Post Office Broke Promise, Owners of Market Allege

Waiting for the mail to come is a nail-biting experience each day at a neighborhood grocery store in Mar Vista.

The owners of the 53-year-old Mar Vista Apple Market are looking for a letter they--and their loyal customers--hope will say that the U.S. Postal Service has changed its mind about booting the store out to make way for an expansion of the Mar Vista post office.

Market owners Marvin Sobel and Anthony Scuticcho say postal officials pledged four years ago to help relocate the store so a new post office can be built on its site.

But with less than a month to go before the market will be forced to close, they contend the post office has failed to deliver on its promise.

Postal officials, meanwhile, dispute that any offer was made and say they are under no obligation to assist the market owners in any fashion.

The pending shutdown has angered shoppers at the market at the corner of Venice and Grand View boulevards, between Culver City and Marina del Rey.

Residents have started a petition drive, helped prompt an inquiry by a local congressman and added to a flurry of letters to the post office asking the agency to help the independent market.

If the grocery isn’t able to reopen nearby, hundreds of elderly residents who do not drive will be unable to shop for food, neighbors warn.

The postal agency’s stance angers Sobel and Scuticcho, who say a post office real estate agent promised relocation assistance in late 1995 when he asked them to let him inspect and measure the 22,000-square-foot grocery.

“He said, ‘This can work out great for everyone,’ ” said Scuticcho. “We said relocating a grocery store is a lot of money. He said, ‘We know, we’ve done this before.’ ”

But soon the post office extended its lease on a smaller post office building a block south on Grand View Boulevard, and Scuticcho and Sobel figured the agency was no longer interested in their store.

After that, the pair say they spent $150,000 remodeling and upgrading the market with an eye toward increasing business in case they faced a rent increase when their current lease runs out next month.

But when the partners set out to extend the grocery’s $8,000 a month rental, they say, they learned that the post office was negotiating with their landlord to take over the site for $28,000 a month.

This time, a new post office agent was involved. Sobel and Scuticcho say he said he knew nothing of the first agent’s promise.

Postal officials acknowledge that their previous representative’s role in the property acquisition ended in early 1996. They contend that the new negotiations were different because this time the grocery store’s lease was nearly up.

The market’s landlord said he sought to protect the grocery operators when the post office initially inquired about the site in the mid-1990s.

“Back then, I said you have to work something out with Tony and Marv,” said landlord Donald Brand, who, along with his two West Los Angeles brothers, owns the store’s site.

Brand said the post office resurfaced about eight months ago. He confirmed that a lease agreement with the post office is all but finalized but declined to discuss specifics.

But, he added: “I’m sad to see the market go. Everyone’s mad they are leaving.”

Dahlia Spaeth is certainly upset. She is an 85-year-old Mar Vista resident who has shopped at the market since it opened.

“I’ve been coming here 53 years. It’s a shame they have to leave the neighborhood after all this time,” said Spaeth as she loaded bags of groceries into her car trunk.

“Where will people without cars go to shop? So many elderly people have been shopping here as long as I have. Where will they go?”

Neighboring businesswoman Trudi Dieterle agrees. She is circulating petitions urging state and local officials to intervene to save the market.

“If the post office needed more space, why didn’t they take over the land just south of them when it was available a year and a half ago?” asked Dieterle, owner of a thrift shop called Trash and Treasures.

“There are hundreds of people in this neighborhood who can’t walk 12 blocks to Vons. Doesn’t hardship to the elderly mean anything? Have a heart.”

Rep. Julian Dixon (D-Los Angeles) struck a similar tone four months ago when he asked top-level postal officials to look into the agency’s handling of the affair. Had Sobel and Scuticcho not been misled, they “would have acted differently and saved this neighborhood market,” Dixon wrote in a letter.

Postal Service government relations representative William Weagley informed Dixon that the market, without a long-term lease, doesn’t qualify for relocation assistance because it “does not meet the requirement of a ‘displaced person.’ ”

David Klement, manager of the post office’s West Coast facilities office, has defended the Postal Service lease as an “open market transaction.”

In a letter to a lawyer for the market, Klement blamed Sobel and Scuticcho for their dilemma. “It appears that your clients failed to coordinate with the most important person regarding their lease--the landlord,” he wrote.

In Mar Vista, meanwhile, a sign in front of the current post office announces that the building is for sale and will be available in the summer of 2001.

Postmaster Hugo Cardenas said his 90 workers will be happy to move to a place with a bigger customer parking lot and a mail truck loading dock. Mail now is unloaded in an alley.

Up the street, Scuticcho and Sobel are making signs that will announce their going-out-of-business sale. They said they do not have the approximately $300,000 it would cost to move their store’s equipment and 10,000-item inventory.

They said they hope to absorb some of their 40 employees in a market they own in Culver City.

“When they first approached us the post office said they would not hurt us because we were a small business,” said Sobel.

Added Scuticcho: “I guess we were naive.”