Sounding Off:

The front page of the Huntington Beach Independent (“Report: Plan could strain,” July 23) reports that the Downtown Specific Plan will strain the city services and cause noise, air pollution and increased traffic, but that Kellee Fritzal, deputy director of economic development for the city, says, “There isn’t any overriding issues on this.” (You’d think that the “deputy director” would be capable of using proper grammar.) The article goes on to say that these non-overriding issues will require the commission to issue “a statement of overriding consideration” before it votes on the plan at the end of August.

Did I hear that right? The deputy director says there are no overriding issues and the commission, thus, will issue a statement of consideration before it votes in five weeks? It sure sounds to me as if the vote has already been cast, regardless of the effect on residents of Huntington Beach. The city sells out to the developer. The developer leaves town with the money. The residents are stuck with the bill for the impact.

At 1 a.m. Friday, I was awakened by the screams of my next-door neighbor. A coyote, displaced by previous developments, had just broken the neck of my cat, LeRoy, and was dragging him off to enjoy a meal. The developer that kicked the coyote out of his previous hunting grounds doesn’t care. He’s too busy counting his money on some tax-sheltered island in the Caymans. The police department doesn’t care. They’re too busy dealing with the mob-size crowds that previous developments have brought to Huntington. The police were kind enough to transfer our call for help to a telephone ringtone that the kind officer called “Animal Control.” I say they connected us to a ringtone, because there is no hard evidence that there really is a phone on the other end.

LeRoy died peacefully. We carried him into the house on a backboard and lit a candle in the room. He responded to our voices and his breathing calmed. He lasted another two hours after the attack. LeRoy was everyone’s cat. Everybody in the neighborhood knew his name, and he could hang out at a dozen different doorways and be fed. Every kid who couldn’t have a pet at home had LeRoy to play with and love while playing outside. He never ran from a fight, but he never started one either. People who lived blocks away and were just walking to town would stop and ask how LeRoy was doing if they didn’t see him on the sidewalk. LeRoy will be missed.

The developers of Huntington Beach had no responsibility to relocate the coyote before putting scrapers on its hunting grounds and clearing the site-footprint of brush and game. The profit-making businesses and hotels that follow the development have no liability for the personal impact of their enterprises after the developer gets his money and skips town and the hotel settles into the business of collecting $500 a night for a room. When LeRoy left his body behind, the developer was probably busy washing down a mouthful of paté de foie gras with a bottle of Chateau Lafite Rothschild. When the increase in tourists from the Downtown Specific Plan brings an increase in trash, the city will up the collection fees; meanwhile, the developer will be busy spreading out his money on the king-size bed of his top-floor hotel suite so he can roll around in it.

More drunks will be driving our streets, and the city will ask for a bond to pay for more police. The cost will be born by each and every resident, and the profiteers of the Downtown Specific Plan, of course, will be out playing polo. With more police, the city can then issue citations to the local residents for forgetting that it is the second or fourth Thursday of the month and parking their vehicles in the way of the sweeper that was paid for by the residents to sweep up the garbage brought by the development. The Kelly family has already paid three such citations, two when my busy wife forgot to park her car on the designated side of the street, and one when my unknowing daughter-in-law brought the grandchildren over for a visit on the wrong Thursday of the month.

Why are the profits of ventures such as the Downtown Specific Plan privatized, while the costs of the impacts of such ventures are socialized? I wonder why the Downtown Specific Plan doesn’t assess a fee on the developers and the profiteers of the development to pay the total cost of all bonds, residents’ citations, and increased trash sweeping and collection, henceforth? Then I too might agree that “there are no overriding issues” in this plan.

No, Kellee Fritzal, “there isn’t any overriding issues on this.” Just make your “statement of overriding consideration” and rubber-stamp the plan at the end of August.

MIKE KELLY is a Huntington Beach resident.