Celebrity Mayors: Out in Palisades?

If some community leaders in Pacific Palisades have their way, Chevy Chase couldn’t stumble through a second term as honorary mayor.

Rita Moreno would be out. Ditto for Dom DeLuise. It would be an impossible mission for Peter Graves.

It’s nothing personal. They just want to take the honorary post and make it official. Or somewhat more official.

If left to them, the Palisades will have not only a mayor, but up to 15 elected representatives from neighborhoods throughout the affluent Los Angeles community to deal with planning issues.

The proposal by Randy Young, a local historian and a member of the town council, is an attempt to end factionalism in the community. Community disputes are now handled by neighborhood associations and a town council picked by the Chamber of Commerce and other council members.

Young and others want to create an organized body to handle such disputes and to deal with Los Angeles city officials at a time when the Palisades is feeling the crunch from traffic jams and booming development throughout the Westside.

Like Seven-Armed God

“We have been like a Hindu god with seven arms,” Young, who presented his plan at a town hall forum Thursday evening, said of the community’s neighborhood groups. “It’s been a case where the multileft hands don’t often know what the multiright hands are doing.”

Flo Elfant, town council chairwoman, said the idea for a formally elected council is designed to get people in the community more involved in local affairs. The plan is not a precursor to incorporation for the Palisades, she said, which does not have a large enough tax base to support a city separate from Los Angeles.

“It’s not like we’re trying to secede,” she said. “We just need a way to deal with some of the problems in this community.”

In recent years, the Chamber of Commerce has appointed a local celebrity to serve as honorary mayor, and Chase, DeLuise, Graves and others have filled the role. Moreno now holds the title.

Young said the idea worked fine while the Palisades was primarily concerned with boosterism and community pride, but it no longer serves the area’s needs. He said a borough system, like the one in New York City, would function well in the Palisades. The organization would present the community’s views to Los Angeles officials.

“I know a lot of people here are happy with the idea of a celebrity mayor, but it should be an administrative position,” Young said. “We really need someone who can deal with all these civic groups, and celebrities just can’t do that because they’re too busy with their own careers.”

Young’s plan calls for 9 to 15 neighborhood districts in which elections would be held to pick community council representatives.

The town council now is made up of 16 representatives, many of them hand-picked by the Chamber of Commerce. Young has prepared a map of proposed districts for the nearly 4,000-acre community, which is represented on the Los Angeles City Council by Marvin Braude.

Presumably, the elected representatives would grapple with other issues that are raised at the town forum, including the most controversial proposal in the Palisades today: Mobil Oil Corp.’s plan to open an all-night mini-mart and gas station.

The oil company wants to expand the snack shop at its station on the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Swarthmore Avenue and keep it open around the clock, an idea that has been roundly criticized by community leaders and has prompted numerous angry letters to the local newspaper.

Civic leaders believe that if Mobil’s plan is approved by the Los Angeles City Council, crowds of teen-agers would spill out onto the Palisades streets and that the mini-mart would encourage late-night drinking.