Mailbag

This part of DeBell building doesn’t wash

In your Saturday editorial (“Clubhouse is a nice addition to community”), in which you reported some of the drawbacks of the new DeBell clubhouse, there was one very significant omission. Unlike Burbank’s brand-new community services building, which is not an athletic facility but has showers, Burbank’s brand-new golf clubhouse, an athletic facility, does not have showers. Burbank may now have the only $10-million athletic facility constructed in the United States in the last 25 years that does not have showers.

GENE WALSH

Burbank

What happened to saving on education?

The Jan. 7 Burbank Leader story, “District searches for superintendent,” is really rather mind-boggling when you think about it. Here we are with the highest unemployment rate since World War II, hundreds of thousands of educated, qualified people out of work, and our school district is actually paying $29,000 to a headhunter to find a new superintendent of schools. Wow, do these guys even live on the same planet as we do?

And what’s their feeble excuse for not doing the job themselves as they’ve traditionally done?

“District officials could not divert themselves from their responsibilities to oversee the application process.”

Oh, the poor dears, but, hey, isn’t this one of their “responsibilities” in the first place?

For crying out loud, in these times of radical financial cutbacks where every single teacher and district employee is being asked to make do with less, what do our overpaid officials do to set an example?

They hire an outside agency to do their work for them! Cool, but why stop at just hiring a new superintendent? Let’s hire a whole new staff. They couldn’t be any worse than what we already have.

RICHARD J. TAFILAW

Burbank