City Council’s Attention Deficit Disorder

Re “Listen Up, Politicians: It’s Ears Before Ayes,” Dec. 31: The article minimizes the central point that the City Council hearing was for a strip club seeking longer hours and fewer restrictions on its operation.

Several colleagues heard these same arguments in a prior committee hearing. During both hearings, I was listening to someone. I was listening to my constituents and other L.A. residents who are concerned about the proliferation of strip clubs in our neighborhoods, and no amount of bellyaching from the porn industry’s attorney is going to change that.

Jack Weiss

Los Angeles City Councilman

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As anyone who has had an issue before them knows, City Council members behave more like pooh-bahs than public servants. Many, and Weiss is a prime example, go about their business as if public hearings had nothing to do with actually hearing the public. Blue Zebra attorney Roger Jon Diamond did us all a favor by bringing it to the courts’ attention, and hopefully forcing it on the council’s as well. It’s not only lawyers for strip clubs who receive this disdainful treatment. I hope it won’t take a class-action lawsuit to cure the council’s institutional attention deficit disorder. Imagine if the courts decided that all the council members’ decisions made in their “quasi-judicial capacity” were invalid because they had flouted their duty to listen.

David Ewing

Venice