LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

Hazy ordinance
Editor: The Sebastopol City Council has made it perfectly clear.
With a unanimous vote they have legalized citizen rights to smoke
an illegal product (marijuana) while making it against the law to
smoke a legal product (tobacco). Makes sense to me … in the haze of
a second-hand episode of the Twilight Zone.
Greg Dabel
Graton
Incoming missiles
Editor: Sebastopol has made the city a nuclear free zone. That’s
good. The city is at the cutting edge on regs governing; solar,
polluting fireplaces, bike paths, smoking, drinking in the park,
etc. That’s good. The city is very strict on enforcing building
codes. That’s good. The Design Review Board does excellent work.
That’s good. On the other hand, for some reason (probably
staffing), the city can’t enforce the mandatory helmet regs at the
Skateboard Park, nor can it enforce the no skateboard-no bicycle
riding on city sidewalks. So now, what baffles me is that this very
progressive city pleads impotence when it comes to removing ugly,
broken, and unused newspaper racks. Santa Rosa could do it without
a Supreme Court decision, why can’t Sebastopol? As reported in the
(July 22 issue of Sonoma West Times & News, “Guerilla signs on
several downtown newsstands raise the question: Eyesore or free
speech?”) the City Attorney says the city can’t even remove a
mattress from a city sidewalk without going through an official
process to determine the mattress is “legally” abandoned. Impotence
is too kind of a word. I can only imagine the bucreaucratic
nightmare an incoming nuclear missile would cause while determining
if it is “legal” or not. Power to the ugly newstands.
Neil E. Davis
Sebastopol