Meeting Time: March 14, 2023 at 5:00pm PDT
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Agenda Item

IX. PUBLIC PARTICIPATION: ORAL AND WRITTEN COMMUNICATIONS FROM THE PUBLIC

  • Default_avatar
    Howard L about 1 year ago

    Re: Microphones, Cable-TV and more that you would best be aware.

    Ceremonial Mayor and Councilmembers, and staff at the dais:

    Please ensure that you all speak directly into your microphones and be sure to notice and request that speakers at the podium are speaking directly into the podium’s microphone, or have them request a handheld-wireless-microphone if they are unable to reach the podium’s microphone.

    Speakers at the Podium often have the microphone bent over to the side as a result of one reason or another. The microphone won’t pick them up if they are not speaking directly into it, just as your individual microphones won’t pick you up if you are not speaking directly into them. Btw, something that Councilman Massey actually does seem to know, but which rookie councilman Saemann absolutely does not seem to know -- as he slouches back in his chair as if he were in his home’s living room watching football while scarfing down a plate of spaghetti and meatballs. He’s only missing a cigar in his mouth sitting up there on the dais.

    And this also includes the City Attorney who may sometimes even speak with his microphone turned off, and let us not to forget especially C.M. Suja Lowenthal who talks so slightly as if to be talking to a baby in her arms or in a library. This is a public meeting; speak up people, as we all seem to get it that the city is doing everything possible, it does seem, to make sure the public hears as little as possible and simply tunes out from the cable-TV PEG-access city channels.

    It’s all apparently part of the trick to make the video as c-r-a-p-p-y as possible and sound as inaudible as possible in the year 2023. Video and sound were both great going back 40 years. What happened in recent years? Government evidently got sneaky-wise of how to turn off the public.

    The City Council should be very concerned that City Manager Lowenthal and Lowenthal’s puppet City-Clerk’s-operation (with the City Council’s implicit concurrence) seems to be doing all possible to eliminate Hermosa Beach civic meetings, including School Board meetings, from playing well (or even at all) both LIVE and in Replay on the City’s two PEG (Public-Education-Government) access - cable TV channels, i.e., Spectrum Ch-8 and Frontier/FiOS Ch-31 as they have been played and replayed for decades.

    Frontier/FiOS (unlike in Redondo Beach and in Manhattan Beach) has been showing only color bars for weeks now on Hermosa’s Frontier PEG access Ch-31, and Frontier is evidently giving Hermosa city staff lip-service/nonsense reasons for this, apparently just bamboozling the Suja Lowenthal weak-as-water bloated city management operation. This is outrageous!

    Both PEG channels have gone to H-E-L-L in a handbasket under Suja’s reign of utter-incompetence, and with evidently the full complicity of the Hermosa Beach City Councils past and present, and for that matter the Hermosa Beach Public Works Department in my view.

    And also the City Council and other civic meetings are not being always heard well if at all on cable-TV. So be sure to speak directly into your microphones.

    And yes, some of us well-know there are YouTube and Granicus videos available, however most in the know, also know that’s not where the vast thousands of the residents and business people have easy, immediate, and 24-hour access to seeing what their government is up to on their home and business television sets, and which is where Hermosa Beach has had that capability for decades. Please be sure to speak directly into your microphones and be sure to request that speakers at the podium also speak directly into the podium’s microphone or have them request a handheld-wireless-microphone if unable to reach the podium’s microphone. Btw, just because you on council hang-tightly onto your cell phones does not mean no one watches these meeting on cable-TV. You all know that very few but the “insiders” view them on YouTube or the Granicus, and you also know the hit counts are minuscule for those.

    But ask yourself, why would Lowenthal and you on the Council want the people to be as ill-informed as possible? Obviously you evidently do! Your performance proves that.

    The agendas hide everything now, the meetings playing on Cable-TV are virtually unviewable. You know it. And you don’t give a d-a-m-n.

    All my views herein, as always of course.

    Howard L.

  • Default_avatar
    Howard L about 1 year ago

    Re: General public comments regarding Street Rehabilitation/Paving Deficiency

    Councilmembers / Public Works Commissioners:

    I have been trying to get answers as to the street segments to be accomplished in the current CIP-191 “project”, the long, long, long running “annual street improvements” project for each year, which seems to not be occurring but every 3 or 4 years at best, if even that often, and with the current “year’s” project seemingly going no-where.

    PW-staff refuses to provide me even a tentative-list of street segments by indicating they are still being worked up, or by simply not even responding. To me that means they have nothing? It’s all this mickey-mouse Council and Suja driven nonsense throwing monkey wrench after monkey wrench into the works.

    The PW department absolutely should be running such list by you on the PW Commission for the Public to be informed as in past decades for review, comments, and concurrences, and not after same is cast in concrete, ready to go to bid if that ever even comes. It seems they run a lot of stuff by you guys after the fact and then report in Council that such and such was reviewed by the PW Commission. Review, what review, sham review after stuff is cast in concrete. Sham after sham.

    Or are the City’s people to assume that a couple of city engineers, and the PW-Director only, (perhaps also C.M. Suja and Councilman Massey) will determine what streets get repaired for Massey’s next run for council? We all know the Lowenthal/Massey agenda is to say to H-E-L-L with automobiles; to H-E-L-L with spending money on street infrastructure. They most-apparently want buses, trains, bikes, and just walking in town. However I recall no vote by the people giving such direction for a dictatorship headed by Massey and his taxpayer overpaid Suja.

    This communication is to also emphasize to the PW Commission that the North section of Prospect Avenue from Aviation Blvd Northward to the new Hermosa View School is falling apart now exponentially. Btw, I do not live in proximity to that section of Prospect Avenue, however in some 40-years I have seen the city do only one thinner-than-thin slurry-seal on that section of North Prospect Avenue in city. Now from improper city maintenance it absolutely requires a full grind and repave.

    Back in the 1970s, that section was last surface-repaved I believe. It’s only a matter of time before a chunk of N. Prospect’s falling-apart, potholed pavement is shot up from a vehicle’s-wheel to be striking one of the young children walking to school in the head. If you don’t believe such is possible, think again.

    Hermosa Beach, under the incredibly dysfunctional and all-but-useless city councils of the past six or so years, has accomplished next to nothing with regard to street rehabilitation. I happen to walk a lot in the three beach cities, and it is amazing the real street paving and rehabilitation I see taking place in Redondo Beach, year after year, and in Manhattan Beach too.

    But in Hermosa Beach, well especially since the Hermosa Council’s hiring of the worst, most-incompetent, mostly-absentee, 20-year Long-Beach politician, and multiple-years transportation-bureaucrat in Santa Monica, i.e., Suja Lowenthal, next to nothing with regard to street rehabilitation has been getting accomplished. We all know of the incredible four parks bathrooms cl-us-ter-fks under the last 4 PW Directors and of course Suja and the prior Council of (Massey, Armato, Campbell, Detoy, and Jackson).

    I blame the Hermosa Beach City Councils of the last 6-years for the hiring and retaining-on of Lowenthal. Lowenthal of course can’t help it if she’s incompetent as a City Manager. It’s the City Council who retains this incompetence and that’s now seeing to it that she will be compensated over $400,000 in salary and benefits this calendar year of 2023, and this given additionally her costly, bloated city manager office staff Suja-Empire operation to top it off.

    It’s no wonder next to nothing of substance is getting accomplished with respect to the so-called “annual street improvements” project, CIP-191. The money’s excessively going to this top-heavy wheels-grinding-slower-than-slow, ‘Ball of Confusion’, city manager operation, and while Hermosa’s treasury-money for meaningful needed things, just piles up unspent, now close to $60 Million in the Suja/Massey smoke and mirrors HB city funds balances.

    So if you on the PW Commission don’t ask strong questions and demand real, forthright, honest, substantive answers, you may as well not even attend your PW Commission meetings, as you are just apparently being used as stooges to make it look like something is being accomplished legitimately. The PW Commission may as well be renamed the Public-Works-For-Window-Dressing-Commission, i.e. the PWFWD Commission.

    All within are my views as always.

    Howard L.