Bowen and the Battle of the Shopping Malls

How many times do we have to see Steve Schlein’s warmed-over diatribes in your letters column (Times, Nov. 22)? Schlein has been writing variations of his letter for several years now--the variation this time is he’s included newly elected Assemblywoman Debra Bowen as a co-villain along with City Councilwoman Ruth Galanter.

I am compelled to write because Schlein has seen fit to comment on the Coastal Area Support Team (COAST), an organization in which he has never participated and about which he knows nothing. He offers comment on COAST events as if he had been there. He was not. As a founding director of COAST, I was.

Schlein again reiterates his notion that Culver City’s Marina Place mall threatened to compete with the Channel Gateway project, as if this were the reason for the lawsuits to stop Marina Place. Channel Gateway consists of some 1,100 apartments and an office building. How could this possibly compete with a shopping mall?

To again set the record aright, Channel Gateway replaced a prior proposal for that site--a 2-million-square-foot mall that would have been larger than Marina Place. When Channel Gateway’s apartments and offices replaced that proposal, it reduced the potential traffic impacts by 80%. During the community’s fight against Admiralty Place, Schlein was neither seen nor heard.

In this latest incarnation, Schlein states that COAST received “at least $12,000” from activist Arnold Springer’s Ulan Bator Foundation. COAST’s treasurer would like to know where Schlein got that number--because all that money sure hasn’t made it onto COAST’s books. Actually, COAST and its lawsuit against Marina Place have been supported primarily by the many homeowner groups and local businesses in the areas surrounding the mall site.

Schlein repeatedly refers to the COAST lawsuit as “Bowen’s suit.” For everyone’s edification, we who formed COAST were fighting the “battle of the malls” well before we met Debra Bowen. We were delighted when we did meet her, we welcomed her intelligence and dedication to the cause, and she became one of our pillars of strength. But the COAST lawsuit is our undertaking--not Debra Bowen’s alone.

PAUL D. DOEBLER

Los Angeles

Doebler is president of the Coastal Area Support Team.