Mailbag: Main Street closure puts focus on people rather than cars

For generations, Main Street has served as the hub for all activities occurring in downtown Huntington Beach. Whether catering to tourists or locals, hosting the Fourth of July Parade, or surfing’s US Open, the location is at the heart of our downtown community.

Simply put, Main Street is about people. It is more than just another street in our vast city. It is in fact a place and a destination. It should never be treated like just another roadway or parking lot. Anything that can be done to further enhance Main Street as a place for people should be done. By continuing to restrict vehicle access, you treat Main Street the way it should be treated: as a place for people.

Remember, cars don’t eat at restaurants, buy souvenirs or frequent downtown businesses. People do. The H.B. City Council will benefit everyone by thinking in terms of people rather than cars. The calculation is very simple:
The more people our downtown can thoughtfully accommodate, the more we invest in the success of our downtown businesses.

I strongly support the extension and expansion of Main Street closures to vehicle traffic and am hopeful the council will embrace the simple logic of accommodating people rather than cars.

Steve Shepherd
Huntington Beach

Foley can accomplish what Republicans have been failing to do

While I completely agree with the Mailbag letter of Susan Dvorak supporting Costa Mesa Mayor Katrina Foley’s run for O.C. Board of Supervisors, it did not go far enough in separating her from her Trump-supporting GOP opponents.

While former Supervisor Michelle Steel was mishandling the coronavirus pandemic and risking the lives of her constituents in service of misguided Trump administration demands, where were these local officials? Mainly waffling and doing nothing. Foley was indeed proactive and involved.

Foley’s Republican opponents can talk all they want about representation, but they can’t match what Foley can do for us here and in Sacramento or Washington, D.C. It is clear that Orange County needs to fight for its fair share of attention and resources, and Katrina Foley is uniquely positioned to do that for us.

Tim Geddes
Huntington Beach

Climate change’s wide effects

This week many in our country added a new word to their vocabulary: “polar vortex.” It joins “bomb cyclone” and “derecho” to terms most of us never heard before. Until the climate crisis.

We in Southern California have escaped the winter storms that are plaguing much of the country. But we have our own climate-related problems: sea level rise and record wildfires and storms.

Much blame regarding loss of power, loss of drinking water, and delays in vaccine delivery to Orange County has been fired back and forth at officials running power grids and others trying to keep people safe and secure. But what’s to blame? Climate change.

Strong and frequent storms means strong and frequent storms regardless of location or season. Carbon-containing fossil fuel burning has fouled the atmosphere with greenhouse gasses, causing climate change. A price on carbon, ultimately leading to a clean energy future, is the only way to solve the problem.

What are we waiting for? Spring?

Curt Abdouch
Costa Mesa

Apodaca’s accuracy

In regard to Daily Pilot columnist Patrice Apodaca’s column in which she discusses the sad state of journalism today, the difference of coverage is drastically different today from say 40 years ago. When I headed public relations for the Irvine Co., the Daily Pilot, the Orange County Register and then-Orange County edition of the Los Angeles Times were heavily staffed with editors and reporters. Each of the three publications had a reporter assigned to cover Newport Beach, a reporter assigned to cover Irvine and a reporter whose assignments included covering the Irvine Co.

Coverage by each newspaper and its reporters was highly competitive and intensive. When I was interviewed for the position of Director of Public Relations by the late William Mason, then president of the Irvine Co., I told him that I could get the company covered by such national publications as the Wall Street Journal, Time magazine and Business Week. His response: “I don’t care about them, you have to get some control over the coverage by the Daily Pilot.”

Those were different days in local journalism, and as Patrice Apodaca writes, we are all certainly worse off because of journalism’s current perilous state.

Martin A. Brower
Corona del Mar

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