Mailbag: Who invited the former president to enter our airspace?

I’m so angry, I’m not sure where to begin! I read in today’s Daily Pilot that the Pacific Airshow had a “special guest,” which was Donald Trump in his branded plane on his way to a GOP convention in Anaheim. Who invited him, the show organizers? The city of Huntington Beach? Did he pay for this privilege? Were other candidates offered the opportunity to fly their planes over our beach and in front of hundreds of spectators? Did the spectators who paid to attend understand that they were possibly paying for a particular candidate to advertise to them?

Laurie Houghton
Huntington Beach

I live in Seal Beach near the Los Alamitos Joint Forces Training Base. As I write, jets roar over my neighborhood — some directly above my house — on their way to and from the three-day Huntington Beach Pacific Airshow. My dogs cower underneath furniture; some neighbors resort to tranquilizing their frightened pets.

In the past, I’ve weathered the disruption without complaint because so many people enjoy the air show. This year, however, the Huntington Beach city attorney and the new council majority have thoroughly politicized what simply should be a fun family event.

Final straw: The air show’s opening day featured none other than a flyover by the Trump plane.

I am forever surprised by what is “legal.” Not all Huntington Beach residents support Trump, but they all helped pay for his free campaign stunt.

Due to a head-scratching and secretive lawsuit settlement, Huntington Beach taxpayers are providing more than $5 million for what was previously self-supporting entertainment. (The organizer alleged the city, despite having little choice, maliciously shut down the 2021 air show after an oil spill catastrophe.)

What’s more, the private company running the air show gets to charge an entrance fee for swaths of a public beach. That seemingly underappreciated privilege should not have become a Trump whistle stop.

But this disrespect doesn’t just concern Huntington Beach. Seal Beach and Los Alamitos residents should not be compelled to endure the noise and safety risks imposed on us to prop up a highly politicized, for-profit spectacle.

Susan Christian Goulding
Seal Beach

When Huntington Beach City Council Mayor Pro Tem Gracey Van Der Mark was speaking about her Monopoly experience (Huntington Beach passes Go, collects its own ‘Monopoly’ game, Daily Pilot, Sept. 28), she related a story about her children asking why they had to pay a Monopoly tax. She could have used this as a teaching moment to explain how taxes fund public goods and services that benefit the community as a whole, saying something like, “Taxes maintain the parks and beaches where we go in the summer, build the roads to take us there, hire police, firefighters and lifeguards to keep us safe and pay your teachers’ salaries. They hire people to keep our food and water safe, and protect the environment so you’ll be able to enjoy nature when you get older. Speaking of getting older, taxes pay for grandma’s Social Security, which she needs to live on, as well as her medical care. It also pays for the military to keep our country safe. And lastly, taxes pay mommy a salary.” But instead, the general tone of Van Der Mark’s response to her children is that taxes are bad and you better get used to it. Apparently, Van Der Mark doesn’t understand the function of the government and the fundamental role taxes play in it, which is unfortunate for someone sitting on our City Council.

Dave Courdy
Huntington Beach

UC Irvine’s law department, where both Katie Porter and Dave Min were professors, has provided the two key lawmakers to Orange County’s governmental districts, one, the federal 47th Congressional District and the other California’s 48th Senate District, both of which cover approximately the same areas, with the latter including not only Newport Beach and other beach cities but running as far inland as Anaheim, Orange and Villa Park. Both lawmakers are facing extremely strong opponents in the upcoming elections.

Much has been written about the charismatic personality and popularity of Katie Porter, who is known for her famous whiteboard presentations to business moguls as well as her refusal to take corporate election funds. She will be abandoning her 47th Congressional District, which is only a two-year position, to run for the much talked about Senate seat abandoned by the death of Sen. Diane Feinstein.

No stranger to tough campaigns, she will be running against two other popular California Democrats.

Interestingly, Dave Min, who was elected to the California Senate for the first time in 2020, is running for Porter’s abandoned district. Because of his short political career, less is known about his contributions on a federal scale, while on a local scale he has been very active. On a personal level, I have contacted and gotten help from his official aides on three occasions when I have contacted his office. Prior to entering politics, Min, a Harvard Law School grad, was recognized for his expertise on financial markets and housing finance issues and has written often for well-known newspapers and contributed to television and radio.

Lynn Lorenz
Newport Beach

Your article regarding the underground utility proposal in Laguna Beach brought back a slew of old memories. When I was living on Seashore Drive near 48th Street in Newport Beach there were numerous occasions when that neighborhood was suppose to get rid of all those ugly telephone poles and wires. Each time this event was suppose to happen, it didn’t. So most of us just ignored any additional news on this subject when it came up. And boom, all of a sudden it not only happened, but the entire area was transformed into what looked to be a war zone with sidewalks gone, giant holes dug in the street, very large and strange-looking items just sitting in the middle of the street and chaos prevailing everywhere.

This nightmare took place about 20 years ago and what was suppose to be about a year and a half of transitioning to underground utilities took about four years. Due to the area being in very close proximity to the beach, all work and construction was halted for the summer crowd between June and September thereby loosing more time for completion. The property I was living in and was also part owner of paid our share through property taxes, and if I recall, it was right around $15,000. And then all of a sudden all the equipment, the big trucks, the strange-looking items and all the workers were gone. And when I say gone, I mean not a trace could be found that there was any kind of work that had been done. They even repaved all the streets. I sat on my second-story balcony and peered south on Seashore Drive to see not only the absence of any and all poles but a kind of a silent beach landscape that had a calm to it that was hard to describe. It was four years of noise, not being able to drive on the street, having to dodge and jump over construction items on the sidewalk when the sidewalks were still intact. But the finished product, however, after the job was completed, was worth every minute of misery we had to go through.

On a less technical issue, yet on kind of a sad note, our winged friends who once perched for hours at a time on the now absent miles of telephone wires now fly around aimlessly seeking out new places to rest and enjoy the various views the neighborhood has to offer. If bird translations to English were possible, we might hear a comment from a disgruntled bird such as, “There they go again, can’t they just leave well enough alone?”

And we wonder why as humans our cars are prime targets for bird droppings. Other than that, the neighborhood is far better off with no ugly poles and wires going every which way. So, Laguna Beach folks, vote those poles out and the underground wires in.

Bill Spitalnick
Newport Beach

I’ve frequented the two, often busy McDonald’s in Fountain Valley for quick, on-the-go meals. The Egg McMuffin and Filet o’ Fish are first-rate, but the French fries are, hands down, the best in the business! There’s no question McDonald’s is the leader in this industry. So I was very surprised to learn recently that the restaurant was trying to be another kind of first.

McDonald’s has proposed building a 24-hour restaurant with two drive-up lanes for ordering, within feet of a neighborhood of single-family homes in Fountain Valley! A McDonald’s representative I spoke to couldn’t think of a single instance where this has happened before.

“Fountain Valley, a nice place to live” is the city’s motto. I hope the best interests of homeowners, residents and Fountain Valley’s reputation are top of mind when city planners are making their decision to approve this project or not.

Fusako Takeda
Fountain Valley

I am writing this letter out of frustration over the way the majority of our elected Huntington Beach City Council is governing the city. From the day they were sworn in last December, the four of them have shown a disrespect for their colleagues and for the public. A mayor was chosen with very little city experience, the right of the council to decide what flags are flown at city facilities was replaced with an authoritarian ordinance effectively banning the Pride flag, four very important department heads left our city, the council majority refused to send the Housing Element to the state for approval, then eliminated key citizen’s boards and committees (the voice of the community), tried to insert the city attorney in running the library when we have a well trained staff and library board, enacted an anti-vaccine-mandate policy when the cases of COVID-19 are on the rise, entered into a lawsuit over the RHNA numbers and rewrote the Human Dignity Statement when hate crimes are on the rise, and there are more.

Now we are faced with a number of charter revisions and amendments. This has always been done by a citizen’s committee, who every 10 years or when needed, review the charter, discuss potential amendments with the assistance of a qualified expert on charter revision and are given legal advice. However, our City Council majority determined that they would do the job, so the mayor put together a committee of three council members. When the public became aware of some of the proposed changes, they took action. Never before, in my memory, have so many citizens come before the council to criticize what they were doing.

Shirley Dettloff
former mayor
Huntington Beach