Editor:

As is generally true of conservatives who have one finger in the pot of fiscal probity, Quentin Kopp gets some things right and others wrong. For example, Kopp fails to mention the 2013 ballot initiative, spearheaded by intrepid DSA activist Tony Kelly, which would have opened trash collection to competitive bidding.

Why did the initiative fail? Because every member of the City Hall “family” – from our faux “progressives” to our “conservatives,” as well as our sell-out labor “unions,” lined up behind Recology to defeat it! There was to be no garbage at all by 2020, an always unlikely projection  –  one similar to international nonprofit chain Vision Zero’s nonsense about ending every single pedestrian casualty by 2024.

Instead, we pay for smaller garbage bins (at a steeply higher price) while trash (Amazon deliveries, plastic take out containers from restaurants, etc.) has skyrocketed during this health crisis. 

Kopp completely misrepresents the situation regarding conservative columnist Marina Times (now former) co-owner Susan Dyer-Reynolds. Supervisors Dean Preston and Hilary Ronen did not want taxpayer dollars going towards subsidizing a publication that savaged them with nasty lies and vile rhetoric. When they presented Dyer-Reynolds with the facts, they maintain that no correction was printed (as any responsible and responsive publication would). While shining a light on her completely biased columns was a counterproductive tactic – giving Dyer-Reynolds undeserved credibility, along with the victimhood that the right so loves to embrace – the move was not because she wrote about “corruption” (which, in her case, had been limited to calls for Nuru’s removal) but because she penned incredibly biased slander against Preston and Ronen, screeds which evoked the era of yellow journalism of yore.

It is notable that neoliberal conservatives such as David Lee, who, as a RPD Commission member was a key player in privatizing our parks, are only now pushing to revoke the 1932 “monopoly law” and to push back rates <i> only </i> to 2017 levels, when Kelly’s ballot initiative (which Kopp served as a co-spokesperson for) was savaged by the members of Kopp’s Chamber of Commerce-led tribe.

When “conservatives” drop the “free market” charade and acknowledge that corporate monopolies should not receive corporate welfare at the expense of the rest of us, then mountains will be moved. The question remains: Will they?

Harry S. Pariser