Activist Group Causes Concern

Frank Mapson, in his Sept. 12 letter (on cable TV controversy in Long Beach), berates Councilman Warren Harwood, Craig Garbe and the Long Beach Coalition for Traditional Values--for, as he says, “trying to block prospective cable operator Steve Simmons from providing cable television to the city of Long Beach.” You’d think Long Beach didn’t have cable television.

While Mapson speaks of his deep concern about councilmen with “tiny minds” and the L.B. Coalition for Traditional Values, this citizen is as equally worried about a group of left-wing community activists and their radical alternative newspaper, Citizen News, who describe themselves as “progressives.” I refer to the Long Beach Area Citizens Involved, a powerful and influential organization that already has four of its members, or former members, sitting on the council.

With a good number of Citizens Involved members belonging to the Long Beach Unitarian Universalist Church, the group must have taken it pretty hard when, as Times staff writer David Haldane reported (Sept. 12), its minister--after 13 years with the church and now being replaced as a result of “a falling-out with certain elements of the congregation,”--said: “There simply was no support for a socialist, progressive message in that pulpit.”

SIDNEY S. WATTS

Long Beach