Mailbag: Can police remedy this ‘dangerous craze’ before it’s too late?

The article, “Surf City launches e-bike training program” is probably over due, due to the increasing number of kids on e-bikes along with the number of bike wrecks resulting in serious injuries such as concussions, fractures and shattered knees.

The article cites dubious behavior such as doing wheelies and going through red lights at high speeds. The program is being sponsored by the Huntington Beach Police Department. The 70-minute sessions will consist of replicating real world scenarios at increasingly challenging speeds, how to utilize emergency braking, obstacle navigation and helmet use.

Whether or not the kids actually learn something from these sessions and make use of what they learned when out biking in the real world will be obvious when the wrecks decrease along with the number of riders getting hurt.

It appears that here in Newport Beach we have the same problem with the riders going too fast, doing wheelies and whizzing through red lights. I’m not sure if H.B. also has this issue, but I have been observing more and more of these quiet bikes being ridden in the middle of the street as if they were cars on the streets of Newport Beach.

The other day when I was stopped for a red light on my way to the pharmacy in Via Lido, a young person on a bike was in one of the car lanes stopped waiting for the red light to change. The scary thing about this is the fact that on the slower surface streets, these bike people are actually keeping up with the flow of traffic and making turns with the cars. It will probably take more than the Huntington Beach program to remedy or resolve this increasing dangerous new fad involving high speed bikes being assimilated with cars. Let’s hope that this latest dangerous craze can somehow be rectified before it gets any worse.

Bill Spitalnick
Newport Beach

Reacting to H.B. Council

So Huntington Beach’s esteemed mayor, Pat “Potty Mouth” Burns is at it again, hurling vulgarities at others on a live mic during public council meetings. We should note that Burns was one of the council members who sanctimoniously argued that a council-appointed book censoring committee should have authority over parents in deciding what is appropriate for and what might corrupt their children. The library, in his and other council members’ view, needed to be “cleaned up,” so to speak.

Perhaps, Burns should consider cleaning up his own house, first.

Of course, the right thing for Mayor Burns to do is to apologize. However, judging by his past behavior, an apology is unlikely. Rather, he may, as he chose to do when asked by his former colleagues for an apology for directing a vulgarity at them, simply say, “Oh, do you think I was speaking to you? Then you must think you are what I said.” This retort was no doubt thought quite clever when he learned it when he was 10 or 11 years old.

Well, maybe Mayor Burns is not to blame. Perhaps his present behavior results from his having had no committee to clean up the library when he was a child… perhaps.

Mark Wimbish
Huntington Beach

Huntington Beach Councilmember Butch Twining pontificating on decorum and respect at City Council meetings [in his commentary piece that ran in the June 29 Daily Pilot/TimesOC] is laughable, since he was seen vaping in the audience during one such meeting last year.

The saying “the fish begins to rot at the head” is apropos here. If it weren’t for the divisiveness, disrespect and adversarial stance we’ve seen from this MAGA council for the past two-plus years, we wouldn’t be in this position now.

Former Mayor Gracey Van Der Mark verbally attacked liberal council members and the audience (mostly directed at the “other side”) and limited public comments to just two minutes. Her persistent vicious lies about porn in our beloved library decimated the library staff, who were labeled as perverts, pedophiles and groomers. Many city employees in other departments have fled as well.

Current Mayor Pat Burns has gone even further, visibly and audibly expressing his disgust and disdain with groans, sighs and vulgar hot mic moments (“another f—ing cow,” “f—k ’em,” and calling three former council members pieces of s**t). He usually limits public comments to one minute per speaker and is very quick with the mute button, more so if he doesn’t agree with what the speaker is saying. His long-winded diatribes about “proper decorum” earned a stern warning from the ACLU regarding First Amendment rights and violation of the Brown Act.

The amount of disrespect, gaslighting and even outright lying from those on the dais is astounding. Why are they so surprised that a pot boils over when you light the flame, stir the pot and keep turning up the heat?

Proper decorum goes both ways.

Michele Burgess
Huntington Beach