Just Paint It

Easy Reader Letter to the Editor - 6/15/23

Dear ER:

If Beach Cities Health District was serious about adding a bike lane to Flagler Lane, it could be done tomorrow with some paint (“On Local Government: Proposed bike path missed the cut off,” ER June 8, 2023). The fact is BCHD only wanted to pursue this project because it would have added a sidewalk to the west side of Flagler, allowing for access to their “Wealthy Living Campus.” Tom Bakaly told the Torrance Traffic Commission that a bike lane on Flagler is consistent with the South Bay Bicycle Master Plan. If you bother to actually read the Plan however, it is not.

Mark Miodovski ERNews.com

Path to nowhere

https://easyreadernews.com/letters-to-the-editor-5-18-23/

Easy Reader

Dear ER

From even the most casual review, the Beach Cities Health District has spent around $500,000 in planning the bike path from Beryl and Flagler; along Flagler in Torrance; and then a 200-foot long strip in Redondo Beach. Based on the distance and work planned, well over half of the expenditure is for Torrance. BCHD announced it plans to spend $1.8 million to improve that 200-feet in Redondo Beach, from Diamond and Prospect to the Torrance city border at Flagler Alley. That is both an unreasonable, exorbitant expenditure and also a stranded segment because Torrance has rejected the work from the Torrance border to Beryl and Flagler. BCHD should not be allowed to waste $2 million of scarce taxpayer resources on a 200-foot strip of stranded bike path.

BCHD needs to stop playing real estate developer for a 100% privately owned building and get back to basics — providing benefits to the residents who reside in the District (Redondo Beach, Hermosa Beach, and Manhattan Beach).

Mark Nelson

Redondo Beach

Hospital history

3/16/23 https://easyreadernews.com/letters-opinion/

Dear ER:

There aren’t very many people who remember the story of the South Bay Hospital District. The hospital district was formed to build and run a hospital for the residents, not the entire area. So voters bought land, paid for the hospital, and paid all the bills and workers from the 1950s until 1984. The hospital lost money all through the 1970s and had to be shut down in 1984 or go broke. Fortunately a private company rented the hospital, cleaned house and kept some of the services running as a private hospital until 1998. Beach Cities is just South Bay Hospital with a name change in 1994. Even though they no longer had the public hospital, the board of directors decided to keep the taxpayer money and land and do whatever they wanted. The health district no longer meets a single one of the requirements that voters approved when they approved the hospital. It doesn’t own or operate a public hospital and it’s become a commercial business that works outside the voters’ cities. I understand that the district wants to get bigger and bigger, since that’s what government agencies do. What I will never understand is why the district continued to exist when so many of us protested in the 1990s to either keep the hospital running or shut it down. They seem to have created some sort of private company that no longer works for the residents.

R A Loeffler

Hermosa Beach