Mailbag: Signatures needed on petition to protect H.B. library

In some ways, it feels like an eternity ago when the conservatives on the Huntington Beach City Council unveiled their unpopular book-banning plan in June 2023. This led to their development of a politically motivated book review board, restrictive youth library cards and the council majority’s exploration of privatizing the public library to a for-profit corporation backed by a private equity firm.

Fortunately, the national out-sourcer yanked its proposal in the eleventh hour, largely due to public backlash, but that doesn’t mean it won’t return. Library Systems & Services could easily approach the city again with a sole-source bid that might win over the majority. We won’t let that happen, and that’s why a petition is circulating around town to let H.B. citizens have a voice at the ballot box on how their taxpayer money is spent to manage our public library. Four council members should not be given the power to overhaul it.

The other petition was created to give Huntington Beach residents a voice in determining whether a volunteer review board, consisting of political appointees without professional librarians, would have “final” and “non-appealable” authority over what books the library buys for youths under 18.

If you haven’t signed the petitions, you can find them at tables in front of the beautiful Central Library, which celebrates its 50th anniversary next year. Petitions are also available at other locations around town. To date, thousands of signatures have been gathered, but more are needed.

By signing the petitions, you will protect our beloved library. You will also protect Huntington Beach from costly lawsuits that will clearly move forward if the council fully enacts its censorship proposals. Above all, in November vote for our library champions, City Council members Dan Kalmick, Natalie Moser, and Rhonda Bolton!

Carol Daus
Huntington Beach

Does anyone speak humanity?

I heard wailing.

First, I checked her room and finding it empty, I followed the sound to a dining room.

In a split second, I took in a room the size of a basketball court with tables full of patients, family members, staff and walls lined with people standing shoulder to shoulder. Mom was sitting alone, wailing, “Help me, help me!” I felt gut-punched! I silently screamed, “What kind of pit is this!” In a single glance, I memorized the hundreds of faces who stood motionless with frozen expressions of apathy. Everyone within the walls of that facility could hear the wailing and chose to ignore it. Whether they were present in the dining room or not, they were complicit. While I have seen so much violence both real and cinematic, I have never seen anything more brutal.

I placed a hand on Mom’s shoulder, and she calmed down immediately.

The setting was a skilled nursing care center where my mother was taken for acute and short-term rehabilitation. This incident was the last straw over 11 days marked by utter absence or woefully inadequate nursing care. I was chilled to the core wondering how many times I hadn’t heard her wail.

I hope to spare others of a similar living nightmare. Here are suggestions I have for anyone considering short or long-term nursing home residence:

• Have a plan in place. Become familiar with the limits of the affected member’s health insurance before a crisis occurs;
• Utilize the online tool from MediCare at https://www.medicare.gov/care-compare/?providerType=NursingHome. Its five-star rating measures inspection reports, vaccination rates, and staffing;
• Research the facilities available by first reviewing sites such as Yelp or Health Grades. Other online tools are Nursing Home Inspect, which contains more than 80,000 nursing home inspection reports and the NursingHome411, provided by the Long-Term Care Community Coalition. It offers state data on staffing, ratings and complaints.
• Regardless of the number or quality of online resources, the best inspection is conducted in-person. Note the environment, cleanliness, speak to as many staff members as possible, taste the food and check the residents’ grooming.

I am a a retired family nurse practitioner and former associate clinical professor at UC Irvine. This letter is dedicated to C., K., and J., titan guardians and advocates for the care and dignity of elders.

Karen Deck
San Juan Capistrano

Walz has support in Newport

In response to the mayor of Newport Beach (who was quoted recently on social media as well as in local online news), I would like to say that vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz will not just be “dipping into some of our residents’ pockets” when he visited our city on Aug. 13. Those among us who are excited about Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate will be giving gladly and generously to his campaign. We would like nothing more than to have a positive candidate like Walz as our vice president to help erase some of the “gloom and doom” political atmosphere brought on by far-right Republicans who have been trying to take us back in time to the last century.

When Mayor O’Neill brags about how well the “7-0 Republican City Council” is running the city of Newport Beach, he should be reminded that local government is not supposed to be partisan. Also, on some occasions, let it be known that the council lets down the people it is supposed to be representing by playing politics instead.

And how does the City Council manage to consist exclusively of Republicans when they are no longer in total control of Newport Beach? Neither are they in control of Orange County. In the most recent presidential election, that of 2020, Biden carried the county by almost 5,000 more votes than Trump. In 2016 Clinton also got more votes than Trump in Orange County.

Even in Newport Beach, Republicans do not hold the edge that they once did. In the presidential election of 2012 Republicans carried Newport Beach by a 2-to-1 margin. But in 2020 that margin had significantly decreased. Republicans won by a margin of only 8,000 votes with Biden getting 44.14% of the vote to Trump’s 53.97%, while 1,000 votes went to a third-party candidate.

In my opinion, that small margin of Republicans continues to dominate Newport’s City Council in two ways: one, by holding at-large elections, making it way too expensive to run for office and thus favoring the wealthy. Or it becomes necessary for candidates to seek financial backers and be influenced by them. The other way one party often controls elections is by sending out incendiary election fliers. Many of Newport Beach’s residents are disgusted by the dirty politics they witness each election season.

So O’Neill should only speak for himself when he brags about the Newport Beach political scene or when he casts aspersions on our potential vice president. He should just relax because he will not have to work under Walz; his second term will soon be drawing to a close.

Lynn Lorenz
Newport Beach

Rainbow flags and municipal elections

The scene: a catered fundraiser brunch earlier this month for Dan Kalmick and his allies in the spacious backyard of a former Huntington Beach mayor. I put some fresh fruit on a plate and joined a table of three women, none of whom I knew. Within minutes I had defied every rule of persuasion that I had put to heart. It didn’t help that I was the only man at the table, overdressed in a light tan jacket and button-down shirt while other men were wearing tasteful Hawaiian shirts and high-end sandals. Add my academician’s vain assumption that folks were supposed to listen to me, and my mansplaining was primed and ready for failure.

I did believe in my message, though. Here was a crowd that had chosen to draw a line in the sand with the pole of a rainbow flag, and I was there to question the wisdom of that strategy. But when I asked, all too rhetorically, what the others thought made people homophobic, they responded with ideologically freighted description instead of explanation. “It’s their religion.” (Then what makes that religion so appealing?) “They’re ignorant.” (They’re not so dumb, and ‘teaching’ them is condescending and counterproductive. Even I know that.)

If we’re going to fight a disease we better understand the cause, but I drew a blank from everyone when I suggested that the animosity comes from perceiving gay people as a threat to family viability. I couldn’t even get around to explaining the related phenomenon of redirected aggression, the demagogue’s go-to organizing tool. Somehow these folks were completely unaware of the acute stress felt by America’s white working class these days and the extent to which they seek relief through mutual assistance from their families.

What could I have done, then, outside of dragooning my understandably resistant audience into a social science course of my design? I would advise against leading the charge with identity, a classical wedge issue. I would strongly suggest, instead, a quest to promote the common good, focusing laser-like on building state-of-the-art infrastructure and delivering vital local government services to all. There’s a strong pragmatic point in favor of that strategy. The crowd that rallies around the rainbow flag doesn’t have political clout. If it did, MAGA-type reactionaries wouldn’t be dominating city politics today.

So, progressives, do you want to help LGBTQ+ residents? Put your own oxygen mask on first. All of us are experiencing a palpable decline in our standard of living wrought by global warming, inflation and the aftershocks of pandemic devastation. Build a government that helps relieve those insults to our standard of living, and you’ll get the winning votes in the next election. That will then give you the political wherewithal to protect the gay people among us.

Sam Coleman, PhD, MSW
lecturer at CSU Long Beach

Podcast deserves unbiased moderator

Re: “New podcast ponders O.C.’s ‘purple’ politics ahead of the election” (Daily Pilot & TimesOC, Aug. 11): Depending on the political slant the idea of an O.C. political podcast is a great one. The moderator should be neutral, and unfortunately the moderator here, Mike Madrid, is a Republican who backed Donald Trump even after the then-candidate disparaged all Mexicans by saying that “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. … They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

A non-biased moderator would be able to discuss the reasons why the county has turned from red to purple in a clear and concise manner and would insure total impartiality.

Richard C. Armendariz
Huntington Beach

Citizens have a right to know

At the Aug. 6 Huntington Beach City Council meeting, I proposed a new ordinance declaring Huntington Beach to be a “Citizens’ Right to Know” city. Such an ordinance would state that the city cannot restrict release of any settlement terms on lawsuits involving the city without the unanimous consent of the City Council. Given the protracted squabble at the end of that council meeting, referenced by Matt Szabo’s excellent article, “Charges fly over air show deal in Surf City,” in Saturday’s Daily Pilot, I feel stronger moves must be made to ensure transparency and honesty in our public officials. This especially applies to our city attorney, Michael Gates. The behavior of the city attorney and the council majority, aimed at hiding the egregious details regarding the Pacific Airshow settlement agreement, can only be described as chicanery and possible malfeasance. An ordinance or a resolution such as I’ve described would, at the very least, provide Huntington Beach citizens with essential information to guide our choices in electing individuals who have the best interests of our city at heart.

Diane Bentley
Huntington Beach

It was a straightforward request from the Huntington Beach City Council minority at the Aug. 6 meeting: “Financial Transparency - Determine Total Cost of Pacific Airshow Settlement.” In a slick sleight of hand, majority Councilman Tony Strickland made a substitute motion, which passed after a long and heated discussion, to add the Pacific Airshow to Councilman Casey McKeon’s separate agenda item: “Taxpayer Transparency - Evaluation of City Tax-Sharing.”

What? Not the same thing! Now, instead of getting to the bottom of the egregious settlement with the Pacific Airshow, we might learn how much income the city might earn from the air show each year. No. We want to know exactly what loss the Pacific Airshow suffered from one day’s cancellation due to an oil spill. Why was it worth $5 million and an exclusive deal for up to 40 years that’s a massive taxpayer giveaway? Code 4 should have sued Amplify Energy, who caused the oil spill, not the city. Why did City Atty. Michael Gates and the City Council majority roll over and settle?

Tickets for this year’s October show are already being sold at exorbitant prices, though Code Four may not yet have pulled a city permit (which should be an actual contract, with specs, not merely an event permit). Has Code Four or the city attorney yet responded to numerous Coastal Commission and State Lands Commission letters stating that the event is an unauthorized taking of public land under the terms of the city’s lease with the state, and requires a coastal development permit that has never been applied for? Code Four has now monetized the pier and a mile of public beach and water, restricting required public access, plus thousands of parking spots. Does Code Four have sufficient insurance to cover any exposure to the city for liability in the event of a plane crash in a highly populated area? Is the city fully protected against any future unscheduled cancellations?

So many valid questions and very few, if any, transparent and acceptable answers.

Michele Burgess
Huntington Beach

I’m guessing that if someone did some digging they would find that political contributions were a part of the Pacific Airshow settlements scandal currently roiling Surf City. Code Four no doubt incurred losses after the oil spill canceled the final day of the airshow, but they should not have sued H.B., as how was this the city’s fault? Instead maybe the city and Code Four should have joined to sue the pipeline operator. And just how did a settlement to make Code Four whole for one day’s losses balloon into a 40-year contract overwhelmingly padding the wallet of Code Four and its founder using the city and its taxpaying residents as the cash register? This whole thing smells worse than the odor from the spill itself!

Mike Aguilar
Costa Mesa

The chaos of the Huntington Beach City Council was on full display Aug. 6. Mayor Gracey Van Der Mark and Councilman Casey McKeon introduced measures designed to distract from the egregious giveaway of the Pacific Airshow settlement.

Van der Mark’s proposed ordinance in opposition to AB1955 not only misrepresented the law but also ignores the fact that the city operates no schools and employs no teachers. But opposing the law wasn’t her real objective. It was to create controversy.

Controversy to distract the public from the fiscal irresponsibility of the air show settlement.

McKeon tried a different tack. His pitch was that there was nothing abnormal about public funding going to private events. Except that his proposal specifically exempted the airshow from scrutiny.

It took a lawsuit to make the terms of the settlement public. And now we know why. They are giving millions of our tax dollars to their campaign backer to settle a suit the city could have won. Kim Carr’s victory in court proves it.

It’s our tax dollars being given away instead of being used to provide city services.

They need to be held to account — in the courts, at the ballot box, or both!

David Rynerson
Huntington Beach

Mooring deal was bound to sink

Re: “Compromise on Newport Beach tidelands mooring fees stalled indefinitely by state officials,” Daily Pilot, Aug. 10:

State Officials actually bailed out the six City Council members who voted for the so-called deal from an embarrassing and potentially illegal outcome. The deal was based on making promises that they knew full well could not be kept.

The deal would not have served either of the two real objectives sought by the Harbor Department — raise more revenue for the department by increasing mooring fees and abolish its decades-long practice and policy on transfer of mooring rentals, without due compensation. From my interpretation of data collected for the past 7½ years by the Harbor Department, as many as 75% of the moorings could be granted legacy rights with no fee increase for decades. However, the next City Council with new members would void legacy rights, under the guise that their hands were tied by those terrible Democrats in Sacramento.

The City Council needs to scrap the current bait-and-switch deal completely and start from scratch. A good start would be to abandon the consultant’s laughable analysis on fee increases. It needs to define the exact issue it is trying to solve, in an intellectually honest way. And most important of all it needs to listen to those who elected them.

Jamshed Dastur
Balboa Island