With encouraging approval from the Design Review Board last Wednesday and a presentation before the Community Council scheduled for October 11, a new Mort’s is well on its way to reopening early in 2008. The town’s beloved delicatessen, which closed its doors for remodeling on March 31, will reopen in a new guise, but with the same emphasis on casualness and community that Mort and Bobbie Farberow fostered from the time they opened in 1974. The new owner, former L. A. Mayor Richard Riordan, ‘is sensitive to fitting in,’ Rick Mills told the Palisadian-Post. Mills, who is the chairman of the Pacific Palisades Design Review Board, outlined the plans that look more like a facelift than a makeover. Trish Riordan Torrey, who is overseeing the project, attended the meeting, along project manager Janel Wright and architect Ralph Gentile, of Ralph Gentile Architects. Gentile’s L.A.-based firm specializes in the gaming, restaurant and hospitality industries. Local designs include Boule Bakery on La Cienaga, Bliss at the W Hotel and Josie restaurant in Santa Monica. Riordan’s project consists of exterior and interior improvements to the one-story retail building at 1029-1035 Swarthmore. The previous restaurant space consisted of approximately 5,800 sq. ft. divided into two adjacent spaces’the former deli and the Oak Room. Plans call for maintaining two separate restaurant operations, whose much-anticipated names were revealed at the DRB meeting. A ‘Mort’s’ sign, antiqued to look as if it had always been there, will be placed on the awning above the entrance. The deli will be called The Village Pantry, reflecting Riordan’s sister restaurant The Original Pantry in downtown Los Angeles. The Oak Room will keep its name and reopen as a bar and grill, with banquet capabilities. The project will not enlarge the restaurant area or the footprint on the site, and the existing parking lot that serves the restaurant will remain at 43 total, including four handicapped-accessible parking spaces. The deli will offer a buffet line, with seating at booths, tables, and the addition of a community table, which Riordan hopes will encourage people to be neighborly and talk to one another, Mills said. With no promises on final menu items, Mills reports that the matzo ball soup will most certainly have a place on the menu. ‘What would we do about Passover, if they didn’t?’ he asks. In addition, the new owners are making efforts to recruit some old staff members, several of whom are still around. ‘One former employee works at Caf’ Vida and one at Gladstone’s, another of Riordan’s restaurants,’ Mills said. For the Oak Room side, which will not be accessible from the deli, the d’cor will be more formal with tables and chairs and a bar and stools in the middle. For the building’s new exterior, the architects propose an earth-tone color palette, which will not exactly match the retail stores in the same area, but will be compatible. The bulletin board, formerly placed on the building’s fa’ade and updated by PRIDE, will be replaced with a plaque in memory of Mort Farberow, who died in 2002. For the moment, Riordan’s staff is focused on building out the new restaurant and is not planning to offer seating outside, as it requires a different city permit. While supporting the new project, Mills says that the DRB attached a condition, which requires that the tenant improve the appearance of the three newspaper racks in front of the restaurant. ‘They’re old and beaten-up, and although they are technically the responsibility of the owner of the building, we are insisting that the tenant either remove or improve them,’ Mills said. The Design Review Board, created by city ordinance, oversees the aesthetic standards of the commercial areas in the Palisades, including the village, Santa Monica Canyon and Sunset at PCH. The Community Council will hear details of the project next Thursday at 7 p.m. in the Palisades Branch Library community room.

With encouraging approval from the Design Review Board last Wednesday and a presentation before the Community Council scheduled for October 11, a new Mort’s is well on its way to reopening early in 2008. The town’s beloved delicatessen, which closed its doors for remodeling on March 31, will reopen in a new guise, but with the same emphasis on casualness and community that Mort and Bobbie Farberow fostered from the time they opened in 1974. The new owner, former L. A. Mayor Richard Riordan, ‘is sensitive to fitting in,’ Rick Mills told the Palisadian-Post. Mills, who is the chairman of the Pacific Palisades Design Review Board, outlined the plans that look more like a facelift than a makeover. Trish Riordan Torrey, who is overseeing the project, attended the meeting, along project manager Janel Wright and architect Ralph Gentile, of Ralph Gentile Architects. Gentile’s L.A.-based firm specializes in the gaming, restaurant and hospitality industries. Local designs include Boule Bakery on La Cienaga, Bliss at the W Hotel and Josie restaurant in Santa Monica. Riordan’s project consists of exterior and interior improvements to the one-story retail building at 1029-1035 Swarthmore. The previous restaurant space consisted of approximately 5,800 sq. ft. divided into two adjacent spaces’the former deli and the Oak Room. Plans call for maintaining two separate restaurant operations, whose much-anticipated names were revealed at the DRB meeting. A ‘Mort’s’ sign, antiqued to look as if it had always been there, will be placed on the awning above the entrance. The deli will be called The Village Pantry, reflecting Riordan’s sister restaurant The Original Pantry in downtown Los Angeles. The Oak Room will keep its name and reopen as a bar and grill, with banquet capabilities. The project will not enlarge the restaurant area or the footprint on the site, and the existing parking lot that serves the restaurant will remain at 43 total, including four handicapped-accessible parking spaces. The deli will offer a buffet line, with seating at booths, tables, and the addition of a community table, which Riordan hopes will encourage people to be neighborly and talk to one another, Mills said. With no promises on final menu items, Mills reports that the matzo ball soup will most certainly have a place on the menu. ‘What would we do about Passover, if they didn’t?’ he asks. In addition, the new owners are making efforts to recruit some old staff members, several of whom are still around. ‘One former employee works at Caf’ Vida and one at Gladstone’s, another of Riordan’s restaurants,’ Mills said. For the Oak Room side, which will not be accessible from the deli, the d’cor will be more formal with tables and chairs and a bar and stools in the middle. For the building’s new exterior, the architects propose an earth-tone color palette, which will not exactly match the retail stores in the same area, but will be compatible. The bulletin board, formerly placed on the building’s fa’ade and updated by PRIDE, will be replaced with a plaque in memory of Mort Farberow, who died in 2002. For the moment, Riordan’s staff is focused on building out the new restaurant and is not planning to offer seating outside, as it requires a different city permit. While supporting the new project, Mills says that the DRB attached a condition, which requires that the tenant improve the appearance of the three newspaper racks in front of the restaurant. ‘They’re old and beaten-up, and although they are technically the responsibility of the owner of the building, we are insisting that the tenant either remove or improve them,’ Mills said. The Design Review Board, created by city ordinance, oversees the aesthetic standards of the commercial areas in the Palisades, including the village, Santa Monica Canyon and Sunset at PCH. The Community Council will hear details of the project next Thursday at 7 p.m. in the Palisades Branch Library community room.

Heal the Bay Report Says Greater City Effort Needed

Water quality test scores at beaches throughout the state soared this summer, according to Heal the Bay’s annual Summer Beach Report Card. And that success’and some failure’hit close to home. ‘This was an incredible summer’the best we’ve had in recent memory,’ said Heal the Bay Executive Director Mark Gold at a press conference last Thursday morning on Will Rogers State Beach, next to the Chautauqua Boulevard storm drain. ‘One of the reasons we’re standing here is that this has been a chronically D and F beach. ‘Usually, we stand here and do these [conferences] and report the bad news,’ Gold told his audience. ‘But we have good news to report today.’ Each fall, the environmental nonprofit releases the results of its statewide summer beach report, which reflects testing of bacteria levels from multiple sources, including fecal waste, at beaches between the end of May and the beginning of September. Beaches are assigned grades ranging from A through F, corresponding to the risk of illness to ocean users. Of the 67 beach locations tested in Santa Monica Bay this summer, 93 percent received A or B grades, up from 75 percent the previous summer. Beaches like Castle Rock at Sunset Boulevard and nearly all of Will Rogers saw A and A+ grades. But of the five beaches in the Bay with ‘poor water quality,’ two were along the Palisades. Castle Rock Beach at Sunset Mesa received a C; Will Rogers at Temescal Canyon received an F. Other sites within the Bay which received failing grades were the Santa Monica Pier, Dockweiler State Beach at Ballona Creek and Malibu’s Puerco Beach. Improvements within Santa Monica Bay reflected a statewide trend. The percentage of California beaches receiving A or B grades rose 10 percent from last year to 92 percent. Consistent with recent patterns, L.A. County had the poorest water quality in the state. The report cites ‘extremely poor water quality’ in Long Beach and Avalon for helping the county secure its worst-in-the-state ranking. Heal the Bay attributes much of the improvement to a record statewide drought. The nonprofit also credits tougher pollution standards and better enforcement by local governments. Both the city and county have recently completed millions of dollars worth of improvements by building and upgrading storm drains. ‘We’ve seen a sea change in cooperation between the city and county,’ Gold said. But there are still local causes of concern. As reported by the Palisadian-Post, water quality suffered at Temescal as a result of irregular maintenance of the canyon’s city-operated low-flow (dry season) diversion. A large summer buildup of trash accumulated at the diversion, which prevented it from rerouting polluted urban runoff away from the beach, said city sanitation engineers. The city did not clean the diversion until after it received calls from Heal the Bay and the Post’which were both alerted to the matter by concerned Temescal beachgoer Donna Chapin. Heal the Bay’s Gold used that incident during last week’s press conference to urge local governments to maintain their diversions. ‘Temescal and Castle Rock both have dry-weather diversions, but clearly greater effort to operate and maintain these facilities is needed,’ read the report. ‘If you don’t properly maintain them, they don’t work,’ Gold said. Local beaches also benefited from a lack of sewage spills this summer. According to the city’s Department of Public Works, only one sewage backup in the Palisades entered the city’s storm drains. About 2,244 gallons would have emptied onto Will Rogers Beach if a county-operated diversion in Las Pulgas Canyon had not successfully rerouted the hazardous flow back into the sewer system on August 1. Earlier this winter and spring, multiple spills originating from the Palisades brought tens of thousands of gallons of sewage to local beaches. The city and county do not reroute storm-drain runoff from November through March, defined as the ‘wet period’ of the year. —– To contact Staff Writer Max Taves, e-mail reporter@palipost.com or call (310) 454-1321 ext. 28.

Judge’s Decision Means “Destroying” Controversial Rustic Canyon Home

An Orange County Superior Court’s tentative ruling made last week orders the City of Los Angeles to enforce its own rules and revoke the certificate of occupancy of a controversial Rustic Canyon home within 60 days. If finalized, the court’s latest decision will force homeowners Vickey and Mehr Beglari to bring their 8,550-sq.-ft. house at 909 Greentree Rd. into “compliance with city municipal code,” requiring them to remove 14 feet–the equivalent of as much as 2,000 sq. ft.–away from their three-story house’s street front. That would “effectively destroy the house,” Beglari lawyer Mark Baker told the Palisadian-Post on Tuesday. Baker, who plans to appeal, called the decision devastating for his clients. “These people, theoretically, are going to get kicked out of their house,” he said. “They can’t sell it. They can’t refinance it. They can’t live in it!” The ruling written by Judge David Velasquez invalidates the decision of the city’s Department of Building and Safety, which had “improperly” calculated the prevailing setback of the street, thus allowing the Beglaris to build 14 feet closer to the street than city code permitted. Velasquez formally discharged the city from contempt proceedings it had faced for failing to follow an appellate court decision. But he assailed the judgment of the Building and Safety Department. A department spokesman said he would not comment on pending litigation. The judge has given the city and the Beglaris an opportunity to object to the decision. City Attorney Spokesman Frank Mateljan said, “In all likelihood we will file something with the court next week, but nothing has been finalized.” The Beglaris’ lawyer, however, said he has no expectation of the judge changing his decision. Five current and former Greentree residents, who took the city to court, are “pleased with the decision” but still cautious about last week’s ruling. Those residents are attorney Ron Oster and wife, L.A. Superior Court Judge Diana Wheatley; attorney John Rosenfeld; and teacher Jacki Horwitz and husband, L.A. Superior Court Judge David Horwitz. (Jacki Horwitz is also a Post columnist but not an employee.) Velasquez wrote that he hoped his decision would “accomplish full and final justice between the parties.” But tension between the Beglaris and their neighbors only seems to have increased. The Beglaris blame last week’s ruling, in part, on their neighbors’ ties to the legal community, Baker said. (Following state law, the court was moved to Orange County because two of the plaintiffs are sitting judges in L.A. County Superior Court.) “In my clients’ view, this was judges helping judges. You’ve got two judges and two other lawyers,” Baker said. Some of the plaintiffs and their supporters suspect that Mehr Beglari, a developer, used his professional ties to gain improper influence within the Building and Safety Department. The Beglaris’ lawyer said that racial biases motivated their neighbors. “They’re an interracial couple. I think that has something do with it. He’s Persian and she’s African-American,” Baker said. The plaintiffs told the Post they would not dignify those accusations with a response. Acting as a spokesperson for the plaintiffs, John Rosenfeld said that he and his neighbors have fought against the Beglaris’ illegal addition because it marred the look of the community and flagrantly disregarded the law. “This house is at the gateway to the canyon,” Rosenfeld said. “All the other houses are set back. That’s one of the things that makes it Rustic Canyon. There are big front yards there, and they’re not built up to the front end of the property. And unless we did something to hold the [Beglaris and the city] accountable, this would become part of the new status quo.” Tension between the Beglaris and their neighbors first arose in 2001. In January of that year, Building and Safety approved a 6,550-sq.-ft. addition to the Beglaris’ existing 2,000-sq.-ft ranch-style house. But when the Beglaris began excavating the front of their 10,000-sq.-ft lot in April 2001, their neighbors suspected that the couple had planned to build too close to the curb, violating the street’s prevailing setback. In October 2002, a zoning administrator with the Department of City Planning reviewed the neighbors’ complaint and agreed. The administrator concluded that the house was 14 ft. closer to the curb than permitted by city code. The reason: the Beglaris benefited from a Building and Safety error that vastly underestimated the street’s setback. But the following February, the City Planning Commission overruled its administrator’s decision, prompting the Greentree neighbors to take the fight to court. In October 2003, a Superior Court judge disagreed with the Planning Commission’s decision and ordered the city to revoke all of the Beglaris’ permits, including their certificate of occupancy. And in December 2004 that decision was affirmed by the Second District Appellate Court to which the Beglaris had appealed. Following other legal delays, Bureau and Safety revoked the Beglaris’ permits in January 2006, giving them one month to comply. However, by the time the February deadline came, Building and Safety had withdrawn its order forcing the Begaris’ compliance and restored their permits. Why? The Beglaris found a way–consistent with an interpretation of Building and Safety practices–to alter the prevailing setback of the entire block: In 2004, they purchased 921 Greentree, only a couple doors down from their other home. The following year, they built a canopy attached to the front of the chimney that stretched five feet toward the curb. Building Safety approved that canopy’s construction. That seemingly minor change had a big effect. It decreased the prevailing setback for the entire block. The zoning code calculates the ‘prevailing’ setback by taking the average of the property line that is the shortest distance from the street (an attached garage at 925 Greentree) and the setback of any properties within 10 feet (the Beglaris’ 921 Greentree). So when the Beglaris asked Building and Safety to restore the permits to their beleaguered house at 909, the department agreed, citing the Projected Building Exception of city code. But last week’s court decision in Orange County found that Building and Safety ‘improperly applied the provisions’ of that code. Neither 921 nor 925 Greentree is a ‘bona fide Projecting Building’ as defined by L.A.’s municipal code–effectively rejecting the city’s decision to restore building and occupancy rights to the Beglaris. —– To contact Staff Writer Max Taves, e-mail reporter@palipost.com or call (310) 454-1321 ext. 28.

A Bobcat operator was digging ditches for new plumbing inside the old Mort’s Deli building Monday morning as remodeling moves along for two new restaurants, under the ownership of former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan. Yet immediately next door, at 1037 Swarthmore, owners of the a la Tarte bistro and bakery had left a handwritten message in chalk on a blackboard in the front window. It read: ‘Dear Clients and Friends, ‘Thank you for your continual support and friendship over the years. Sorry we have to go! But, we have a lifetime of wonderful memories from the last 12 years. Thank you!!! ‘Love, ‘Bonnie, Bert, Adeline and the a la Tarte staff.’ On Sunday afternoon, shortly after closing for the day following a typically frantic morning of serving meals amidst the farmers’ market crowd, owners Bert and Bonnie Yellen told their 15 employees (regular and part-time) that they had decided to end their lease, effective the next day. The employees had long anticipated a sale of the restaurant, since the Yellens had been openly searching for a buyer for more than two years. But they hadn’t expected an abrupt closing. ‘We’ve been trying to sell the place ever since the landlord (Palisades Partners) doubled our rent,’ to about $4.50 a square foot, Bert Yellen told the Palisadian-Post early Sunday evening as he helped move furniture. ‘I wanted to get some of our investment back by selling to another restaurant owner who would buy all our equipment, take over the lease, and inherit our clientele. The landlord insisted on maintaining a French restaurant [in order to avoid direct competition with other tenants on the street, including Terri’s, Dante’s and the new Mort’s], and I brought in about a dozen viable candidates. But the landlord turned everybody down or was inflexible about a new lease. These guys only wanted to give a five-year lease without a five-year option, and that’s just not realistic. It would take about three years just to recoup the remodeling and upgrade costs, and then the landlord could double the rent again. I had a prospective buyer who owns successful restaurant in Beverly Hills, but she wouldn’t agree to a lease like that.’ Said Bonnie Yellen, ‘This is the saddest thing I’ve ever had to do. We’ve been here 12 years and we wanted to keep it open until we found a buyer, but we’ve been losing money and we can’t afford this.’ In fact, Bert admitted, they had only paid their old rent the past three months. ‘We were upset that the landlord couldn’t agree to work out a deal with one of our potential buyers,’ he said. ‘But I told the landlord I would pay all our back rent [an estimated $13,500] with a certified check once they agreed to a buyer.’ The Yellens have been absentee owners the past two years after moving to La Paz, where they have been renting a house and converting a two-story building a block from the Gulf of California into a new restaurant that will feature a combination of American, French and Mexican food. Bonnie is also going to build her own professional kitchen in their new home where she can teach cooking classes. The Yellens donated all their remaining food ingredients and supplies such as large bags of flour and sugar to Bellwood Bakery in Brentwood (‘We’ve always been helpful to each other,’ Bert said), but on Monday morning loaded a rental truck with all their furniture and sent it down to La Paz for the new eatery. They had to leave behind the colorful wall murals depicting French countryside scenes.

The City of Los Angeles has begun Phase I of the Bureau of Sanitation’s Solid Waste Integrated Resources Plan (SWIRP), which will put L.A. on track to become a ‘zero-waste’ city by 2030. The main goals of the SWIRP are to eliminate the use of urban landfills, develop alternative technologies for long-term waste disposal, increase recycling and resource recovery and convert the entire Sanitation fleet to liquid natural gas vehicles. Phase I is a process driven by stakeholder input and participation that will determine the principles and visions that will inform future stages of the Plan. City representatives are currently hosting neighborhood meetings across the city to determine region-specific concerns. Last Wednesday, Tony Torres, a consultant for the city, addressed a group of stakeholders in Pacific Palisades to explain the current plan and to discover the environmental concerns of Palisadians. ‘Local input in Pacific Palisades is different than Boyle Heights,’ Torres said. ‘After having these meetings, we’ll figure out the best plan.’ However, that’s only the beginning. The final SWIRP document will be a 20-year master plan that outlines necessary Bureau of Sanitation program changes, infrastructure needs, legislative goals, a financial plan and the environmental impact report. To become a zero-waste city, Los Angeles will need to make radical changes in three main areas: product creation (manufacturing and packaging), product use and product disposal (resource recovery vs. landfilling). Torres also outlined the newest recycling programs for the city, which include improvements to curbside collection; recycling for apartments, multifamily dwellings, commercial businesses and offices; opening of new markets for recyclables; and recycling of food waste. After his presentation, the floor was opened up to questions and concerns of local residents. One woman asked why materials like Styrofoam, which is not biodegradable, are still being manufactured. ‘If there is a demand for that material,’ Torres said, ‘they will keep selling it.’ He added that Styrofoam (non-contaminated) can now be recycled in the blue bin, a fact that few people in the room seemed aware of, making it obvious that an increase in environmental education will be an integral part of helping L.A. achieve its zero-waste goal. Following Torres’ presentation, Marie Steckmest of Palisades Cares, who organized the meeting, led a discussion about what could be done in Pacific Palisades, not only to aid the city’s efforts, but to help the community become a leader in the ‘green’ campaign. One idea put forth at the meeting was to try and convert the Palisades into a ‘bag free town,’ which would mean that local markets and merchants would no longer provide plastic bags for purchases. Someone else suggested that automatic sprinkler systems be adjusted, to reduce both frequency of watering and the amount of water wasted, as some sprinklers spray large portions of sidewalks and streets. People were also encouraged to avoid hosing off sidewalks and driveways in this ongoing drought. Other ideas put forth were simple, like walking and biking to work and not discarding cigarette butts.

A Palisades mother and her two sons survive, thanks to pioneering approaches by UCLA neurosurgeons

On a weekday afternoon, the Nunez household buzzes with the energy of young brothers Noah, 11, and Diego, 5. They duel with plastic swords and create other havoc while inciting the frenzy of their adoring fans, Doug and Wilbur, the family’s pet pugs. Meanwhile, Lisa D’Andrea Nunez, their mother, a radiant woman who exudes Zen-like calm, brings order to the merry chaos. However typical this domestic scene appears, the family’s history is anything but average, with life-threatening medical crises consuming their life for more than a decade. The ordeal begins in 1995 when Noah, just 3′ weeks old, cried out and then slumped into unconsciousness. At the time, Lisa was busy unpacking boxes. It was day two for her and her husband, Emanuel Nunez, in their new Mediterranean-style residence at the top of Bienveneda, where they still live. ‘I had just nursed Noah and he was in the arms of my mother-in-law in the next room,’ Lisa recalls. ‘My three-week-old experience as a mother said ‘Hmm, that cry doesn’t sound right.” The new mother was right. Her infant son’s face had turned blue and he had stopped breathing. She immediately administered CPR. Once stabilized, Noah was transferred to a local emergency room and after a battery of inconclusive tests, a spinal tap was recommended. Lisa needed to choose a hospital: Cedars-Sinai or UCLA. Her husband, an agent with Creative Artists Agency, called Michael Ovitz, the powerhouse former head of CAA who was Nunez’s boss at the time. Ovitz had just donated many millions to UCLA, so the answer was clear about where to seek treatment. Little did the Nunez family know how major and long-term their connection to the UCLA Medical Center would become. Noah was diagnosed as having multiple arteriovenous malformations (AVMs) in his brain. An AVM is an abnormal collection of blood vessels; blood from arteries in the brain flows directly into draining veins without the normal capillaries in between. Present at birth, AVMs are rare, appearing in less than 0.14 percent of the U.S. population. The risk of hemorrhage is the main medical concern, with about one-quarter of AVMs bleeding by age 15. In Noah’s case, six simultaneous hemorrhages had occurred in his three-week-old brain. Catheters were used to place tiny coils at each site to stem the bleeding before Dr. Neil Martin, chief of neurosurgery, surgically removed and cauterized all the bleeds, a 13-hour procedure involving a team of 15 doctors. Noah’s chances of survival, much less leading a happy life, were slim. After the surgery, Lisa remembers asking one of the doctors if when they had entered the hospital they were in a deep forest, where were they now, had they reached the meadow? ‘His response was that the trees had cleared but we have a very long way to go,’ she says. ‘When we took him home, we had no idea what we were up against,’ Lisa recalls. ‘Prior to having Noah, I had been with Hugo Boss menswear doing celebrity wardrobing and product placement. I traveled to New York three or four times a year and all over the country to film festivals with my husband, who is an agent. It was a very different life we had been leading. ‘In time, it became a situation where I had to choose between playing with my kid on the floor and making sure he was getting proper therapies or rushing into Beverly Hills to make sure ‘so and so’ had the right suit for his TV appearance,’ she says with a touch of sarcasm. ‘I let the wardrobing thing go before he was three.’ Lisa says there was not a lot they could do until Noah started passing developmental milestones. They had been told that he might have a clutched left hand, walk with a limp, be partially blind in both eyes and have a compromised sense of touch. ‘As time went on, most of these things did not occur,’ she says. Noah defied all the odds. Today, he is an outgoing fifth grader at Marquez Charter Elementary who runs, surfs, plays tennis, writes, reads and has lots of friends. Upon learning that AVMs were common to a family genetic disorder called Hereditary Hemorrhagic Telangiectasia, or HHT, Lisa had tests conducted in the months following Noah’s treatment and discovered she had her own brain AVM, one that was large and dangerous. Over the course of seven years, she underwent several interventional procedures and rounds of radiation therapy at UCLA before the mass was finally fully addressed and the potential danger eliminated. Despite HHT being a hereditary disorder (an abnormal gene on either chromosome 9 or 12 causes most cases), the condition manifests itself in many different ways. Ninety percent of people with the gene get nosebleeds, another 30 percent end up with an AVM in their lungs; there’s only a 10 percent chance of having an AVM develop in the brain and just a 3 percent chance it will hemorrhage. Often carriers of HHT have no symptoms. Each child of a parent with an HHT gene has a 50 percent chance of inheriting this abnormal gene. The Nunez’s second son, Diego, was born in 2002, during a time when Lisa continued to battle her own AVM issues. Even though the chances of this child having brain AVMs were minuscule, she insisted on giving birth to Diego at UCLA as an extra precaution. Following her maternal instincts made sense. An MRI of the days-old Diego showed he indeed had AVMs, one of which had hemorrhaged in utero. At 10 days old, the infant underwent brain surgery to remove the hematoma and resect the vascular malformation. At 2′, he became one of the youngest patients to undergo stereotactic radiosurgery for the remaining AVMs to prevent future bleeds. Stereotactic radiosurgery uses sophisticated 3-D computerized imaging to precisely target a narrow X-ray beam and deliver a high concentrated dose of radiation to the affected area. Stereotactic radiosurgery is not surgery in the conventional sense because there is no incision involved. Diego is now a happy, healthy 5-year-old who attends Crossroads and loves everything to do with ‘Star Wars’ and ‘Pirates of the Caribbean.’ An 11-year involvement with the neurosurgery team at UCLA gave the Nunezes status as an extended family of the hospital. When asked by Dr. Martin, Lisa jumped at the chance to join the division’s advisory board several years ago and chaired the organizing committee for the division’s first Visionary fundraising ball in 2005. She will tell her story at the 2007 Visionary Ball, taking place tonight. A commissioned ‘patient portrait’ photograph, a tradition for the Visionary Ball, features the Nunez brothers this year. It will hang in the new neurosurgery wing of UCLA’s ‘Hospital of the Future,’ the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, when it opens next spring.