer is actually loving your job,’ Nguyen says. ‘When I was an unhappy doctor [in San Francisco], I was constantly tired, I never felt recharged.’ Today, Nguyen feels energized”Life here is full of adventures, new horizons, interesting people!”and loves helping Palisadians conquer their afflictions. ‘I feel very grateful that I am able to help my patients,’ she says. ‘I believe so much in my vision of holistic care, and I believe in my clinic. I believe that the patients are ready for a different kind of care.’ That vision is the result of her open-minded philosophy, and a creativity that stems from childhood. ‘I used to play piano,’ Nguyen says, laughing as she recalls taking those lessons. ‘And I loved to draw. But I only drew faces. Portraits. I guess I’ve always been really interested in people.’ (The Holistic Medical Clinic is open Monday through Friday at 15247 Sunset Blvd., Suite 206. Same-day appointments are available. Call (310) 460-9220, or visit www.doctorvan.org.)

The deadline is fast approaching for Palisades Charter High School employees to decide whether to return to the Los Angeles School District. More than a third of the current teachers were granted a five-year leave of absence from LAUSD to work at the charter school, and they must decide by April 30 where they plan to work this fall. A major factor influencing the 92 employees’ decision is whether they will receive their lifetime retirement benefits from the district if they choose to stay, said Executive Director Amy Dresser-Held. The district has promised employees they will have the same access to dental, vision and medical benefits they receive now in retirement. LAUSD representatives, however, have not indicated whether Palisades High employees will be eligible for those benefits after this spring. In 2003, Palisades High separated from the district as a fiscally independent charter school and began receiving funding directly from the state instead of through LAUSD. The school, however, gives the district more than $700,000 annually or about $3,900 per working employee for retirement benefits and that money is placed in a pool and used for current retirees, Dresser-Held said. Pali officials don’t know if they can continue to purchase retirement benefits through the district, she said. ‘We’re hopeful that at a minimum we will have a one-year extension, so we can talk about how to deal with this in the long-run,’ Dresser-Held said. Along with Palisades High, employees from three other conversion charter schools, including Granada Hills Charter High School, can return to LAUSD and are also waiting for a response about retirement benefits. In the meantime, PaliHi’s board of directors has set aside $1.5 million for lifetime retirement benefits in a trust fund. ‘We’ve taken a proactive approach to prepare,’ Dresser-Held said. ‘For those folks close to retirement, this is a hard decision and a tense time. Pali has committed to covering folks, and we don’t want lifetime benefits to be the sole determinant.’ School officials are also considering buying health insurance for their 186 eligible employees separate from the district. The school currently gives LAUSD $1.6 million or approximately $8,600 per eligible employee for health insurance. If the school purchases its own healthcare benefits, it will cost about $180,000 more per year but the benefits packages would be similar, said Chief Business Officer Gregory Wood. ‘It’s more expensive on our own than through the district because we are a smaller organization with not as much purchasing power,’ Dresser-Held said. Human Resources Director Colleen McCarthy said she distributed a survey asking employees to indicate their plans. Fifty-five employees returned surveys, and four indicated that they might leave. ‘We understand they must do what’s best for them and their families,’ Dresser-Held said. ‘My general impression is most want to stay. It will be a relatively small group who will leave.’ To prepare for any turnover, McCarthy has attended 10 job fairs and collected 145 resumes across every department. ‘They are all qualified, credentialed teachers or will be credentialed this June,’ she said. ‘It’s a really nice mix of experienced and new teachers who are excited to have their own classes.’ English teacher Dennis Danziger, who has been the most vocal employee about leaving Pali, wrote in a letter to his colleagues and the Palisadian-Post that he feels sad to leave the school, where he loves to teach, but is concerned about his lifetime retirement benefits. Danziger’s mother-in-law, a former public school teacher, was stricken with Alzheimer’s 16 years ago and without her retirement benefits couldn’t afford her care. ‘I’m not going to roll the dice with PaliHi,’ Danziger wrote. ‘I’m not going to convince myself that earning a few thousand extra dollars a year while I teach here is more valuable or precious than a decent medical benefit package that LAUSD provides.’