Too Many People With Too Much Power Doesn’t Make for Progress

When I first saw “Power Hubs” (Special Millennium Issue/Leadership, Dec. 19) asking whether it would be nice if rich and poor weren’t gouging each other’s eyes out; our schools weren’t crowded and toxic hellholes packed tighter than Tokyo subways; our cities were livable; our canyons and beaches weren’t paved; our open space was protected, and driving to the airport and boarding a plane didn’t take more time than flying to Seattle, I thought The Times finally had realized that our huge population increase, caused by mass immigration, is the problem that has to be solved.

Imagine my surprise when I read that our new power brokers plan to accomplish the above through a better distribution of wealth, an expansion of immigrants’ rights, making the schools full-service centers around the clock, expanding the airport and protecting open space without addressing population growth!

Is The Times ever going to emerge from denial and face the fact that most of California’s problems are caused or greatly exacerbated by the exploding population? It has nothing to do with ethnicity and everything to do with sheer numbers.

Ann Alper

Pacific Palisades

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I was appalled to see that your staff had selected Steve Bennett as one of four important people who are helping to making the future work.

I don’t know anything about Bennett personally. My problem is that you are giving kudos to someone who contributed to a nightmare of land-use controls. Planning commissions and supervisors, appointed and elected, make land-use decisions based on recommendations of their professional planning staffs. What Bennett and his supporters have done is create a situation where the uninformed, unprofessional public will make those decisions.

Do you really believe this is progress? Hardly.

William Bird

Glendora