Letters to the Editor: Should the City Council have approved a $500,000, 2-month holiday ice rink?
In response to the article about Glendale’s first ice-skating rink opening last Friday: Mayor Ara Najarian’s statement that those who complained about the decision to appropriate half a million dollars for a temporary skating rink behind Glendale City Hall were “grinches who wanted to steal Christmas” beggars belief.
Councilwoman Paula Devine’s vote against funding the project demonstrated that she takes her “duty to be fiscally responsible” seriously.
Noel Johnson
Glendale
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Assemblywoman Laura Friedman from the 43rd Assembly District, Gov. Gavin Newsom and the so-called Progressive Democratic (AKA Backward Democrat) controlled state Legislature have destroyed single-family residential neighborhoods.
On Oct. 10, 2019, the Legislature approved Friedman’s co-authored State Assembly Bill 68. The bill created the right to build two units of new rental housing on any single family lot in California, for a total of three units of housing where only one in the past has been allowed by the local government.
AB 68 stops cities from prohibiting ADUs (Accessory Dwelling Units) and a junior ADU on single-family residential lot.
Under the new rules, homeowners can build an 800-square-foot backyard unit in addition to also converting a garage or interior living space into a third residential unit. The new rule has upended the state’s ubiquitous suburban-style neighborhoods.
AB 68 takes away a city’s power to impose conditions such as parking requirements. It also prevents cities from imposing size and set-back requirements for the new construction, if those conditions would be more restrictive than the new state law.
Gov. Newsom and his far-left party seem to want to turn quiet streets of single-family homes into teeming low-rise tenements lined with double-parked cars and angry neighbors.
When your neighbors replace their rear lawns, remove their pools, convert their garages and carports to ADUs, without requiring additional parking, what a hodgepodge of a neighborhood will have been created — the new California!
Mike Mohill
Glendale