Letters to the Editor: A new L.A. council district map that makes sense? Yes please!
In the April 12-15 issue of the L.A. Times, David J. Hickman (editor, editorial page) and his L.A. Times colleagues ran letters to the editor, urging an official response to a request for reevaluation of the proposed boundaries of the Los Angeles city council and city planning districts.
I believe it is important for the L.A. Times to offer constructive criticism of the proposed district boundaries. Our society has an obligation to seek solutions to social problems. When we make proposals to fix problems, we should accept responsibility for the consequences, not just the consequences of what we wanted to happen.
There are more than 1,000 council members in the Los Angeles Unified School District. The district covers more than one million students in more than 2,000 schools. We can’t expect our community to absorb all this growth and change in a single generation without a better system for distributing its resources.
We need a community that is cohesive, which is defined as a community that has a unified sense of its values and goals. Instead of sending us a ream of maps, let them know we stand behind the district they are trying to represent.
I, too, look forward to an official response to my letter.
—John W. Kipp and Steve Smith
Mud baths will cause flooding. Is it the fault of the city? Yes, it is.
When the city council approved the rezoning for the new city park and recreation district I suggested that the city park board be assigned the responsibility of overseeing the park. Instead we have what appears to be a board of incompetents.
The city is building a new park and recreation district that will be located in the new city park district. The current district, which has approximately 400,000 students, will be absorbed. As a city park board member, I can tell you that one of the purposes of this new district is to absorb the current and future students that live in the city.
I have worked in the city park system going back to 1964. The city park board is the people who own the