Here are some of the most thought-provoking reader comments of the week. Comments are selected by our editors and subject to editing for grammar, spelling, clarity and length.
Click on each topic’s headline to see the article in question.
Green Fair Abruptly Cancelled
I don’t get it. How is anyone supposed to know that the vote to close down the Green Fair resulted from the internal audit if the public records didn’t say so?
I don’t think anyone should take solace in knowing if they come forward with a complaint, the county will quietly deal with it so nobody knows what happened and nobody is held accountable.
For every issue the county addresses publicly, how many more are they sweeping under the rug?
— Stunned
“This program is being run with county personnel to the tune of hundreds of thousands [of dollars] …,” [Supervisor Shawn] Nelson said.
Throughout the year, county employees in every agency and department spend thousands of hours and hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars — perhaps over a million dollars — planning, organizing and conducting fundraisers for the Orange County United Way.
Chairman Nelson apparently doesn’t have any issues with an enormous gift of public funds to the United Way. Why is staff time and county dollars spent on a Green Fair any different?
— OC Bureaucrat
Anaheim Streetcar Probe
They should certainly apply the same level of scrutiny to the Santa Ana streetcar project.
The mayor has been promoting that Santa Ana’s streetcar is only part of a larger regional system that includes the Anaheim resort streetcar project as well. If Anaheim doesn’t happen, then the whole regional justification doesn’t work, and the entire Western portion of the Santa Ana streetcar from Raitt Street into Garden Grove becomes effectively useless.
The same concerns about whether Anaheim’s streetcar addresses a real need also apply to Santa Ana, as do the questions about whether it will build new markets and new ridership as the Santa Ana mayor and its promoters say.
The Orange County Transportation Authority should seriously review both projects and use reality-based criteria instead of pie-in-the-sky rhetoric to determine if they are necessary and worth the high cost.
— SA Resident
County Cutting Funds for Latino Health Access
The worst part of this type of political maneuvering is that it is designed to please and get the votes of racist people with small minds. Maybe they should learn Spanish and travel.
Ignorance is not a good adviser. It does not help the city prosper. It creates hate. Sorry that the supervisors cater to these bigots.
— Jfalltoo