Let there be sale signs
I was recently speaking with a friend of mine who operates a business on Main Street.
One of the issues we were discussing was a letter she received from the city of Seal Beach regarding, what can and can’t be in front of her store.
The letter said that no business owner should put benches, landscaping, or signs to advertise their business.
The letter continued to say that this was for everyone’s benefit and with summer coming up it could be an issue.
I walk up Main Street everyday and while their are a few signs, none of them are offensive or block the sidewalk as stated in the City’s letter.
There are a few landscape boxes and benches, which add to the character of our beautiful city. This is not the first time my friend has told me that the City of Seal Beach is not very business friendly. I thought about that and wondered is it true? Several years ago the city put a deposit on parking meters for Main Street. Was that business friendly?
Many merchants wanted a Farmers Market in the Main Street Parking Lot, but the city said no but later let Rossmoor Center have one instead.
Wouldn’t that have helped business? There have often been complaints that Main Street is too dark at night.
Has the city invested in better lighting for Main Street?
There were a lot of complaints about the pier decking before it was upgraded but couldn’t the same be said for the brickwork on Main Street?
Recently, many of the streets and sidewalks have been repaved or redone all together, but is summer time really the best time for that kind of work?
Closed streets and sidewalks and less parking can’t help business. On that same theme how come the sidewalks aren’t kept clean?
Take a look next time you are on Main Street, they really are a disgrace. How come the city doesn’t empty Main Street’s trashcans on the weekends or holidays?
Have you ever walked down Main Street on a busy weekend and the trash is overflowing and all over the ground? That can’t be too business-friendly, not to mention unsanitary.
Personally I don’t see anything wrong with a few signs, benches, and landscaping to attract people into a business.
I’ve been to plenty of small towns and it’s a common theme. It gives the town a local, old fashion, sort of appeal.
Isn’t that what Seal Beach really wants? I’m curious who would complain about a sign offering a sale, a bench to sit on, or some flowers below a window.
It seems to me the city is barking up the wrong tree on this one, but that’s just my thoughts.
Jack Straw
Seal Beach
Fears for integrity in Seal Beach Leisure World
I understand well the reasoning that led to the election of five new board members for Seal Beach Leisure World’s Mutual 5, and I wish this newly-constituted board nothing but success and great achievement—as well as very smooth sailing!
I voted for some of the winners, and I voted for some of the losers—hoping in my own voting to bridge the many and diverse viewpoints advocated throughout this mutual.
Our new Board of Directors has set great and significant goals for itself. May they come to fruition.
The slate of nominees to replace the then-current board spoke very much of total board honesty and of total board integrity—of complete board transparency—in all of its campaign handouts and at all of its many meetings—almost every one of which I attended.
Five of those candidates won, thus replacing/defeating five members of that then-current Mutual 5 Board of Directors.
What has deeply, deeply distressed and concerned me was the immediate resignation of one of those five newly-elected board members, with the board’s new majority instantly appointing in her place a director who had not been reelected at all, who had been—in effect—defeated that very same day, only moments earlier.
This astonishing process is most troubling to me, unless that newly-appointed director was the next-in-line in the voting results; however, even then, an immediate resignation and its immediate replacement is rightly troubling.
Moreover, the new board’s election was by parcel: the resigned new Director should rightly have been replaced by the second-place candidate from her same parcel.
Integrity? Honesty? The full, precise will of the majority of those voting democratically? Complete transparency? If not all of these, then this is a sad and contradictory beginning.
Gary Kinzer
Seal Beach
Leisure World
No budget, no paycheck
While we “the people” have a right to let our legislators know what we would like to see in and out of the annual budget, it is still the ultimate responsibility of our legislators to resolve differences and present and pass the budget on a timely basis.
The system seemed to work quite well until recent years when the politics of “disagreement and delay” has taken precedent over honest and thoughtful negotiating. The more I read about the current “game playing” of our elected officials and the serious effect it can have on innocent state employees who work for a paycheck, the more I want to see a ballot measure that states that “legislators who do not pass the budget on time will have their pay withheld until such time as they complete the job they were elected to do.”
Jim Bailey
Rossmoor
