Readers React: Selling out California’s coast for a few hundred dollars

To the editor: While Charles Lester’s ouster as head of the California Coastal Commission staff certainly reeks of corruption, perhaps the most shocking part of this ugly saga is how pitifully cheap and easily bought the commissioners appear to be. (“Join me at the circus, I mean, a California Coastal Commission hearing,” March 11)

I’m sure we don’t have the entire story before us, but it seems like a mere $500 or $1,000 check suffices to buy favor with a commissioner. Developers with plans to spend millions and millions of dollars can grease the wheels of the commission with the change they pull from underneath their couch cushions.

Ideas of ethics in effect become meaningless when public officials appear willing to sell out the coastline for less than the cost of a good men’s watch.

Ian Pike, San Diego

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To the editor: In case we didn’t think that California’s environmental politics are being directed by corporate interests, readers had a choice of five separate stories in Sunday’s Times to convince them otherwise.

On the front page of the California section, columnist Steve Lopez continued his reporting on the takeover of the Coastal Commission by pro-development interests, and another article noted that the South Couth Coast Air Quality Management District board fired its environment-friendly leader and “reaffirmed smog rules backed by polluters.”

According to other stories, a San Bernardino Democratic legislator opposed a bill to reduce use of fossil fuels, the concern over Exide’s lead poisoning of communities is ongoing, and a staffer for Gov. Jerry Brown was accused of influencing appointments to the Public Utilities Commission friendly to utilities whose stock she owned.

“Liberal” California fortunately has a ways to go to equal Michigan’s water problems or Oklahoma’s fracking-induced earthquakes, but corporations are happy to help us along.

Henry Hespenheide, Hermosa Beach

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