While there has been speculation in the Palisades village for weeks that a change in ownership of Mort’s Deli is “imminent,” owner Bobbie Farberow told the Palisadian-Post on Monday that she had “no comment.” Although she is not prepared to sign the lease recently offered to her by the landlord, Palisades Partners, she is said to be still trying to negotiate in good faith. (See Editorial, page 2). However, the Post has learned that at least two parties have been working for several months to acquire the popular eatery on the 1000 block of Swarthmore. Apparently former L.A. Mayor Richard Riordan, who owns The Pantry downtown and has an interest in Gladstone’s restaurant, is interested in acquiring the deli, as is a group of investors headed by longtime Palisadian Robert Klein, a vice president at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica. While Klein, who is on vacation in Hawaii, did acknowledge that discussions have been under way “for some time,” he said that no agreement has yet been reached with either deli owner Farberow or Palisades Partners. Klein did say that a number of local investors are involved and that the plan is “to keep the name and enhance the menu.” However Klein noted that at this point “there are still a lot of unanswered questions,” including “when and if Farberow will retire.” He also said there is the larger question regarding the future of Palisades Partners, which represents several family trusts. It has been rumored that in the last year there has been growing acrimony among the three managing partners on the direction their business should take, fueling speculation that they are considering perhaps selling off all or part of their commercial interests in the village, which includes 18 of the 22 storefronts on Swarthmore, as well as half of the buildings in the 15200 block north of Sunset’including Pearl Dragon and the U.S. Bank. Klein noted in a phone conversation on Monday with the Palisadian-Post that whoever is going to invest in the restaurant “is going to be expecting a return. Residents like me who have lived here a long time want to keep Mort’s and the village like it is’with a small-town feel. One thing we know for sure is that we want Mort’s to always be here, as it has been for us and our children.” Palisadian Steve Soboroff, who said that his five children “grew up at Mort’s,” agrees. “What kind of a business model are the landlords thinking about here?” asked the developer who spoke with the Post on Tuesday. “No operator is going to accept a three-to-five year lease. At Cross Creek in Malibu we gave Marmalade restaurant a 15-year lease so they could recoup their cost of improvements and make some money. Without the right kind of lease the business will not work out for either the restaurant owner or the landlord. I hope Palisades Partners use their brains and not just think of their wallets when putting this opportunity together. Mort’s isn’t just any deli. It’s a Palisades institution. If they mess with that they could have a problem.”

On June 13 a carob tree failed at the root ball and collapsed on a Chevy Yukon on Ocampo totaling the vehicle. On June 15 a large eucalyptus branch fell on Alma Real a block from where the carob tree had failed the previous day. “The tree gave no warning,” said Yukon owner Michael McRoskey. “It just fell over.” The housekeeper was in the residence and heard a crash. She thought that perhaps it was a garbage truck, but after looking outside, she called McRoskey with the news. “The tree fell over, everyone is okay, but your car is under the tree,” she said. Ocampo was blocked off while an emergency city crew cleared the street. When McRoskey arrived at home, he saw his vehicle had been totaled. “I can’t even get an odometer reading, because the dash was crushed,” McRoskey said. “The scary part is if someone had been driving down that street around noon, they’d be dead.” “We are investigating the tree that failed,” said Nazario Sauceda Bureau of Street Services in the Department of Public Works. “They don’t fall like that typically.” According to Carl Mellinger, a certified arborist, tree failure can be the result of several factors, and each tree needs to be evaluated individually. Some of the causes could include an over-weighted canopy, sidewalk, lawn or irrigation system construction resulting in destroyed roots, or too much or too little water. Eucalyptus trees are prone to a situation called “summer limb drop,” which means they self-prune or shed limbs to protect the tree, Mellinger said. “There’s not a lot of science to explain why it happens, but it’s accepted knowledge.” In the past 10 months in the Huntington Palisades, two carob trees have failed at the roots and three eucalyptus have shed large branches covering the street below. Residents of the Palisades have expressed the need for more pruning on several occasions, including at a December Community Council meeting. At that meeting, Ron Lorenzen, street tree superintendent for the West Valley Region, explained that there are 700,000 street trees under the city’s responsibility, but funding for his department allows for only 70,000 trees per year to be trimmed. Currently, the city’s trees are on a nine- to-10-year pruning cycle. “Certainly, a nine- to- 10-year trimming cycle is not the most desirable,” said Sauceda. But, he added that “the Bureau has worked very closely with the offices of the elected officials to emphasize the need of more resources, considering that in addition to tree trimming, the Urban Forestry Division also performs root pruning, tree removals, stump removals and median island landscaping.” Mellinger said that “In Santa Monica they have fewer trees and more money, so some trees they prune every year. Depending on the tree, pruning is on a three- to- five- to- seven-year cycle, which is ideal.” In February, community activist Dick Littlestone e-mailed Lorenzen with another request for pruning the Huntington’s trees and was told that the contract would be awarded by spring. “We were delayed, but today the city contract was awarded (June 16),” said Sauceda. “We cannot tell the contractor where to go first, but my pledge is to have my staff make a request to do the Huntington as a first part of the contract. “The contractors the city hire also work for other cities and private entities as well, so we have no control over their schedule,” Sauceda added. “In the meantime, we have a certified arborist to inspect and monitor the subject trees until the time they can be trimmed. If there is an emergency, the city will take care of it.” In an e-mail to Robert Weber, Community Council secretary, this past Friday, Lorenzen outlined the bureau’s work load. “Since 7 a.m. this morning, there have been 51 requests for emergency service due to limb and tree failure from the West Valley north of Mullholland and west of the 405 freeway” “It’s unfair for the city to have to take care of the trees with the money they have,” said Mellinger. “The mayor wants to plant a million new trees. I’m curious to know how the City of Los Angeles is going to maintain 1.7 million trees, when they don’t have the budget to maintain the 700,000 we already have. In the long run, it would be cheaper to take care of the trees by putting money up front, rather than handling it with legal expenses caused by damage.”

Steven Boyers, the current Pacific Palisades Community Council vice chairman, will replace Kurt Toppel as chairman beginning July 1. Other executive board members will include Richard Cohen, first vice president-wealth management with Smith Barney, as vice chairman; Susan Nash, an attorney, as secretary; and Ted Mackie, owner of Palisades Bicycles, as treasurer. “Steve has assisted me many times in formulating motions and handling other community matters,” Toppel wrote in an e-mail to the Palisadian-Post last week. “He is pleasant, polite and diplomatic. I have every reason to believe that he will be a good and capable successor.” Boyers, who often comes to Community Council meetings dressed in a suit, is a business lawyer whose practice encompasses the areas of business transactions and litigation, including corporate, partnership, franchise and real estate law. He represents clients in transactional matters throughout the United States but restricts his litigation to California. While he has lived in the Palisades for almost 30 years, he never worked here until about two years ago, when he moved his office from Long Beach to the First Federal Bank building on Sunset. Before Long Beach, Boyers had an office in Santa Monica for several years. “I’ve always gone the other way, towards Santa Monica,” says Boyers, a Rustic Canyon resident who got involved with the Community Council around the same time he moved his law practice here. He was on the Rustic Canyon Homeowners Association’s board of directors and was particularly concerned about the Proposition K spending for renovations at Rustic Canyon Park. When the community became upset with the city’s performance, Boyers was asked to serve on the local volunteer neighborhood oversight committee (VNOC). “George kind of cajoled me [to join the Community Council],” Boyers says of then chairman George Wolfberg. “He passed me on to Norman [Kulla].” (Kulla succeeded Wolfberg as chairman.) Boyers joined the council as an alternate for Area 7 (Rustic Canyon) and then became the Area 7 representative. “It’s been relatively fast,” he says about his move up the PPCC ladder. “The council is really where the rubber meets the road in terms of what it provides to people,” says Boyers, who sees his work with the group as “an opportunity to make an impact, at least on the margins.” “I’ve been amazed by what effective leadership can do in terms of persistence,” he continues. “Twenty percent of the people do 80 percent of the work.” Boyers believes that in order to be effective, the council must be more assertive, prioritize the issues it chooses to address, and “pick battles we can win.” “If you have a reputation of winning, people will take you more seriously,” he says. A native of New Jersey, Boyers earned a bachelor’s degree in history with a minor in English from Rutgers in 1964. During his college years, he drove across the country to California because he was thinking of transferring to Stanford. He gained admission, but when his mother died soon thereafter he decided to stay at Rutgers to be closer to his two younger brothers. “I never forgot California,” says Boyers, who earned his law degree from the University of Chicago in 1967. He moved to Los Angeles shortly thereafter and lived in an apartment on the beach in Venice. Boyers met his wife, Sara, in Westwood through a law school classmate. Sara, a native Palisadian, was in the first graduating class from Palisades High School. She is a former music-industry attorney and an award-winning children’s author. Her book “Life Doesn’t Frighten Me” pairs the paintings of Jean-Michel Basquiat and the words of Maya Angelou. Sara’s father, Jonas Ziering, rode horses in the Fourth of July parades in the 1950s and ’60s. The Boyers married in 1968 and lived in Santa Monica before moving in the late 1970s to Rustic Canyon, where they still live in the same house. They have two children, Jordan, 24, who lives in Oakland, and Lily-Kate, 21, who lives in New Mexico and trains race horses. Boyers left his law practice in the 1980s to run two contract engineering firms’first, Kirk-Mayer, Inc. in West L.A. and then Royalpar Industries in Connecticut. He became executive vice president at both companies and increased their revenues and profits significantly. After 10 years in business, which required constant travel, Boyers decided to return to law. This allowed him to spend more time with his family at home and out on the soccer field, coaching his daughter’s AYSO team, the Strikers. His son played Little League baseball in Rustic Canyon. “What I’m trying to do is be a country squire,” he says about his decision to move his practice to the Palisades and focus his skills and energy on resolving local issues. While Boyers is not retired and does not plan to retire during his yearlong term as council chairman, he plans to spend 10-15 hours a week working on Community Council issues. “I’m trying to make a contribution and pay back, in some way, for being an American in very fortunate circumstances.”