MAILBAG - Sept. 13, 2006

Don’t trust city’s cost estimates

Greenlight II must be right on target when Newport Beach city management, fronted by Asst. City Manager Sharon Wood, feels the need to “hypothecate” ridiculous Measure X cost numbers (“Greenlight II estimates rise,” Saturday).

Remember how accurate they were estimating the cost of the infamous 23rd Street parking structure? How about the great jobs on the numbers for the proposed time-share hotel at Marinapark? Don’t forget those estimates of new civic center costs that seemed to rise at every discussion. Or those ever-growing projections for the Newport Coast Community Center and the overruns on the Newport Coast school bypass road and the Corona del Mar beach renovation.

Reflect for a moment on the costs of the staff time plus the many hundreds of thousands spent on legal, consultant, public relations, architectural and similar fees for ill-conceived and/or poorly executed projects over the last two or three years. Then tell me again how expensive it will be for the city to ensure the implementation of Measure X when it is passed.

What a stupid and transparent way for our paid public servants to conduct themselves! The Daily Pilot, of course, buys into it with no effort at analytical reporting.

Folks, this is the gang that can’t count straight, but they sure are anxious to avoid having any voter involvement in their development decisions, aren’t they?

JOSEPH F. O’HORA

Newport Beach

Concerns about Greenlight II overplayed

The concern raised by your report on Greenlight II costs is overblown. A city bureaucracy devoted to growth is hardly an objective source of such estimates. If property owners see Greenlight for what it is — an intentional impediment to growth rather than an invitation to the polls — they will think twice before incurring any costs.

That is why similar scare warnings about Greenlight I, nevertheless passed by a margin of two to one, did not materialize.

In the absence of a straightforward moratorium on growth, which residents would undoubtedly prefer, Greenlight II is their only means of restoring the controls of Greenlight I, which the general plan update was deviously conceived to circumvent, in our city’s relentless war against the people.

TOM MOULSON

Corona del Mar

Stay out of Costa Mesa, Laguna Beach. OK?

In response to the Laguna Beach writer who fears the invasion of armed robbers, rapists and drive-by shooters that flea from their crimes in Costa Mesa, and her question whether it would please the people of Costa Mesa who think “outsiders” should stay out of South Coast Plaza, the Orange County Performing Arts Center and the Orange County Fair, the answer is a resounding yes. Remind me again when the last time a high-speed chase of a raving rapist serial killer (most likely an illegal immigrant, I’m sure) started here and ended there? Oh, that’s right, probably never.

Just keep your narrow-minded view down south in Laguna, thank you very much.

MIKE MCNIFF

Costa Mesa