When Palisades Charter Elementary School’s new principal Tami Weiser entered her office for the first time on Monday morning, she was greeted with a special surprise: a large card made out of blue construction paper with the phrase ‘Welcome To Our School’ was sitting on her desk. The card was signed on the inside by students of Miss Wong’s kindergarten class. ”’It’s adorable,’ Weiser told the Palisadian-Post, admiring the card. ‘Everyone at the school has been very welcoming.’ ”Weiser, 41, joins Pali Elementary from Hamlin Elementary in Canoga Park, an LAUSD school where she had been assistant principal for two years. She previously was a teacher for a decade, an Annenberg Grant Coordinator for two years and served as a magnet coordinator at San Jose Elementary Highly Gifted Magnet. ”Weiser said her desire to become a principal was something that happened over time. ‘When I was a teacher, people always said to me, ‘Oh, you’d be a great principal,’ and I said, ‘No, never.’ But as you grow and evolve, your interests and talents grow and evolve as well.’ ”’Thrilled’ and ‘elated’ are the words Weiser used to describe her feelings after receiving the phone call that she had been hired for the job. ”’I really wanted to work for a high-performing school and be part of a small village community,’ said Weiser. ‘This school is really a perfect match for my interests and talents.’ ”Jackie Sidman, a teacher at Pali Elementary, chaired the search committee, which comprised Pali Elementary parents, teachers and administrative staff. ”’We felt that Tami would be an excellent fit with the school,’ said Sidman. ‘Everyone on the committee felt that she was enthusiastic, knowledgeable and very experienced.’ ”Weiser’s duties will include being an instructional leader, overseeing operational projects and maintaining the school’s budget and community relations. ”’The most important thing to me is making sure each individual student’s needs are being met,’ said Weiser, who describes herself as a ‘visionary thinker, who is skilled in human relations.’ ”This week, Weiser has been observing each class and joining the students at recess and lunch. She also hopes ‘to call each teacher individually into my office and visit with them for 10 to 15 minutes to get to know them on a personal level, find out their interests and see what support they need from me as an administrator.’ ”Born in Seattle and raised in Denver, Weiser moved to Los Angeles in 1981 to attend UCLA, where she earned a B.A. in educational psychology and an M.A. in elementary education. She also received a master’s in elementary administration from Cal State Northridge and attended a one-year leadership program that teaches educational policy at the local, state and federal levels. ”Weiser and her husband Robert live in Oak Park with their 14-year-old daughter, Michelle, and 12-year-old son, Jordan.

Just days after appearing at a Community Council meeting and revealing his plans for a 64 condominium/townhome project on Sunset, the developer cancelled escrow on Monday. ”Palisadian David Hibbert, the project’s architect, told the Palisadian-Post that Bob Bisno, chairman and CEO of TransAction Companies Ltd., decided ‘it was too small a project for the risk involved.’ Hibbert said the Council’s concerns regarding the proposed height of the project was another concern. ”Subsequently, Bisno told the Post Wednesday that although he had cancelled escrow, he had amended and re-submitted his original proposal, requesting a reduction in the $9 million asking price. ‘I should receive word if the sellers will accept our proposal between today and Monday,’ Bisno said. ”Bisno and Hibbert came to the Community Council last Thursday evening to seek input and feedback on their plan to develop the two-acre site located at 17311-17315 Sunset and Los Liones Drive, which has been on the market since last June. The site is currently home to The Outdoor Room and Color Design Art. ”Council members were inquistive, had suggestions and raised some concerns about the project, but were hardly combative. It was clear that while the Council preferred Bisno’s concept of developing the property into residential as opposed to professional/retail, the project would require a height variance, since Pacific Palisades has a height limit of 35 feet, and the proposal called for building heights of 48 and 61 feet. ”’This community has been very strongly opposed to anything over the height limit,’ said Council member Harry Sondheim. Council Chairman Norm Kulla agreed, saying, ‘The height limit is one of the issues that people feel extremely strongly about.’ ”Council member Ted Mackie also questioned the feasibility of allotting only 175 parking spaces for the 64 units. ”’Since there is no street parking anywhere near this project, I suspect that two-and-a-half parking spaces per unit simply would not be adequate due to the affluence in this town,’ Mackie said. ”Bisno insisted the project would not cause a ‘traffic explosion. The development would generate 36 cars per hour at peak traffic times in the morning and a total of about 440 cars per day, which is plus or minus a car or two in peak time [compared to] the traffic that’s there today.’ ”The property, located just two blocks from the ocean and described as ‘a beautiful flat parcel in front with a rear slope,’ is already zoned to allow the development of 62,000 square feet of commercial and/or office space, Bisno said, acknowledging that the primary considerations of development anywhere in the Palisades are landslides, traffic and view corridors. ‘However, we think there are a lot of reasons commercial is not the way to go.’ ”’I definitely think you are heading in the right direction by going away from the commercial development,’ replied Council member David Williams, who also serves as president of the Palisades Chamber of Commerce. Council member Kurt Toppel told Bisno and Hibbert that they could become ‘instant heroes’ if they built a movie theater on the site, while Council member Gilbert Dembo drew a big laugh from the crowd when he suggested a nursery be built on the site. Bisno, who had been working on the development for six months, called for the installation of a stoplight at the intersection of Sunset and Los Liones’an idea agreed upon by an overwhelming majority of Council and audience members. ‘We spoke to the group forming the [New West] school across the street and they’re in favor of a stoplight. I suspect that the majority of the community would be in favor of the stoplight also,’ Bisno said, adding that he planned to include a now-absent sidewalk in his development. Castellammare resident and former Community Council chair Shirley Haggstrom expressed several concerns regarding the proposed development and called for wider setbacks. ‘I’m really encouraging you to be generous with your setbacks and landscaping because traffic routinely gets backed up from the signal at Sunset and PCH, beyond the Castellammare light,’ Haggstrom said. ‘We have to be able to see those vehicles as we go into that blind corner.’ Meanwhile, the property owner is looking at several back-up offers, including interest from an unknown school. Renaissance Academy board president Bill Bryan confirmed to the Post that RA has not approached landowners regarding the purchase of the property. David Eagle, chairman of New West School, which plans to convert the former Santa Ynez Inn buildings into a campus directly across Sunset, confirmed that New West has also shown no interest in buying the land. Stan Gerlach, senior vice president of CB Richard Ellis, would not reveal the name of the school interested in the property; however, he too confirmed that neither RA or New West are currently involved. ‘We’re still marketing the property and have met with at least two other developers and a school,’ said Gerlach, a Palisades resident. ‘We’re continuing to field calls. If Bob [Bisno] doesn’t want to move forward, someone else will. It’s a great piece of property.’ Color Design Art, an interior design and merchandising firm for homes, has occupied part of the site since 1984. Don Anderson, president of CDA, told the Post the business has found a larger space in Culver City to accommodate its growing business and will relocate there between February 1 and March 1. The business will retain its other location in Thousand Oaks. The Outdoor Room, the Palisades’ only full-service nursery, suffered a major blow when owner Sandy Kennedy died last May. An award-winning landscape contractor, she purchased Sawyer Nurseries in 1997 and transformed it into The Outdoor Room. The nursery’s lease runs through July 2007, but could be bought out by a new owner. However, Olivia Arredondo, a senior employee at the nursery, told the Post that the nursery ‘would not want to close,’ even if the property is purchased. Calls to Linda Lack, The Outdoor Room’s owner, were not returned.

By ALYSON SENA Palisadian-Post Staff Writer My wake-up call was half an hour earlier than usual on Tuesday morning. I set my alarm for 5:30 a.m. to make sure I had enough time to look over my sample ballot once more and pick up my mom by 7 a.m. ”Although I live in Brentwood now, my permanent address is still my parents’ house in the Palisades, so we all vote here. But unlike my father, Mom and I are early risers, and we wanted to vote first thing in the morning to beat the crowds. ”Well, it was a nice thought at least, beating the crowds. ”By the time we reached our Toyopa polling location just after 7, about 40 to 50 people were already packed into the tight quarters of the art-filled playroom. ‘I’ve never seen this many people here,’ Mom said as we stood in a check-in line. Those who had already received their ballots waited in a second line for voting booths to become available. ”Within minutes, a woman at the head of the waiting line announced, ‘The first booth doesn’t show the president. The president didn’t come out on my ballot.’ She had already voted and was back in the line. ”Confused, people turned to watch as one of the election clerks, Dennis Jackson, tested the machine to find the problem. It turned out that the machine was functioning properly and the woman had mistakenly thought that no mark corresponding to her vote for president had registered on her ballot. (If you look at all of those tiny blank circles for too long, you do start to wonder where your vote went to.) ”Jackson assured us that everything was okay, and he told me that a voter could spoil up to three ballots, including the original. Before 8 a.m., three people had returned to the booths to re-cast their votes after their initial ballots were voided. I let one man go ahead of me because he had accidentally smeared the ink on his first ballot. ‘He was checking for chads,’ Jackson said. ”Actress Julia Louis-Dreyfus was among the 7 to 8 a.m. voters, and she brought her two kids with her, as did several other parents, probably before dropping their children off at school. I voted successfully, even with a colorful life-size statue of Abraham Lincoln hovering nearby in the corner. It was the first time I had ever voted at the polls, since I’d been registered as an absentee voter since college, and it felt good to make an appearance. ”On my way out I chatted with poll monitor Kelly Brock, who had arrived at Toyopa just before 7 to review her ‘Irregularities Checklist’ to make sure everything was set up correctly and running smoothly. Brock said she had volunteered to work at the polls this year because she wanted a fair victory. ‘You don’t want to hear on Wednesday that there were problems at the polls.’ ”By 8 a.m., I was at the Recreation Center, which was also busy with about 50 people voting. Just as I arrived, the overhead gym lights went out, but that didn’t seem to faze anyone, since the booths were well lit.” ”’I think there were more people and a little bit longer of a wait [this year],’ said voter Geoff Given, who was waiting outside for his wife, Synthia, and watching their baby sleep soundly in a stroller. ”’It’s so mellow here,’ said Palisadian Bill Rosenthal, a poll captain for the Democratic Party who said he was at the Rec Center ‘to call in any problems [to the headquarters] and contact people who haven’t voted yet.’ ”Rosenthal had voted earlier at the American Legion, where he had been asked to show identification, which he thought was unusual. However, with changes in the national voting laws, more people’such as new voters and those voting for the first time at new locations’were required to show IDs. ”When I reached the Legion at 8:30, about 20 people were voting or waiting to vote at the six booths. After voters checked in, they were directed to an InkaVote demonstration line, where a clerk showed them how to use the pen to mark their ballots. ”’The ink pen has to be used a very particular way,’ said poll watcher Diane Martindale. ‘The voter practically has to grind the thing in to make sure it counts.’ ”Lead inspector Irma Delgado was busy helping people with provisional ballots, since some voters’ names were not listed on the rolls, or their address and name didn’t correspond, or they were in the wrong precinct. ‘You just try to keep a sense of humor,’ Delgado said. Voter Aaron Broder’s name wasn’t on the rolls when he showed up to vote. So even though he said he had registered to vote about a month ago, he still had to fill out a pink provisional ballot envelope before waiting in line. ”Another man coming out of a booth just wanted to make sure he got his ‘I Voted’ sticker, an important souvenir to new and old voters alike. Even kids well under the voting age wore them proudly after their parents voted. ”Wearing my sticker as I entered the Lutheran Church polling location at 9:15, I noticed two tables on opposite sides of the room, each with its own set of voting booths. These distinct stations represented two different precincts, and voters had to be careful to vote at the right one. ”That’s where Palisadian David Wells came in. A senior trial lawyer for the District Attorney’s office, Wells had volunteered to work at the polls for the first time since his college days. The DA’s office thought it would be a good idea, he said. ”In his position as neighborhood voting center director, Wells said his job was to direct voters to the correct check-in table based on which precinct they live in. ‘The ballot has to go in the right box with the right precinct,’ said Wells. ”Lead inspector Tom Shepherd, a veteran poll worker, said that ‘the tremendous volume of people and the lengthy ballot’ could add to the possibility of mistakes. ”Shepherd had previously worked at the Bel-Air Bay Club, which also had an ‘exceptional turnout’ Tuesday, according to lead inspector David Hariri. He and his wife, Mali, arrived at the serene upper-level facility at 6:15 a.m. to set up seven voting booths, which overlooked the endless stretch of crystal blue ocean. It’s hard to imagine that any voting gets done amidst the distracting beauty of the sparkling sea view. ”Only a handful of people were voting when I arrived, but Hariri told me about 270 people had already cast their ballots, ‘more than double the volume of people’ he’d seen in previous years. ”By 10:30 a.m., I was back in the village and visiting Mort’s Oak Room. Two hundred and fifty people had already voted, according to lead inspector Deirdre Sloyan, who said that about 50 people were waiting to vote when the polls opened at 7. ”’What saved our lives was how many people we had helping,’ Sloyan said, pointing out seven volunteers and adding that others were on a break. Palisadian Iris Kameny said she hadn’t worked at the polls since the 1960s, when they had to tally all the paper ballots separately, but now that she was retired she was ‘doing my civic duty because I can do it.’ Not until about 9:30 in the evening could lead inspectors like Tom Shepherd drive the ballots to the checking center at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, where they would wait until the ballots were safely handed in. ” ”As it turned out, the unprecedented number of people who voted at polling locations in the Palisades reflected the record turnout nationwide. More than 114 million people had voted with 99 percent of precincts reporting, according to the Associated Press figures on Wednesday. Absentee and provisional ballots would boost that number to an estimated 120 million, the highest percentage turnout in more than three decades.

Ignited by a number of crucial state issues, Sixty-eight percent of Los Angeles registered voters, went to the polls Tuesday, but couldn’t agree on much, except on the need to clean up Santa Monica Bay. Proposition O gained over 70 percent of bipartisan voter support, endorsing a $500 million bond to help reduce the flow of pollutants flushed out to sea via our storm drains and culverts. The money will be used to upgrade storm drains, install catch basin inserts and screens on drains and develop new parks to filter storm-water runoff. ‘This is a real affirmation of how Los Angeles voters really understand that clean water is equal to public health,’ said Palisadian Fran Diamond, chairwoman of the Regional Water Quality Board, whose recommendations the city acted upon and who will monitor the effective and wise use of the bond money. ‘The City Council will appoint a committee of eight or nine people, all with an expertise in water quality who will select the projects that will be built,’ Diamond told the Palisadian-Post Wednesday. Equally enthusiastic was Assemblywoman Fran Pavley. ‘Prop. O speaks volumes about the support we will now get to clean up our air and water,’ said Pavley, who won reelection to her Westside seat with 60 percent of the vote. Pavley received twice as many votes as her Republican rival Heather Peters (31 percent) and Libertarian candidate Richard Koffler, the Palisadian who garnered 6,777 votes. Entering her third and final two-year term, Pavley told the Post that she will continue her focus on the environment and education. Having won a precedent-setting victory with her bill on reducing limits on automobile emission, she will be working to extend California’s regulations elsewhere. ‘Next week I will be meeting with the Canadian Parliament to discuss our plans to reduce greenhouse gases emitted by passenger vehicles.’ On another issue involving Canada, Pavley said that she is working on attracting film production in the state. ‘While it’s difficult to compete with Canada because of the difference in exchange rate, getting production back is key to our economic growth.’ She added that she may also reintroduce her bill to lower prescription drug costs, which was vetoed by the governor this fall. Health issues will be on the docket for State Senator Sheila Kuehl, who won reelection by some 60 percent to her final, four-year term. Kuehl told the Post that she may resurrect her health care bill, which would provide universal health care for all Californians through a single-payer system. Joining Pavley in her focus on the environment, Kuehl said she will continue working on both natural resources and water issues, and in particular safeguarding the Water Resources Board, which is the only watchguard commission monitoring water quality in California. ‘The governor hasn’t really focused yet on a recent performance review of hundreds of government commissions and boards, but I am worried that the Water Resources Board’which is the only way for the public to really know what is going on’might accidentally get eliminated in an effort to cut costs.’ Kuehl, an attorney, has introduced more than 100 bills that have been signed into law, including legislation to overhaul California’s child support services and to expand the rights of crime victims. While Pavley reflected on the fact that two-thirds of the new assembly will have two years or less expertise due to term limits, veteran Representative Henry Waxman, representing the 30th Congressional District, won a 16th term. The Democrat defeated his Republican challenger Victor Elizalde with 71 percent of the vote. As ranking member on the Government Reform Committee, Waxman has been studying the delay in disability benefits for veterans, the politicization of nonpartisan inspectors general in federal departments and agencies, and the Congressional failures in investigating misconduct involving Bush Administration officials. Closer to home, Waxman will continue to monitor the work of the Federal Advisory Committee Act to develop a master plan for the 400-acre West L.A. Veterans Administration land that takes into consideration the needs of veterans and seeks input from the adjacent businesses and neighborhoods. Also on Tuesday, Los Angeles voters failed to support County Proposition A, which would have raised the sales tax to 8.75 percent to put 5,000 more police officers and sheriff’s deputies on the streets.