Letters: Walnut Creek Council | Failing grade | Governors’ failure | Late denunciation | Constitutional republic

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Walnut Creek should
reelect Kevin Wilk

Kevin Wilk has been a tireless leader on the Walnut Creek City Council. We should reelect him.

He’s constantly attending local events and engaging with residents. He listens to us — we have told him we want Walnut Creek to be a safe place to live, work, shop and play, so he has made public safety a top priority.

While he was mayor, the City Council enacted safe gun storage laws that help protect our children. He voted to ban the sale of flavored vapes to protect our students. He championed a buffer zone at Planned Parenthood to protect patients and staff. Members of the LGBTQ community can feel safer when they see the Pride flag raised every June thanks to his support.

Most recently he campaigned for Measure O to provide many needed upgrades to Walnut Creek facilities and increased staffing on the Walnut Creek police force.

Vote to reelect Kevin.

Sue Hamill
Walnut Creek

Thurmond doesn’t pass
muster for governor

Re: “The school ratings  ‘dashboard’ receives a D for dysfunctional” (Page A6, Sept. 18).

As the current state superintendent of public instruction, Tony Thurmond seeks your support in his bid to be governor of California.

The findings noted in this article covered his tenure directing public education. Elevating obscurity to mask ongoing failures does not bode well for a gubernatorial candidate. Public education continued with a lack of accountability; Thurmond’s failure to promote significant movement toward accountability while leading public education should not be rewarded.

With a ‘D’ grade in education, Thurmond’s calling lies elsewhere; that calling is not California’s next governor.

R Cote
Castro Valley

Governors are saddled
with CPUC’s failures

Re: “State isn’t helping PG&E customers” (Page A6, Sept. 19).

In response to the letter about how the “state isn’t helping PG&E customers” deal with the utility’s greed, the writer should know that it’s up to our governor to appoint California Public Utility Commission members who will act in the interests of California citizens and ratepayers.

Instead, what we’ve gotten for many years are appointees with ties to the investor-owned utilities who give them whatever they ask for rather than properly regulate them as they are expected to do. This corruption has been going on for a long time and will likely continue as long as the utilities can pay big donations to campaigns and offer high-paying jobs as rewards to their government benefactors.

Beth Weinberger
Oakland

GOP leaders are late
with Trump denunciation

Re: “111 former GOP officials are backing Harris, call Trump ‘unfit to serve’” (Page A3, Sept. 19).

I find it very irritating that one month before the national election, 111 former GOP officials decided to go public and endorse Kamala Harris because they believe Donald Trump is unfit to serve.

I am not saying they are wrong, but their timing is unacceptable. Where were they during the primaries when they could have impacted the selection of the GOP presidential candidate? If they had spoken up then, they may have engineered the selection of a worthwhile Republican candidate.

The Democrats have stood up twice in the last two elections to sway the primaries. First when they were afraid that Bernie Sanders was sure to win the nomination and, in one Super Tuesday, selected Biden. This time around they ousted Joe Biden, who was seen as medically unfit and sure to lose to Trump.

Now the Republican Party is a disaster and may never recover and we will move closer to socialism.

Bob Thompson
San Ramon

Pray our nation stays
a constitutional republic

Re: “Letter gets its civics lesson backward” (Page A6, Sept. 19).

My goodness, America is a constitutional republic, not a “democracy,” for good reason. I present to you in microcosm an example of how a so-called democracy works;

California is “blue” and may always be so. However “red” voters in some of California’s rural districts have no sway. California is a democracy and, as a state, it should be, albeit it is now a “one-party” state.

But if you extrapolate that nationally, America absolutely becomes a one-party country. This may meld with the desire of some to govern our great country from the left. However, the founders brilliantly anticipated that problem, allowing for the the individual voters to select their national legislators individually while giving the underrepresented citizens some say in national government.

We need to continue this method of government. The alternative ain’t pretty.

Robin Hall
Walnut Creek