Mandeville Canyon

* Re the City Council’s curious gift of $5 million, May 6: I walk and bicycle the fire trails above Mandeville Canyon on a daily basis. Except for weekends, I often fail to encounter a single other hiker or biker, even on the most spectacularly beautiful day. We don’t need more hillside brushland set aside for usage by the already park-rich and bike-trail-threaded Westside.

If the owner of those acres can make a case that his parcel is worth $13 million, he’d do better donating it and writing off that amount (at a presumably high tax rate) than taking our taxpayers’ paltry $5 million, money we could and should be using for inner-city parks, schoolbooks, pothole repair and myriad other things.

JIM HOUGHTON

Encino