Dear Editor:

Regarding your editorial “Oops, our bad!” and Andrew Towne’s Letter in GLT of 3/15/2007, may I make the following points:

I believe that the newly formed Hillcrest Town Council (HTC) is a needed and very promising forum for civil debate and community action. And I favor a completely transparent, open-door policy, encouraging participation by all Hillcrest residents, and inviting active press coverage at all meetings.

In that spirit, I called GLT Editor in Chief Russell O’Brien on March 2. I told him that, at its general meeting on March 13, HTC would be debating and possibly voting on an important policy statement passed by its Development Committee on February 28. I said that I expected a vigorous debate to ensue, as already reflected in an email thread which I offered to forward to GLT.

I sent the entire email thread that I had, exactly as it existed at the time I spoke with Mr. O’Brien. As you confirm in your editorial, nothing was changed, nothing was “doctored” —- absolutely nothing.

In one of the emails, I said that under Mr. Towne’s policy “practically none of the housing that has been added to Hillcrest under the current zoning would have been built.... This would drive up the price of the existing housing stock even more than it has gone up, and it would encourage more sprawl on the suburban and ex-urban periphery. It is a fundamentally anti-green, exclusionary policy.” This is exactly what I believe.

At the Hillcrest Town Council general meeting on March 13, after a vigorous debate, by an overwhelming vote, the membership in attendance chose to table the policy statement favored by Mr. Towne and send it back to the Development Committee for further work.

Contrary to Mr. Towne’s statement, the row house I live in on Robinson Avenue would definitely not have been built under his proposed policy. Contrary to his statement, there are single-family, 1-story houses, in a traditional style, directly adjacent to our row houses. Under his policy, that would have precluded our modern, higher-density, 3-story row houses.

Finally, if one compares the zoning map of Hillcrest to the existing buildings, under Mr. Towne’s policy, there would be precious few locations where one could add new structures of higher density or even of innovative, modern design. I call that a nearly no-growth measure, almost a no-change policy. And at the Development Committee meeting on February 28, Mr. Towne said that is precisely his goal.

I respect Mr. Towne’s views, though I strongly disagree. I favor “smart growth” in Hillcrest and other in-town neighborhoods. “Smart Growth” aims to reduce urban sprawl and invigorate the core of the city. This will provide new housing and business opportunities for the maximum number of people —- not just those who already own a home or business.

Don Skolnik

Dear Editor:

What unifies us in the LGBT community is our desire for a level playing field, in which our gender, sexual orientation, and gender identity are non-issues. Pride At Work, the LGBT constituency group of organized labor, insists that economic justice is also a LGBT issue.

Most of us in the LBGT community who are adults work, usually for someone else. As workers and as members of the larger community, particularly as people who have suffered disproportionately from AIDS and breast cancer, among other public health challenges, we need health care for all. We also need a fair wage for our work and the opportunity to advance through education, training, and our own hard work.

Contrary to stereotype, on average, lesbians and gays make less than heterosexuals. For lesbians, this is intensified by gender discrimination. Transgender workers face particularly intense economic discrimination. Even gay men, fewer of whom have child-rearing responsibilities, are at an economic disadvantage.

With the high number of LGBT in low-wage jobs in the retail and hospitality sector, the LGBT community has an interest in these workers winning better wages, health care, and working conditions for themselves. Workers organized in unions, particularly women, have the best chance to do this.

While the city may save a buck contracting out work previously done by a city worker to a private employer who pays less, our community and our economy as a whole suffer from the loss of that living wage job. When it’s harder for hotel workers, grocery, or other retail workers to organize into a union, their ability to get fair wages and health benefits suffers.

In a header, “Shame on you, Brian Polejes,” a columnist in the Gay and Lesbian Times this week took me to task for criticizing a candidate for Port Commission because of her past support for contracting out city worker jobs and for anti-union hotel developers. While the candidate denied it, two unions who represent workers hurt by her actions, AFSCME and UNITE-HERE, verified the truth of the allegations. It was completely appropriate for me to criticize these actions, which hurt low and moderate-wage workers, many of whom are LGBT, and I have no apology for doing so.

For the sake of our own LGBT community, as well as for San Diego as a whole, we must add economic justice to our equality agenda.

Brian Polejes

Vice President of Organizing & San Diego Chapter Chair

Pride At Work

Dear Editor:

Apparently the City of San Diego and the 2200 Club have reached an agreement to close the bathhouse on April 30. Remember that the city first tried to close the 2200 Club because it was within 1,000 feet of residential property even though there had been a gay bathhouse at that location for over 20 years. Well, they tried to close the G & B Emporium, an adult bookstore, for the same reason. It all started in 1997 when the city said the bookstore was nine hundred feet, as the crow flies, from the closest residential property. And you would have to be a crow to get there in nine hundred feet because the freeway was in between. In reality, a person would have to walk or drive a country mile to get there. Clearly this was not the intent of the 1,000-foot law and the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the bookstore last fall. Not only will the bookstore be allowed to remain open but the taxpayers will now be required to pay the half million plus dollars in legal expenses incurred by George Isbell and Bob Clark, owners of the G & B Emporium, in addition to the half million dollars in legal expenses incurred by the City of San Diego. City Attorney Mike Aguirre inherited this mess when he was elected to office but he had plenty of opportunities to resolve it and save us some money. He finally made a tentative settlement agreement with the G & B Emporium but the San Diego City Council rejected it and decided to go to trial. Now the trial is over and Aguirre and the members of the council have wasted another million dollars of our city’ money. What law abiding LGBT business will the city try to close next? Rumor is that it might be Pecs.

Patricia Thornton

Dear Editor:

I certainly never expected to agree with Nicole Murray on anything again in this lifetime, however, the forever Empress is right on about the current bathhouse crisis in San Diego.

All Nicole did was state the obvious when he wrote in the G&L Times three issues ago: “You all need to know many of the complaints made to the health department and police department were from our own community and from bathhouse patrons. This does not include so-called anti-gay ‘former’ homosexuals.”

What is it last issue’s letter writer Tyrone Jones is more concerned with and about in Nicole’s column – the so-called infringement on the patrons and owners of the sex clubs or the fact that if the city attorney is successful in closing down the baths that all the men frequenting the clubs will be trolling Balboa Park and the streets of Hillcrest and North Park much to the chagrin of our heterosexual neighbors?

Mr. Jones, none of San Diego’s bathhouses have been in business for 50 years, so it’s a bit unfair in the same letter to ask Nicole not to make untrue or undocumented comments. The truth is, before all the rampant misconduct Nicole used to hold a lot of community fundraisers and campy contests at the baths – many of which haven’t been in existence since the 1980s.

Lee A. Schoenbart