Editor,
I am voting for Verna Rollinger and Judie Mancuso for Laguna Beach City Council because we desperately need enlightened leaders.
Mayor Steve Dicterow’s latest scheme to have OCTA buses transport visitors from the freeway to our bus terminal was a bust and I believe it cost $80,000 of your tax money.
Dicterow’s latest statement “I don’t think people have a right to live in Laguna” reflects his skewed thinking process.
Early on Dicterow wanted to build a skate board park in Moulton Meadow’s park but forgot to ask Arch Beach Heights residents what they thought about it.
Dicterow said the food at the Susi Q senior lunch was inedible, but no one had ever seen him at senior lunch. He voted to cut down trees downtown and said we needed more cops downtown until he went on a ride along with our cops and realized our cops are stretched thin as it is.
He voted to build a huge 500-car garage at the city entrance and sat by while city department heads and other city employees got bigger and bigger salaries and pensions. He had the unbrilliant idea of painting our cop cars black and white.
Bob Whalen and Dicterow sit by while the micro managing city manager causes an on-going brain drain at city hall as a endless list of transit managers, department heads and other employees leave. They sat by as a police chief from out of town was hired rather than promoting one of our cops to the position of chief, who knows and respects our town and its history. They watched and did nothing as the bagel place on Ocean Avenue tried to move 40 feet west in the same building and was harassed by the city for a year. They were never consulted when the city manager suddenly decided to strip the only park downtown of its public benches –the pepper tree and original playhouse park across from the Zinc, and this was a destination point for downtown folk who wanted a cool place to sit.
Whalen and Dicterow did nothing to encourage Smart and Final and or Stater Bros. to bid for the Albertson’s store and have offered no leadership to reach out to the LGBT travelers to continue to come as they have for decades to our internationally listed “gay” beach, West Street, and spend their travel dollars at our hotels, art galleries, shops and restaurants.
We need Rollinger and Mancuso and we need to ask our micro managing city manager to retire and live comfortably on his $225,000 + annual pension. Now is the time for a change.
Roger Carter, Laguna Beach
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