The Beach Reporter Letter February 6, 2013
Those residents and others are again having to give of their own valuable time and expenditures to challenge the insanity of drilling oil wells next to million-dollar homes in tiny Hermosa Beach. Now they’ve received this latest insulting, ignorant, and self-serving Kool-Aid response from Layton.
Why wasn’t Layton personally in attendance at the council/school board meeting when an E&B item was on the agenda? Is The Beach Reporter instead to be printing Layton propaganda responses every time Hermosa residents speak out in a public forum regarding E&B’s less than honorable deal, as made and signed secretly with Hermosa’s City Council?
E&B, with the outrageous secret help of Hermosa Councilman Michael DiVirgilio and Mayor Kit Bobko, and probably a few others behind the woodwork, has slickly weaseled its way into Hermosa Beach, a 21st-century city with stated goals fostering health, being green and carbon-neutral. And now E&B is to be drilling toxic oil wells?
E&B’s pitchman, Layton, has now moved himself into Hermosa Beach to better manipulate its 1.3 square miles of beach, ocean, residents, businesses and home-owners to E&B’s needs. E&B evidently views Hermosa’s electorate as being stupid and easily conned into returning to the 19th-century’s oil-drilling greed and ugliness.
If Layton actually believes Hermosa residents will be fooled into turning backward from a forklift pallet-full of smoke-and-mirrors documents, glossy PR and tempting elixirs to be dumped at their doorsteps and filling their mailboxes, than perhaps he needs to wake up and smell the coffee. Layton’s stuck in a dream and seems to have no clue that what he heard at the Jan. 23 meeting from those residents was merely the tip of the iceberg that E&B has so recklessly navigated into.
Howard Longacre
Beach Reporter Letter
Shame On You Hermosa Beach City Council. 13 Minutes of Shame