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Letters to the Editor

Move Project Along

To our LCF City Council members: I read with alarm this morning the report of the Planning Commission’s deadlock on the vote to approve the development plan for a new Town Center.

This is not a time for further dithering. It is now time for a wise

decision and I urge you to approve the project so we can finally get something our town has needed for so long … an attractive and functional Town Center!

Darren Mattix and our City staff have done the necessary homework; almost all I have read is favorable, and we should now proceed with the proposed project. After the former project died, I was convinced we would never see anything come to fruition, but it appears there is a now an excellent chance for a proper centerpiece for our town to be built in the very near future.

I am sure any good architect can draw up yet another interesting and different plan for such a project as Peter Kudrave has done. However, I think we are well beyond that conceptual stage, and are now able to launch a viable project. We need to move on smartly without further delay.

There are various homeowner objections I have read about, and these should be addressed directly. If the berm planned at Lillian Court will not keep people from passing through, then an attractive fence should be added. If undesired parking in the residential area is a possibility, then the City should implement permitted parking for that area. I am confident other identified objections can be resolved.

So, let’s get on with this long desired and much needed improvement for La Cañada Flintridge!

Regards,

Tim and Carol Scheck, La Cañada

A Solution for Project

I would like to share with you a concern and solution I have regarding the proposed park in the new Town Center project.

What concerns me is the proposed park is really not a park at all — it’s actually a water retention/bio-swale system for the project, which is mandated by law, masquerading as a park. By using a retention/bio-swale system the developer is forced into a design which may not be the best and it also sets a precedence for future expansion of the island area.

The retention/bio-swale area could be eliminated by using a different EPA Accepted method. The method I am suggesting will provide the developer and city with a better system which is flexible and in most cases cost effective. Using this system does not require revisions to the overall plan, unless of course the developer would like to rethink a civic center in lieu of the park. It only requires changing the paving specification from AC paving and concrete to Pervious Concrete.

Pervious Concrete is EPA accepted and meets the NPDES regulations. The use of this material provides for groundwater discharge by allowing the water which normally runs off parking and roadway surfaces to percolate through and into the ground. The pervious concrete acts like a filter; eliminates costly tie-ins to municipal storm drain systems and in this case the need for any other land-wasting systems such as bio-swales or retention basins. Besides being a wonderful groundwater re-charger it has the capability of minimizing the “heat island effect” by reducing the paved surface temperatures by 3 to 10 degrees.

I strongly request the Council and city staff to give this system consideration before approving the project. In my opinion this product will enhance the project and make our community even better.

Bert England, La Cañada Flintridge

Kudrave On Time for the Party

In a rather shoddy piece of writing Carol Cormaci (“Too Many Cooks”) accused Peter Kudrave of being a late to the party spoiler for offering changes to the current proposal to develop the Sport Chalet site. She couldn’t have been more wrong if she had set out for New York by swimming to Catalina.

It is not too much to say that context is everything and Carol took Peter’s statement at the Planning Commission hearing that it had taken him 20 hours of work to create an alternative plan as proof of her charge. But she didn’t attend that meeting, nor did she call Peter. She also didn’t attend Monday’s council session; if she had she would have heard Mr. Kudrave speak to his involvement with the current proposal. He has, in fact, been talking to the developer, Darren Mattix, since October of 2005. He has known and worked with Mr. Mattix for a number of years and he has spoken with all members of the Planning and Design Review commissions, as well as the mayor. He has done all of that in the background, he neither wrote nor spoke in public. His aim has been to improve, not obstruct, development.

Peter spoke to the Planning Commission because that is the forum where the public has the first opportunity to address a governmental agency with power to approve, or disapprove, changes in the law proposed by the developer. Late in the game? In 1998 the approval process began in the spring and didn’t end until just before the council elections almost a year later. The plans for this proposal weren’t even submitted until April and council approval is slated for the end of this month. From a public policy standpoint that is warp speed and too fast for it’s own good.

The roadmap for the development of this site is the Downtown Village Specific Plan, a byproduct of the 1998 proposal. This plan took hundreds of hours and several months to complete. It cost $500,000 to produce and the committee members included every segment of the community. Central to the plan is a village square, which the Plan states “shall be located on the north side of Foothill Blvd.” The question is where is the village square?

In discussions with Mr. Mattix, Peter said that if Building B were moved to the general area of the proposed park the public square, called for in the plan, could occupy the vacated space and the current extension of Beulah could remain. This would eliminate the necessity of the entrance road to the west of Building B thus eliminating a second stoplight. The objection was “economic.” The park, both by its’ location and slope, is not a place that will draw much use and we now learn its’ real function is to serve as a catch basin for storm water that would otherwise exceed the runoff rate into storm drains allowed by the County. We have, in fact, traded a public square for a park that is not a park. It is clear, by their questions, that none of the council members were aware of what had taken place.

Whether this is acceptable is beside the point that it needs fleshing out. Plans should not be tossed aside without complete understanding as to why. The problem is not that Peter Kudrave came late to the party, it’s that others didn’t come at all.

Kent Schmidt, La Cañada Flintridge

Consider the Source

We are writing to respond to a letter from David Wilcox on sunspots and global warming from the July 6 Letters to the Editor of the La Cañada Valley Sun. Most of us are not climate scientists and so we must rely on indirect data — scientific papers, newspaper and magazine articles — to form conclusions on the subject of global warming. So, if we all must choose a source to trust for information on the changing climate, we probably want to read a respected, peer-reviewed publication such as Nature or Science, much as we might get our (conservatively-slanted) news from The Wall Street Journal and not, say, LiberalsREvil.com.

When Mr. Wilcox cites sunspots as the primary cause of global warming, he is clearly forsaking mainstream publications for a politically slanted website or two. Research has shown that since about 1980 the total solar irradiance, particularly the ultraviolet part of the spectrum, and the cosmic ray intensity show no significant increase other than the expected 11-year period solar variation. Thus sunspots, which cause increased solar brightness, particularly in the ultraviolet, cannot explain the significant increase in the Earth’s temperature since 1980 (see, for example, Krivova N.A., Solanki S.K., Solar Variability and Global Warming: A Statistical Comparison Since 1850, Adv. Space Res. 34, 361-364 (2004)). When someone turns to political websites (e.g., https://www.nationalcenter.org/NPA203. html) as a source for scientific information, it mostly serves to discredit their opinion.

Finally, signing a “PhD” after your name does not elevate the stature of your opinion on global warming if, for instance, the PhD research concerned turbulent flow on an aircraft wing; it just serves to show you are unfairly grasping for credibility.

Signed,

Beth Fabinsky, MS physics, but definitely not atmospheric science, reads Science News every week; and Rob Thompson, PhD, physics, specialty completely unrelated to meteorology, avid reader of Nature and Science magazines; La Cañada Flintridge

Join American Legion Post

Post #288 American Legion needs the help of all war veterans living in the greater Crescenta Valley, including La Cañada Flintridge.

We are losing our WWII vets as they pass on. We need your youth, vigor, your new ideas and involvement in Post activities to keep our various youth programs available to the Crescenta Valley youths. We sponsor Boy’s State, a Boy Scout troop, youth baseball teams and other functions that help our local youngsters.

This takes volunteers to help coordinate these various programs, but our WWII vets are no longer in a condition to volunteer their help.

The American Legion fights for the many benefits that are received by veterans. We have a lovely hall and recreation room at Post 288. Come by and see it at 4011 La Crescenta Ave., Montrose, or call me for more information at 249-1063.

Will you join our Post #288 and help to make it once again the post it was? Please consider joining our post. We will pay your first year’s dues.

Thank you,

Mike Carone, La Crescenta