Mailbag: Citizens to blame for ‘witch hunts’

In last week’s letter to the editor, I made a statement in the middle of the text that easily could be misinterpreted.

I did not mean to imply that it was the “city of Laguna Beach” that conducted witch hunts when it came to blocking businesses entering Laguna Beach. I meant to say city residents were guilty of demonizing and conducting witch hunts on quality businesses that wanted to develop a property and conduct business in town. It’s an easy editing error to make when you are thinking what you are saying and not reading the actual words as they are placed in the sentence.

Thankfully the city administration, the Planning Commission and especially the City Council doesn’t let these inane arguments affect their judgment and ultimately approve the projects. They understand the priority that has to be placed upon attracting successful businesses for our community and make sure that the applicants feel welcome, in spite of a few vocal opponents who give Laguna a bad name in the business community by their visceral actions and poor behavior.

I sincerely apologize for the misstatement.

DENNIS MYERS

Laguna Beach

Mobile park dwellers need protection from owners

As a member of the Sierra Club Save Hobo Aliso Task Force and a former resident of Laguna Terrace Mobile home Park, I was not surprised to read letters from the park manager assailing the Sierra Club and Penny Elia (Mailbag: “Many Laguna lots could be ‘illegal,’” Feb. 26). The park owner and management have a sad history of creating villains to avoid any progress on the sale of the park to its residents, and this is just more of the same. If park residents would actually read the California Coastal Commission Appeal A-5-LGB-10-039, easily obtainable at www.coastal.ca.gov, they would see that Paul R. Esslinger, Steve Esslinger’s father, is also an appellant to the subdivision. I would hardly consider him a “gadfly,” nor is Elia.

For any potential buyer of Laguna Terrace Park, it is far better to get the appellants’ concerns out of the way once and for all, rather than just brush them back under the rug, only to reappear later. Instead of vilifying those who support the California Coastal Act, park residents should press the park owners for the first right of refusal when the park does go up for sale and obtain a letter of intent from the current owners formalizing the tenants’ option to buy the park.

Just telling residents they will get to buy the park is not enough, and there is no automatic guarantee of the property remaining a mobile home park once it is subdivided.

Park residents must obtain binding legal agreements from the current owners before the commission approves the subdivision, as the mobile home park will become much more valuable, and thus unaffordable to residents, after such approval.

To understand the many issues, I would strongly recommend that interested park residents go online and read the article “Going, Going, Gone “¦ the Bitter Fate of Orange County’s Mobile home Parks” in the August 1991 issue of Orange Coast Magazine and an article in the April 8, 1991, Los Angeles Times titled “Treasure Island is Awash in Uncertainty.”

Residents of Treasure Island Mobile home Park fought a long battle with Richard Hall and his business associate, James Lawson, to try to buy their park or stay in their homes.

In the end, despite a great deal of support from the Laguna Beach City Council, the property was sold to the Athens Group and is now the Montage Resort.

Betsy Bredau

Laguna Beach

Donations still needed for fireworks

My thanks go out to those who have sent in checks and made suggestions on how to fund the fireworks the Fourth of July. Believe me, Jim Howard and I have been working on this since September, and sometimes it got lonely.

The high school might consider the seniors designing posters to be placed in the local stores but under no circumstances would they want them going door to door or soliciting cars coming into the canyon because it could put them at risk if they ran into a hostile reaction.

Likewise, placing jars or containers for donations on counters runs into a problem of collection as well as the risk that someone would dip into them.

We decided on the “Checks to Ken Frank” as the best way to go.

I feel that Jim and the Recreation Committee deserve applause for working with the Board of Realtors, and I couldn’t be prouder of Michael Gosselin and his fellow Realtors for offering to underwrite the total cost if necessary.

But hold on a moment! Why should the rest of us sit back and let them do all the work? Is there no one out there who can send in a check for $5, $10, $20 or more? That $25,000, by the way, won’t be enough to cover the same kind of show we had last year. Costs have gone up, so it’s vital that we raise as much money as possible.

Please send in what you can and support whatever fundraiser the Board of Realtors plan for the future.

DENNIS TAYLOR

Laguna Beach

Dogs outweigh people in Laguna

The dog’s life, 2010!

Everything has changed since I had my dog Bo Derek “” Bo for short. My boys never new the true name. She was a love. She was always with me when I trained for marathons and 10Ks. I trained her to go in the bushes to do her thing. Then that became a “no-no,” so then I trained her to go in the street because it was easier for me to pick it up, (boy was she confused!) as well as picking up for other people who didn’t care.

Now something new has come up. Careless dog owners who make dogs “first” and humans second class. In my case (being in my 70s), maybe I’m third class. Nowadays dogs rule is the theme and I get a little annoyed.

In my time, like my neighbor said, dogs were just dogs. Now dogs rule the sidewalks. I’ve never seen so many dogs.

I would like to suggest that someone, anyone, the city, the dog owners, anybody, set up a code of responsibility for dog owners.

That means dogs should not be left unattended. Humans should still have the right-of-way. Long leashes should be shortened to 4 feet. I’ve been tangled up so many times, had to wait while they get through smelling each other (and that goes for dogs, too) and sometimes I walked in the street just to pass by the dog congestion.

Why not try to be courteous and look ahead or behind for people passing by. And, please, don’t let them drink out of the public fountain.

And, please, teach your dog to use the bathroom at your home instead of every tree in downtown Laguna! It’s beginning to smell.

JIM LASHLEY

Laguna Beach

Elia’s efforts should be applauded

Re: Penny Elia, Sierra Club Involvement/Intervention in the Hobo Canyon Disputes (“Mobile home park conversion stymied,” Feb. 19.):

First, as someone whom Penny stopped speaking to seven years ago or so, I might be in a unique position. I incurred her wrath, as many have mine, but the environment needs ideologues or it’ll continue its slide into entropy. Penny was angry at me because I accepted donations for my beach clean-up programs from the Montage Resort and the Athens Group. I was in my fourth year of administering them uncompensated for the California Coastal Commission, paying all of the overhead out of my own pocket.

We were actually beginning to earn statewide recognition, a lot of it due to Penny and her husband, Danny’s, most excellent graphics work for us.

Part of my decision was a result of filing for bankruptcy in 2003, mostly due to my environmental efforts which had drained my wallet and savings. I was forced to choose between accepting corporate sponsors’ bucks and folding the programs, at a time when only my group, Clean Water Now! Coalition, was actively engaged in removing litter and pushing the water quality activist envelope in Laguna.

Back then, Penny, Ed Almanza and Steve Gromet were appointed to a city committee trying to negotiate a more ecologically and regulatory compliant project as proposed by the former Driftwood Estates developers, High Pointe Communities. Along with the architect Morris Skenderian and his staff, then Councilman Steve Dicterow was the godfather and chaired this series of pow wows lasting more than six months.

I was personally appointed by Steve and City Councilman Wayne Baglin (then chairman of the Regional Water Quality Control Board) to be the city’s de facto, third party hydrology and water quality consultant. My uncompensated criticism was to assure the proposed 19-lot subdivision got objective professional analysis.

The Driftwood Estates meetings, at City Hall were very “vibrant,” there was a lot of shouting and confrontation (by yours truly included), but eventually it was whittled down to 13 lots.

My lobbying led to more than $1 million in storm drain and wastewater improvement mitigations, including a mini treatment plant for the runoff to improve water quality.

The tract map was eventually approved by our City Council at a hearing. We’d achieved about a one-third reduction in total units, numerous mitigations, and Dicterow gave me a 15-minute speaking slot to explain my support.

So it is amusing to read knee-jerk words like “alarming” used by Penny’s critics regarding the Laguna Terrace Park, immediately adjacent to the former Driftwood Estates, now owned by Athens Group and known as Aliso Lots.

One of the things we openly discussed at those Driftwood meetings was the simple fact that these two parcels cannot be looked at in a vacuum. They are in fact inextricable, and any dummy taking their first biology class learns the holistic, continuum concept.

The plants and animals, the surface drainage patterns, etc. don’t recognize and should not be looked at in isolation, or restricted in their ecological connectivity by man-made, arbitrary property lines.

While I feel that Penny wrote me off unjustly, I will staunchly support her right to defend her ideals, especially when it’s out her back door. To do otherwise would be unconscionable, hypocritical actually.

There’s a common myth at work here, the perception spin that “protectionistas” like us somehow abuse or subvert. Quite to the contrary, we expect compliance with land use regulations by our own city, usually the local lead agency. That the city manager dragged his feet for years, basically refused to generate updates for databases and inventories, officially approved and filed with the Coastal Commission, is really his lapse, not Penny’s.

What should alarm these critics are the pitiful policies of City Hall.

It involves a myth that we’re 100% ecologically friendly, and that our council’s appointment of political patronage cronies to an enviro-committee somehow translates into a magic wand of compliance.

It doesn’t. Boots on the ground vigilance by the real enviros who slave in the trenches does. We keep City Hall honest, and do it without getting paid.

ROGER VON BÃœTOW

Laguna Beach