Beware of Silly Adults Carrying Big Candy Sacks

The burden of wealth: Halloween is no treat to many Beverly Hills residents, especially the mansion-dwellers north of Santa Monica Boulevard.

Those homes have become a magnet for trick-or-treaters from throughout the region. The assumption--unsupported by formal research--seems to be that the candy haul will be bigger and better if it comes from the abodes of the rich.

Beverly Hills Police Lt. Joe Lombardi said the department usually doubles its field deployment on Halloween, especially in the city’s northwest portion.

“In that part of town, we have a large number of pedestrians and severe vehicular traffic,” Lombardi said. “(Halloween) is a real traffic hazard.” But most recent Halloweens have been calm, he said.

Still, the invasion of outlanders is causing a backlash among some residents.

“I see fewer and fewer people turning their lights on and opening their doors,” said one longtime resident, who asked not to be identified.

The resident said she was particularly incensed by the growing tendency of adults accompanying the youngsters to carry a candy bag of their own.

“It is upsetting when you answer the door expecting to see little children and you see a bunch of adults instead,” said the resident. “If that continues, it will end the whole custom.”

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What are we, chopped liver?It sometimes seems that every waiter and bus driver in town is working on a script, taking acting classes or trying to pitch a pilot. Why should parking enforcement officers differ in their desire to hit it big in The Biz?

Last week, one such officer was on the verge of ticketing an illegally parked car on Wilshire Boulevard in West Los Angeles.

The owner rushed up, begged for mercy and offered to move the car.

“You gonna put me in your band?” the officer asked.

“I’m not in a band,” the owner replied.

“You gonna put me in a movie?” the officer persisted.

“I don’t do movies,” the owner said.

There was a short pause.

“I could probably work you into the Westside section of The Times,” the owner, a reporter, suggested.

The officer thought about it a moment.

“Nah, that’s OK,” he said. “Thanks anyway.”

He moved on without writing the ticket.

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Visiting dignitary: Los Angeles City Councilman Nate Holden had to ask passersby if he was in the right place when he drove up to the auditorium where the West Hollywood City Council met Monday night.

He may have wished he’d driven on.

Holden was backing a council measure asking President Clinton to commute the life sentence of Jonathan Jay Pollard, the Navy intelligence analyst who pleaded guilty to espionage in 1987 for selling military secrets, including data on Iraqi arms, to Israel. Holden pushed a similar measure through the Los Angeles City Council in April, arguing it was unfair that Pollard got a harsher punishment for helping an ally than spies who had sold secrets to enemy nations.

West Hollywood Mayor Sal Guarriello interrupted a business-levy hearing to let Holden say his piece. The big-city indulgences ended there.

During a speech in which Holden compared Pollard’s imprisonment to the jailing of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., he was bombarded with catcalls from a crew of regular City Hall antagonists who opposed city support for a spy.

Holden bristled. “I’m not going to challenge anyone to go outside with me,” he said. He urged people to be nice.

Then he was cut off for exceeding the council’s two-minute speaker’s limit.

The Pollard measure, sponsored by Councilman Paul Koretz, passed later 3 to 0, with two members abstaining.

Holden was already gone.

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Landlord wins one: When are Santa Monica landlords entitled to more than a 12% rent increase a year? Until a week ago, “when hell freezes over” would have been the answer.

Actually, the Santa Monica Rent Control Board uses the term extraordinary circumstances to describe what it takes to warrant a rent increase exceeding the city’s 12% limit. And as rent board attorney Anthony Trendacosta explained to a state Court of Appeal panel in a recent case, it is the view of rent board members that such circumstances don’t arise very often.

Asked for an example of extraordinary circumstances, Trendacosta told the justices that a landlord whose building was greatly damaged in an earthquake “probably” would be eligible to exceed the 12% cap.

The justices were unimpressed. In what appeared to be a sharp signal to the rent board to loosen up a bit, they ruled in favor of landlord Earl W. Kavanau, who had sued after being denied more than a 12% rent increase in one year. He sought the increase after investing almost $100,000 in a 10-unit building he had bought on 5th Street near Montana Avenue.

But when Kavanau asked to recoup his costs with what amounted to $35,000 annual rent increase spread among the units, the rent board offered him $5,000 a year, and said the rest should be amortized over eight years.

“It’s clear (the judges) didn’t like what we were doing,” Trendacosta said.

But he defended the rent board’s thinking. A landlord’s right to a fair return on investment “has to be balanced with interest of the consumer,” he said. “(Kavanau) was asking basically to double the rents, displacing people who are rent-burdened.”

Kavanau was delighted with the decision. “I took a building near to being a slum and turned it into a nice, beautiful building,” he said. “Somebody had to tell the Rent Control Board that black isn’t white and white isn’t black.”

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As seen on TV: The Westside has yet another television series to call its own.

CBS’ “South of Sunset,” described by the network as an “action/comedy/drama” (enough genres for you there?), made its national premiere Wednesday night.

Ironically, the show was preempted locally for news coverage of the brush fires, and rescheduled for 11:30 p.m. Saturday. If the creek doesn’t rise, “South of Sunset” will make its delayed prime-time debut in L.A. next Wednesday at 9 p.m. on Channel 2.

Stan Rogow, one of the co-executive producers and creators, said one of his goals with the series is “to show the romanticism and the old Hollywood-ness of Los Angeles.”

“South of Sunset” is the tale of Cody McMahon (Glenn Frey), a once-successful studio security chief, who now operates the Beverly Hills Detective Agency, which, like many a real-life business, is outside the city limits but uses the city’s name.

The agency’s offices are on Pico Boulevard, which sparks a running joke of clients asking how far south of Sunset it really is.

If some of this sounds familiar, you’re perhaps recalling “Beverly Hills Buntz,” a 1987-88 NBC series in which Lt. Norman Buntz (Dennis Franz of “Hill Street Blues” and “NYPD Blue”) opened a detective agency in the Pico-Robertson district that also, in a stretch for cachet, claimed to be in Beverly Hills.

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Maybe they could wear diapers: Hair care tycoon John Paul De Joria may have saved 6 million acres of Oregon forest from destruction, but the Malibu City Council is still insisting that he make sure the “horse effluent” from his proposed stable doesn’t end up in Malibu Creek.

Citing his record for environmental activism, De Joria, the millionaire behind Paul Mitchell Systems hair products, asked the council last week to grant him a variance to build a horse stable on his Sweetwater Mesa Road property.

During his hearing, De Joria emphasized his environmental concerns, as evidenced by his efforts to preserve ancient forests and to protect the California coast.

“I’m in it in a very big way,” he said, and as an environmentalist, he would do nothing to harm the creek and watershed in his own back yard.

Noting that the creek is more than a mile from his property, De Joria added that it would be “virtually impossible to affect a river a mile away.”

Unswayed, Mayor Carolyn Van Horn said nitrogen from the horse manure could eventually get to the creek and cause an algae bloom. At Van Horn’s suggestion, the council approved De Joria’s variance with a condition that he work with both a city biologist and waste-water consultant to develop a plan to keep animal waste out of the creek.

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Council meetings:

* Beverly Hills: 7:30 p.m. Tuesday. 450 N. Crescent Drive (310) 285-2400.

* Culver City: 7 p.m. Monday. Interim City Hall, Trailer No. 1, 4095 Overland Ave. (310) 202-5851.

* Los Angeles: 10 a.m. Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. 200 N. Spring St. (213) 485-3126.

* Malibu: 6:30 p.m. Monday, Hughes Research Laboratory Auditorium, 3011 Malibu Canyon Road. (310) 456-2489.

* Santa Monica: 6:30 p.m. Tuesday. 1685 Main St. (310) 393-9975.

* West Hollywood: 7 p.m. Monday. West Hollywood Park Auditorium, 647 N. San Vicente Blvd. (310) 854-7460.

Contributing to this report were staff writers Steven Herbert, Nancy Hill-Holtzman and Ken Ellingwood and correspondents Jeff Kramer and G. Jeanette Avent.