Chicago Clout in California

In response to “Chicago Clout Reaches to Santa Monica Mountains,” Part I (Jan. 21):

Hey Chicago! Did you ever check out the other side’s facts of George Murphy Dunne’s project with the legislators that represent the area and with the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area office? Dunne has insisted on blighting one of the major and as yet undeveloped and magnificent scenic canyons in the Santa Monicas, setting his house on the most visible promontory of the western ridge of Zuma Canyon. Do you Chicagoans have a stunning mountain range rising from the sea and stretching over 50 miles into beautiful downtown Chicago? Well, here in Los Angeles we do and there’s nothing else like it in the world except maybe Sydney, Australia and so, Congress made it into a park in order to protect it.

California expects over 30 million residents by the year 2000, most of them in Southern California. Where will they go to breathe? The recreation area, if it can be completed could have the greatest use of any national park in the nation. Our Santa Monica Mountains and beaches which include fabled Malibu deserve better from you than raunchy Chicago-style politics you’ve used to cripple our park.

If you want to help Dunne, find him some land to buy with the money from the fair market price the government must pay him for his land, and let’s get on with creating this treasure of a park which has suffered so badly from this Republican Administration. Now, if we don’t reverse the direction of the new legislation, Chicago Democrats will have done it to us as well. Rep. Sidney Yates (D-Ill.) has been a good friend of this park in the past. How could he have been so hoodwinked? We need him and many more like him to help us complete this park.

Thanks for the Times for its editorial “Stain on the Mountains” (Jan. 22).

MARGOT FEUER

Malibu