Questions the Goals of the CVTC

Who does the Crescenta Valley Town Council serve – local residents or big business?

Residents concerned about the proposed AT&T small cell on Briggs Avenue had the following experiences with CVTC:

1. Land Use Committee meeting where the decision was made to recommend approval/disapproval was pushed forward from Thursday, May 3, 2018 to the preceding Monday, April 30 with just one day notification emailed to residents – on Sunday! The only residents who knew about the meeting and attended were in favor, so it passed [Council] unanimously.

2. We emailed a request for all documents from the Land Use Committee meeting including the list of residents that AT&T said they notified about the April 30 meeting. (Residents near the proposed project say they don’t believe they were contacted by AT&T.)  We received no reply to our request.  I attended the Oct. 18 general meeting for CVTC and repeated our request for the Land Use documents to the CVTC president. Harry Leon told me that even though the documents were in electronic form (and thus could be easily mailed to us), he said the only way we could get the documents was for us to attend the next Land Use meeting on Nov. 1. I showed up on Nov. 1 to discover the Land Use meeting was canceled.

3. At the Nov. 15 CVTC general meeting, the small cell appeal was on the agenda but, when we arrived, we were told that since AT&T did not show up, CVTC would not address the small cell appeal. Concerned residents who had shown up to speak about the appeal were told to restrict their comments to small cells in general. CVTC is bending over backwards to be fair to AT&T, but what about to the residents?

4. During the entire period and continuing into the present, the CVTC website is unavailable or incomplete, so we have no way of finding out about the date/time/agenda of upcoming meetings (including Land Use Committee), documents from past 2018 meetings, Land Use committee member names/contact info. The CVTC Facebook page is also incomplete and only accessible by Facebook members; the page should be viewable by everyone.

On these important issues that affect all of us, CVTC should at least provide a level playing field.

Marilyn Tyler

La Crescenta

Invites Closer Inspection

Regarding “News from Sacramento: What More Could We Do For Them?” Viewpoints, Nov. 15), I don’t disagree with anything Assemblywoman Friedman says about the needs of our military veterans which are being met by government and by nonprofit, and that much more is due. However I feel that one statement of hers calls for closer examination, and I offer this for a broader view of the problem.

She states that the “real, absolute, reason” for the high suicide rates of U.S. veterans (22 per day) “remains unclear.” If she means that clinical diagnoses are not certain in many of these individual tragedies, I may agree with her.

But I believe we know, or should know, the fundamental cause of despair so deep that life is not worth living for so many vets. It is that we have sent our brave troops, often repeatedly, into insane wars of choice – wars that are not defending our homeland or our freedoms, for objectives that are not winnable militarily, as our own generals have told us.

To quote Bishop Desmond Tutu: “There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in.”

Roberta Medford

Montrose