MAILBAG - Dec. 21, 2006

It’s time to demand accountability

After all the negative press the Huntington Beach Police Department has been getting, it’s about time the citizens require the City Council, including those bought and paid for by the police union in past elections, to establish a Citizen Commission for honesty in policing in Huntington Beach.

All the bad press needs to be investigated and reported by the people who pay the bills — taxpayers in Huntington Beach. The council and police don’t seem to be earning a reputation for honesty in government.

Follow the lead of County Supervisor John Moorlach and demand accountability.

Barry L. Williams

Huntington Beach

Something fishy in Colby’s ouster

I think the less-than-two-day-old board dismissing a superintendent smells of dirty politics (“School leader placed on leave,” 12/14). Karen Colby has been an excellent administrator/teacher in the Ocean View School District for more than 30 years. I’ve known Ms. Colby since she had my son in her class 30 years ago, and she was a wonderful teacher. I also taught in the Ocean View School District for more than 30 years and found Ms. Colby to be a competent and excellent administrator.

Jim Erickson

Huntington Beach

Supt. Colby didn’t deserve this

It was handled in the poorest manner possible (“School leader placed on leave,” 12/14). Ms. Colby is an outstanding educator, a most decent human being and doesn’t deserve in any way to be treated in this manner. She has watched carefully over students, teachers and community, always having the best interest of those under her at heart.

What a sorry mess this district is in now. I question the leadership of the school board.

Julie Stein Mooney

Retired Oak View principal

Park pictures worth a thousand words

My thanks to Tim Geddes for exposing the falsehoods in Bob Polkow’s “Sounding Off” contribution of Nov. 3.

Bob Polkow never checked his facts. I had no part in the planning of the Oct. 28 “Day in the Park” by the Save Central Park group, let alone “staged a picnic” on the land so that I could “mislead the viewers of the council meeting the day before voting date,” nor had anything to do with vandalism of signs by either side, nor used any “questionable tactics” in presenting a PowerPoint demonstration to show the people of Huntington Beach some of the pictures I took while I attended the picnic by invitation, nor used any “tactics they have used in the past to mislead voters,” nor “used questionable tactics before, but this was a new low.”

Pictures are worth a thousand words, and every photo that I presented to the council and the television viewers on Nov. 6 was from the site of the Day in the Park on Oct. 28, including the flock of meadowlarks visiting the site.

People need to know what they are losing by building a senior /community center on this land, and what better way than photographs, other than visiting the site? I encourage more “Days in the Park” to acquaint people with the natural amenities of this precious land. I was out there today, and again, flocks of birds greeted me.

The proposed park site is a part of the extremely valuable Huntington Beach Central Park for both people and wildlife, as it is well known by birders throughout the Southland for the quantity and variety of bird life that is seen in the park. That some people associated with Bolsa Chica are supporting the senior center in Central Park is distressing, but many Bolsa Chica supporters and original founders of the Amigos de Bolsa Chica are against the center in the park, showing once more how this issue is so divisive to Huntington Beach.

Mr. Polkow seems to use personal attacks to cast aspersions on the people who disagree with him. I no more gave a “thinly veiled threat” than the man on the moon. I have lived and/or worked in Huntington Beach for more than 30 years, living in Huntington Beach in the mid-1970s when I was stationed as a lieutenant commander at the Long Beach Naval Regional Medical Center and in the early 1980s, when I established my medical practice in Huntington Beach, which I have continued in the same location for 26 years.

I was asked to help “Save Bolsa Chica” by a patient of mine in 1980 and served as a board member of Amigos de Bolsa Chica for 12 years, then co-founded the Bolsa Chica Land Trust in 1992, and I have served as a board member of the trust ever since. I have been instrumental in the victories piling up for wetlands preservation up and down the California coast, and have been very active in cleaning up the ocean and beaches from the sewage being discharged off our coast.

Huntington Beach has very valuable assets in its ocean, beaches, wetlands and open spaces like Central Park. If people care about these assets, they will stay engaged in the process and work to locate the senior center in another place other than Central Park. Central Park is too valuable to leave to mean-spirited people like Bob Polkow to rule the roost. At least he should get his facts right before writing fallacious letters to the Independent.

Dr. Jan D. Vandersloot

Huntington Beach

Desalination plant good for the city

The Orange County Taxpayers Assn. supports the proposed Poseidon desalination plant in Huntington Beach. It will generate $2.45 million per year in property, sales and utility taxes. That will help pay for environmental improvements as well as the schools, firefighters, police, healthcare, libraries and transportation that keep our natural and human habitats funded.

An economically healthy community is more likely to be an environmentally clean community. The builder will spend tens of millions of dollars locally to build the facility, creating hundreds of direct and indirect jobs during construction. After construction, it will continue to provide full-time and indirect jobs in Huntington Beach.

As a reliable source of fresh water, the facility will help protect us against the economic and tax consequences of drought or other disruptions to our water supply. It will be operated for the benefit of the community by a taxpaying private business. Private investors will put up the money and take all financial risk.

The proposed desalination facility is a win-win project, even for those who now oppose it.

Reed L. Royalty

President, Orange County

Taxpayers Assn.

San Juan Capistrano