MAILBAG - Nov. 29, 2007
Harsh ordinance is overbearing
Regarding the inquiry in the Nov. 26 Community Forum Mailbag by William and Kathryn Jensen (“City’s steep pruning fines are outrageous,” Mailbag, Monday), “What has happened to our great city of Glendale that it would penalize anyone for maintaining their own trees?”: It appears perfectly clear that we have a City Council that is either incompetent or gross predators against its own citizens.
How many other booby traps has this council and the city attorney set for Glendale residents? Given the best of intent, the council members demonstrated pure incompetence by approving an ordinance that permits a city agency to assess such an outrageous fine against a citizen, or they are simply predators out to punish Glendale residents for a minor permit violation.
In either case, the city attorney’s office must bear part of the responsibility for presenting such a harsh ordinance to the council for approval.
It appears time to replace all council members and fire the city attorney and those in his office responsible for this ordinance and maybe other similar traps.
GENE GUSTAVSON
Glendale
Words of trust in God aren’t missing
Doesn’t anyone fact-check the letters the Glendale News-Press prints? In “Take a stand for God on new dollar coin,” (Mailbag, Monday) Margaret Rice writes that “loyal and patriotic” citizens should “refuse the coin” to get the words “In God We Trust” to appear. The new dollar coins do contain these words! They’re printed on the edge of the coin, not on the front or back.
In the future, before forwarding a missive designed to get someone’s dander up (or, for the case of the Mailbag, before you print such a letter), please take 30 seconds to look it up to find out the facts.
VICKERE MURPHY
La Crescenta
Area shouldn’t rely on old equipment
From time to time we read about emergency preparedness in Glendale. I have seen articles in this publication about the communication system built to be used by emergency responders, and doing such is prudent and appreciated (“Frequency speech,” Oct. 11).
The recent wildfires experienced in Southern California set me to thinking about information resources available in emergency situations. When something happens, the residents have a great need to know the impacts and circumstances of a large-scale disaster such as earthquake, fire, landslide or flood.
Take the Green Valley Lake fire as an example. An enormous fire roared through a populated area of the forest. The entire population, an area similar in size to northwest Glendale, was evacuated. It was 10 days before any of those people knew any details about what had happened to their homes and businesses. Much of the information was distributed by homegrown or extemporaneous means, to the homeowners.
Can you imagine living through the span of 10 days without knowing whether your home was burned to the ground?
Many of the news sites that cover the Green Valley Lake community went down for a day or two under the load of demand from people trying to find out what was going on. The situation caused me to wonder about what would happen if the Glendale community faced the same situation.
The Web is obviously the best method for disseminating information. So I began to investigate the status of the Glendale city website.
It appears the city of Glendale Web server would quickly succumb to 30 or 40 simultaneous viewers. How could the city of Glendale server handle the traffic resulting from the spectacular publicity a wildfire or other disaster generated? What about the Glendale News-Press Web server ? It all seems fine on a normal day, but what about when something happens?
The money spent to plan for the peak demand and keep up to date with current technology is worth the quality of life and piece of mind gained by the community.
GREG HISCOTT
La Cañada Flintridge
Yousefian vote shows signs of leadership
Wow! A 4-0 vote of no confidence for Councilman Bob Yousefian on the airport authority board (“Council votes against Yousefian,” Nov. 8) is a rare sign of collective leadership from our council. This action demonstrates their conviction to provide leadership for the benefit of the entire city, and we would like to thank you.
With their courage demonstrated on this, we hope they will continue to face other issues in a way that rises above the negative activities that have characterized their work for the past several years.
Perhaps this act of leadership will encourage other well-qualified leaders to step up and allow the voters to remove Yousefian via the ballot box in the near future.
ROGER AND LINA SEAVER
Glendale