The City Itself Is a Public Nuisance

* Your article, “Sylmar Cruising Spot Is Declared Public Nuisance” (July 29) refers to the La Rinda Plaza owners--one group of many owners and operators of businesses throughout Los Angeles who have been targeted and declared a public nuisance by the city. Associate Zoning Administrator William Lillenberg said “this was the first time he used such measures to combat cruising.”

Well, in the last two years, the city has had a lot of firsts--using (or in my legal opinion misusing) the Municipal Code in an attempt to control and combat liquor stores, minimarkets, motels and more recently a laundromat, a doughnut shop, a parking lot and now “cruisers.”

The law says that in order to be considered a public nuisance, the actual operation or maintenance of the property itself must “constitute” the public nuisance. On the contrary, most of the businesses that have been cited and declared a nuisance (and had costly conditions imposed against them) have done absolutely nothing wrong except just to be there in a “bad” neighborhood.

In Los Angeles crime is everywhere: public intersections, public parks, public buses, public schools and public streets--just to name a few places owned, operated and maintained by our own good city. Drug dealers, prostitutes, drunkards, gang bangers, graffiti taggers and, yes, “cruisers” find their way onto all of these public places. Obviously, public property attracts the scum of the city as much, if not more, than the private businesses that are being targeted.

The city has made it a regular practice to declare any kind of legitimate privately owned business to be a public nuisance simply because uninvited undesirables choose to patronize them.

If the loose standards for nuisance-abatement currently employed by the city were to be applied to governmental agencies and public properties, the city would be required to declare itself a public nuisance and mandate these exact same conditions on itself!

HARRIET K. BILFORD

Reseda