Education of the Modern Doctor: Marcus Welby vs. House 
Corrections
In her June 30 story about Carl DeMaio’s illfated ballot initiative, Kelly Davis quoted Ethics Commission executive director Stacey Fulhorst as specifically commenting on the DeMaio campaign when, in fact, Fulhorst made it clear that she was commenting more generally. As a matter of policy, Fulhorst doesn’t comment on specific cases.
Also, in last week’s story about a proposed Downtown homeless-services facility, Davis wrote that Housing Connections, the group selected to develop the facility, had determined, through a street survey, that the project provided enough beds to house everyone within a one-mile radius of the site. The street survey actually only covered a quarter-mile radius. We regret the errors.
The library boondoggle
While “The big gamble” was an excellent title for your June 30 San Diego Central Library editorial, it could have also been titled “Wall Street by the Sea.” How dare the mayor and six City Council members gamble taxpayer money! Who do they think they are?
In my opinion, they are no different than the Wall Street bankers and mortgage brokers who triggered the recession.
The upside of this gamble is to end up with a monument that will be used by 1 percent of the city’s population and will help developers sell their properties in the Downtown area. The downside is that the city will have to close more fire stations, lay off police officers and further reduce local library hours.
In any case, it will cost the city $3 million per year of taxpayer money to operate this library. I see only possible downside for 99 percent of the people who live in San Diego.
Wouldn’t it be a better idea to “outsource” this library in the same way the mayor wants to outsource other City services?
Couldn’t the city give the land to a company such as Borders or Barnes & Noble to develop a combination library and bookstore? The property could then be taxed, and the library could be run without any cost to taxpayers. The only difference would be that Mayor Sanders and the council members would not have their names posted on the front of the library.
It’s not too late. I suggest that the people of San Diego contact their council members and protest the construction of this library at the groundbreaking ceremony on July 28 at 10 a.m.
Ronald Harris, Scripps Ranch
‘Tabloid journalism’
As a reader and fan of CityBeat since its introduction, I was disappointed in the paper’s decision to label its piece on Carl DeMaio’s failed managed competition initiative [“The Front Lines,” June 30] as “news” rather than “opinion” or as “tabloid journalism.” As a matter of disclosure, I am all of the following things: An unabashed liberal Democrat, a gay man, a friend of both Mr. DeMaio and Mr. Hale and a strong opponent of Mr. DeMaio’s proposed initiative.
Surely there were legitimate points that the writer of this article could have used to hail the failure of this particular version of the managed-competition initiative, but instead they went with thinly veiled homophobia. Mr. Hale’s company manages and designs websites for several local businesses, but that fact doesn’t seem to be relevant to his involvement in Mr. DeMaio’s initiative campaign. By citing two of the most provocatively named URLs that he administers in this article, the writer seems to be imposing their own apparent discomfort with sexuality on the reader.
After reading this article three times, I still don’t know of what Mr. Hale is being accused. The research on this article seems to have been rushed and inconclusive, at best. The writer, in trying to make their case, vaguely cites three campaign consultants of indeterminate political orientation—none of whom can say that any laws have been violated or that anything inappropriate has happened. In a much less prominent paragraph, the director of the city’s Ethics Commission is said to have found nothing wrong or uncommon about the practices that Mr. Hale employed as a campaign consultant. Perhaps Mr. Hale and Mr. DeMaio could have avoided the appearance of a conflict of interest by not working together, but if CityBeat was not able to determine that anything illegal or inappropriate happened or is likely to have happened, why did they decide to publish this article nonetheless?
I hold journalistic integrity in high regard, and SDGLN.com hasn’t yet disappointed me to that end. Their articles are well-sourced and manage to draw reasonable conclusions which are supported by the available research. I would have expected a comparable level of integrity from City- Beat, the publication whose editorial convinced a lifelong Democrat such as myself to reject my party’s conventional wisdom and support the strong-mayor initiative on the June ballot. I hope that this article isn’t indicative of a change in policy for this publication, which I consider to be superior to the mainstream daily and weekly papers of our fair city.
Daniel Horan, Normal Heights
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