Letters to the Editor: Glendale street renaming, traffic scofflaws catch eyes of readers this week
Re: The recent story about the Glendale City Council’s approval of a plan to rename a portion of Maryland Avenue as Artsakh Street.
Artsakh is a small geographical region in the south Caucasus mountains commonly known as Nagorno-Karabakh. Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) is a disputed ethnic “island,” an area of about 40 miles by 40 miles lying totally within the Republic of Azerbaijan. The majority of its residents are people of Armenian descent.
From the late 1980s to May 1994 Armenia went to war with Azerbaijan to gain the geographical region called Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabath). To this day the region remains in serious ethnic-territorial conflict including presence of Armenian military forces with heavy weapons of war. The territorial ownership of Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) remains in conflict between Armenians and Azerbaijanis.
Most importantly, Nagorno-Karabakh is internationally recognized as part of the Republic of Azerbaijan and the U.S. Department of State and several U.S. presidents have refused to acknowledge otherwise.
Four members of our Glendale City Council who voted to rename a portion of Maryland Avenue as Artsakh Street acted in obvious promotion of one participant’s position in a distant ethnic conflict.
In view of the background of Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) as well as the official position of the United States on the conflict, at our local city of Glendale level it would clearly be wise to avoid appearances of support to either participant in that ethnic-territorial conflict. It is not the business of a mere city council in America to promote any side in any international conflict by renaming a street.
If our present City Council still insists on renaming a street in Glendale they might consider renaming a street as Mount Ararat.
Mount Ararat is that very beautiful snow-capped dormant volcano which is visible to the south from Yerevan and which seems to be a national symbol of Armenia, but which happens to be within a geographical region in the east of the Republic of Turkey.
D. A. Bathker
Glendale
--
I am a retired television executive. I play golf and fly a little airplane, so I have some time on my hands.
Every evening I walk my chocolate Lab, Buddy, back and forth along Cumberland Road between Columbus Avenue and Ridgway Drive and therefore cross the intersection of Cumberland Road and Pacific Avenue twice. That intersection has a stop sign on all four corners. An all-way stop.
I noticed that traffic seldom comes to a complete stop and in many instances hardly even slows down. I am not a Glendale Police Department traffic officer, but I do know when wheels stop turning.
So I decided to do my own little traffic survey. On Monday, July 16, between 4:30 and 5:30 p.m., I sat in my lawn chair at the corner in the shade and counted cars that came to a complete stop, almost stopped and those that made no attempt to stop.
Here are the results:
271 total cars, amazing for a residential neighborhood;
68 cars came to a complete stop;
167 almost stopped — a rolling or “California Stop”;
36 never came close to stopping.
A friend of ours recently received a ticket for rolling through a stop sign in Glendale and the fine was $307. That is 203 missed opportunities for a teaching moment, as well as lost revenue.
I know that the Glendale Police Department’s traffic enforcement team is overwhelmed by the number of drivers with little or no regard for the law. This is just a small, one-hour example of that problem.
Jim Kussman
Glendale