Letters to the editor: Residents kept in the dark; supervisors right to delay bill
Edison leaving customers in dark
Year after year, event after event, Southern California Edison’s response to thoroughly predictable wind occurrences is to leave its customers in the dark.
Never do we hear of any efforts Edison is making to update the quality of its equipment. Never do hear about plans to put its wires underground. Instead, Edison frames the conversation around keeping us safe, when the reality is they are simply limiting the potential of their own liability by shutting off the power rather than fixing their self-created problems.
To add insult to injury, while the power is off where I live, a scant two blocks away the power remains on at the exact same time in the exact same conditions, rendering the power shut-off both arbitrary and capricious.
Bill Waxman, Simi Valley
SB43 wisely delayed by board
The Board of Supervisors should be commended for its unanimous vote earlier last week to delay the implementation of SB43 until 2026 for our county.
It would have created an unprecedented expansion in the principal rules for psychiatric civil commitment starting in January.
The new law includes severe substance use disorders as a governing criterion and “personal safety” and “necessary medical care” as added definitions of “Grave Disability.”
While SB43 is an extremely well-intentioned attempt to reform LPS law, in order to help individuals who do not meet the present high bar, unfortunately, the Legislature and the governor put the cart well in front of the horse by not providing for the necessary infrastructure (primarily acute, sub-acute and long-term psychiatric beds to meet the drastically increased demand) and numerous resources (staffing, training, reimbursements, regulations, etc.)
Further, as civil rights groups have pointed out, the definitions provided by the legislature are poorly defined, and subject to arbitrary interpretation.
The net effect of not postponing, would in the words of a local law enforcement official, “turn our emergency departments into psychiatric wards” starting Jan. 1. For this reason, our board along with about 45 California counties are wisely choosing to delay implementation.
Due to our reliance on acute psychiatric beds in Los Angeles County, we are forced to closely follow its decision-making, because if its Board of Supervisors does not delay implementation, our emergency departments may yet be somewhat impacted.
However, in light of the state’s budgetary issues, one wonders if the infrastructure and the resources necessary to implement this dramatic change will ever come to fruition?
Given this, SB43 seems much more likely to join the fate of “chronic alcoholism” as a governing criterion, which had been in place since the law’s design in 1967, never implemented for the lack of infrastructure and resources, and recently removed.
Joseph C. Vlaskovits, M.D., Newbury Park
This article originally appeared on Ventura County Star: Letters: Residents kept in the dark; supervisors right to delay bill
