Oak Park website awarded

IN THE KNOW—Harvey Kern, left, editor of oakparkupdate.com, and Brett Garrett, the website’s founder, flank Ventura County Supervisor Linda Parks after receiving the inaugural Oak Park Spirit Award for keeping residents informed on local issues. Photo courtesy of Oak Park Update It’s Friday morning and Harvey Kern sits at the local coffee shop to take a breather following last week’s massive brush fires which threatened many Oak Park homes, his included.

Kern, a resident of Oak Park for over 35 years, voluntarily evacuated his home when Ventura County Supervisor Linda Parks called a little before 1 a.m. Thursday morning to notify him she was asking for a voluntary evacuation of the area.

Parks—whose district includes Oak Park, an unincorporated community in East Ventura County—phoned Kern not because she was personally calling each house, but because she knew he has become an important link in the bedroom community’s chain of communication.

“In the case of the fires, being able to communicate at an early stage about possible evacuations, fire direction and damage, helped to reduce the anxiety of residents and prepare them for evacuation,” Parks said. “I sent e-mails to many people in Oak Park and Bell Canyon, and I always knew the ones I sent to oakparkupdate.com would be widely read.”

For the past two years, Kern, 63, has worked as the editor of www.oakparkupdate.com, a website dedicated to specific news and events taking place in Oak Park. The site also includes local sports scores and information about Oak Park schools. According to Kern, the site, which began in 2002, sends out electronic newsletters to over 500 residents and receives about 3,000 visitors a month.

“It’s very gratifying when people read it and tell me how much they enjoy it . . . I like providing very current information,” Kern said. “It’s a real labor of love.”

As the website has gained notoriety, Kern has become a point of contact for many of the groups and organizations throughout the community. His labor of love has become the 21st-century version of a community bulletin board and has given Kern an inside track on news throughout Oak Park.

To be sure, even before the midnight call from Parks, Kern was posting the supervisor’s advisory e-mails so Oak Park residents would know how the fire was progressing and whether they needed to evacuate.

Many in the small community turned to the website for information on the area’s blaze. And even though Kern left his home early Thursday morning, he continued to update the site once every two hours for the next 36 hours.

“I kept getting e-mails with questions about what was happening,” Kern said. “I wanted to be sure people were at least getting some good local information . . . Whether I was working from the hotel room or my daughter’s house, I wanted to keep getting information up there.”

On Friday alone, Kern said over 2,200 residents visited his site.

Recognizing its importance to the community even before the fires started, Parks awarded Kern and the site’s founder, Brett Garrett, the first-ever Oak Park Spirit Award at last week’s Municipal Advisory Council meeting.

Kern and Garrett almost missed their moment of recognition when the awards were accidentally left at Parks’ office in Thousand Oaks. Much to Kern’s surprise, Parks drove back to her office to retrieve them.

“After she attended a board meeting at 8:30 in the morning and then had a very long day, she went back to the office to get the awards,” Kern said. “I was really touched by that . . . It just shows how much she cares.”

The website was created in 2002 by Brett Garrett, who started www.oakparkupdate.com after he moved to the area and was frustrated because he wasn’t able to find much in the way of local information.

“I liked the small-town feel

hat Oak Park had . . . so I wanted to get to the area and find out what it’s all about,” Garrett said. “So I started at

ending various meetings around town . . . But everywhere I went, I was unable to find information about when and where the meetings were going

o be held.”

So, Garrett, 43, spent $5,500 of his own money to have web designer Jann Repetto create a site that would list important contact information and some basic history of Oak Park. Garrett said he began the site with the thought that it might help his real estate career.

Because of the ever-increasing demands of his career, Garrett began to look for help managing the site. Garrett met Kern at an Oak Park Municipal Advisory Committee meeting and asked him if he would write a history of Oak Park for the site.

Kern, who retired as the director of public affairs for the Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center in 1996, agreed to help.

It didn’t take long before Kern took over the site’s content and was named editor. Kern said he spends about 10 hours a week working on the site. He said, however, he continues to balance time working on the site with the time he spends with Reva, his wife of 41 years.

When not working on the website, Kern plays tennis and tends to his garden. His daughters, Ilana and Carla, both live in the area, and he said he enjoys nothing more than spending time with his two grandchildren, Sophie, 8, and Benjamin, 5.

Garrett, a Southern California native, has lived in Oak Park for the last four years with Laurie, his wife of seven years.