MAILBAG: Reserve hotlines for real crimes

How special is this. Our very enlightened Glendale City Council, at the urging of Glendale Water & Power, pursues a mandatory water conservation program. This program mandates landscape watering Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Sprinklers before 9 a.m. and after 6 p.m. and 10 minutes or less for each watering station.

Now how do you suppose the city intends to enforce this ordinance? They want us to report one another — our fellow citizens and neighbors — on the water-waster hotline. There is no hotline for people talking on cell phones in their car. There is no hotline for people running through stop signs without slowing, or speeding down our streets, or running through pedestrian crosswalks. But there is a hotline for us common folk to report violations of the water conservation program.

Actually, in the latest edition of “From The Source,” a Glendale Water & Power newsletter, there is a whole litany of things we should report to the hotline.

The one thing it doesn’t say to report is the start of a large apartment complex where one or two single-family homes used to sit. That can do nothing but increase overall consumption.

If the city of Glendale as a whole needs to reduce its total water usage by 10% or make everyone face severe increases in their water adjustment rate in 2010, then it seems like an impossible goal if we save water on our landscape and the city continues to allow unrestricted development, which can do nothing but increase overall water consumption.

P.S. Love that fountain at the Americana at Brand.

JIM KUSSMAN

Glendale

Councilmen were right to walk out

With regard to your Aug. 8 article “Gadfly’s audience on the dais shrinks” I feel compelled to comment.

It is certainly true that every person has a right to exercise the First Amendment to speak any time and anywhere, including before an elected body or on a street corner. However, it’s also true that no person is compelled to listen, either by law or at the insistence of the speaker.

I admire and support the actions of Councilmen Ara Najarian and John Drayman to excuse themselves from listening to comments that they found offensive and out of order. I hope that every council member will feel free to follow their actions in the future.