Arigato
I would like to thank the Hermosa Beach Police for their assistance and kindness with a difficult situation. An elderly gentleman only speaking Japanese and seeming lost wandered past our house. My husband and I called the police and they arrived and with great sensitivity and care helped him find the home from which he had wandered. We were very grateful for their help since my very limited Japanese was not enough to understand him. Our thanks to the officers who were so caring.
Joan M. Arias
Hermosa Beach
Opportunity pings
Dear ER:
We finally have the opportunity to get rid of the power plant in Redondo Beach and
have something much more beautiful on our waterfront. The Harbor Village Plan is
the fairest plan I have seen presented in my 43 years of living in Redondo Beach. And
after so much angst surrounding this issue for so long, I’m amazed that there are still
a few people willing to risk keeping the power plant just to fight over some very non-
essential details. Shame on them. All of Redondo Beach should be voting YES on the
Harbor Village Initiative.
Ray Benning
Criminal accountability
Brazen crimes continue in Manhattan Beach. In last week’s incident, four men robbed a couple upon their returning home, cowardly roped and beat them while pointing guns at their heads. Yet the Manhattan Beach Police Department has refused to hold itself accountable by failing to establish goals to reduce the most egregious crimes terrorizing our community.
Although its strategic plan focuses on improvements in leadership and management, it fails to state crime reduction goals at reducing home invasions, burglaries, robberies, and car thefts using outcome measures (e.g. crimes against persons and property per capita, percentage of crimes cleared, residents’ ratings of safety in their neighborhoods).
Responsibility for this lack of accountability rests with the Manhattan Beach City Council. It failed to demand crime reduction measures from the MBPD.
The Manhattan Beach City Council, itself, lacks a strategic plan critical to the effective and efficient use of our taxpayer dollars. Efforts by Councilmembers Terry D’Errico and Mark Burton to ensure political and managerial accountability are sabotaged by Councilmembers David Lesser and Amy Howorth and Mayor Wayne Powell. This trio is content with, “Que Sera, Sera.”
Edward C. Caprielian, Ph.D.
Manhattan Beach
Request for reason
The Hermosa Beach City Council hires and fires only two people, the City Manager and City Attorney. Every year the City Council evaluates the City Manager. Every four years your city councilmembers go through an evaluation process by way of re-election. Our City Attorney does neither. In Hermosa Beach, it has been approximately 20 years since our City Attorney was appointed. Since that time, the City Council has never evaluated the City Attorney nor has the city put out a “Request for Proposal” (RFP) for City Attorney services.
For many services, the city goes out for RFP every several years. We do so for trash contracts, city maintenance contracts and just recently upon hiring a new City Prosecutor it was agreed that we should annually review his services. L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti, upon being elected, made department heads reapply for their positions?
At an elected officials conference last week, I raised the issue that our city had not put out an RFP for City Attorney services in 20 years. You should have heard the gasps in the room. More eyebrows were raised when they heard that our City Manager recommended that no action be taken and the Council stick with our current City Attorney without putting out an RFP. I remember how our City Manager felt last year when a councilmember publicly endorsed a candidate for Police Chief. At the time, the sentiment was that it was the City Manager’s decision so the City Council should refrain from commenting. I wonder what the difference is between hiring the Police Chief and the City Attorney.
Nanette Barragan
Hermosa Beach Mayor Pro Tem
Devil or angel
Before you vilify E&B Natural Resources, remember that they entered the scene by offering to save Hermosa Beach from a potential $700 million legal judgment that would have bankrupted the City. As many of you are aware, E&B asked that the issue be resolved by an open and fair election of the residents instead of through a lawsuit where lawyers, judges and juries will make the decision. My view is that the offer and the request were, and still are, reasonable. The history is all there for everyone to read: E&B Natural Resources stepped in and helped settle the Macpherson lawsuit. Based on jury expert “Mock Trials,” the city was expected to face a judgment of hundreds of millions of dollars.
If voters do decide to reject the proposal in March, Hermosa Beach will be required to repay the $17.5 million loan with interest. But if the project is approved, E&B will forgive $14 million in addition to allowing the remaining balance to be paid from the city’s royalties.Let’s remember that E&B came in to help the City of Hermosa Beach avoid bankruptcy and in return, all E&B is asking for is an open and fair election.
Shane Manning
Hermosa Beach
Park it
Here is exactly the problem at the Redondo High School athletic parking. The residents who complain about the parking do not use their permit parking. Vincent street on a Wednesday night at 6:30 p.m. with no athletic event going on is nearly empty on the south, permit side. The residents park in their own driveway or they fill the north, Redondo high side of the street. Is it because the permits cost money?
Wasn’t the residents’ complaint that they can’t park in front of their own houses? Well they don’t, even when there is space.
Tom Judson
Hermosa Beach
Whose lifestyle is it?
Is it King Harbor Mall or King Harbor Lifestyle Center? Apparently there’s a difference after all. From Wikipedia: “A lifestyle center is a shopping center or mixed-use commercial development that combines the traditional retail functions of a shopping mall with leisure amenities oriented towards upscale consumers.” Malls are where teens go to hang out and meet up, but lifestyle centers cater to “upscale consumers”.
If CenterCal rebuilds the harbor as a “lifestyle center,” lower income types will be discouraged from visiting. Now that I’m retired and on a fixed income, I fall into the lower income category not welcomed by CenterCal’s lifestyle center. However, as a district 2 resident, I would be heavily impacted by the demolitions, construction, noise, and excessive traffic even before the mall opened. Wouldn’t it be better to build an exclusive “lifestyle center” along the coast of upscale Palos Verdes rather than ruin our harbor by overbuilding and crowding out people who actually use it as a harbor?
It makes me sad to feel unwelcome by those who want to demolish our beach and harbor lifestyle so they can replace it with a high end mall. I chose to live in Redondo near the beach because it was welcoming rather than upscale, snooty, or exclusive and I would like that to continue. We don’t need a mall by any other name.
Carol Peterson
Redondo Beach
Getting around school overcrowding
No one disputes that the Hermosa Beach School District has severe overcrowding. However, during the Measure Q campaign no solutions were proposed on how to solve the overcrowding problem in the short term. Many districts have switched to year-round schools to alleviate overcrowding. It makes perfect sense since currently the buildings are not used for approximately three months each year. I realize that year-round schools inconvenience parents because of travel plans, summer camps and afterschool care. On the other hand, I am sure that parents would prefer that their children are educated in a less crowded atmosphere. A number of studies have shown that year-round schools provide a better education because there are shorter vacation breaks so kids forget less from semester to another. I hope that the Hermosa School District will consider this reasonable, short-term solution.
Fred Huebscher
Hermosa Beach
Apologize later
Was anyone else disgusted by David Hadley’s letter thanking voters for electing him to represent the South Bay in the state assembly (ER Letters, November 20, 2014). First, he runs a negative smear campaign against his opponent. Then he promises to work hard for everyone. And, to top it off, he sanctimoniously bemoans the low voter turnout and urges people to get informed and vote in the future. What a pious hypocrite. It’s the smear tactics of politicians like him (yeah, I know, virtually all politicians) that turn off voters in the first place. Besides, he should be happy with the low voter turnout. That might be what got him elected.
Joe Heumann
Manhattan Beach
Hermosa’s dense planners
Do you want increased building density in Hermosa Beach? That question should have been specifically asked of residents at Hermosa’s General Plan workshop by the outside planning consultants. Instead, it only appeared on a posters asking if we should “Allow apartments above some commercial uses.”
It makes me wonder if higher density is already predetermined.
Another poster asked, Should we “create slow speed lanes for bikes?” We could use a table map to show where. So now residents and city interactions over years to minimize bike paths get ignored?
Then as a mind blower, they asked if we wanted “big box” retailers like Walmart in our quaint little seaside town. Why aren’t we using our local planners instead of paying an outside company? The city needs to mail out a survey of all the questions plus new ones asking our feelings on density increases before any decisions are made so everyone gets a say.
Mark Hopkins
Hermosa Beach
Energy waste
E and B oil seems to be bullying our small city of Hermosa Beach with massive ads and crashing into (school board) meetings where they do not belong. The tactics are sucking up our town’s time, resources and money.People are being duped into believing their ability to fix our schools, roads, ball fields, parks, fire department — all of which are not really broken. I can not believe the naivety of those who support oil, with its risks to our community.
Carol Fleischer
Hermosa Beach
