New Power Plant and Taxpayer Bailouts

* Re “Proposed South Gate Power Plant Faces Fierce Opposition,” Jan. 10: What not a surprise! Sunlaw Energy Corp. is proposing to put a massive, polluting power plant in the working-class, mostly Latino neighborhood of South Gate.

If the plant will really make the air cleaner, as Sunlaw founder Robert Danziger claims, then why doesn’t he have it built in his own neighborhood?

RAUL VASQUEZ

Los Angeles

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* Angelenos have been feeling lucky that the “energy crisis” doesn’t affect them, but look out! Gov. Gray Davis has said that we can’t let Edison and PG&E; go bankrupt. That means either those companies’ ratepayers bail them out or the taxpayers do with state bonds. I think people are beginning to rebel against having their tax money used to subsidize investments or other actions by big corporations and then having to bail them out when they fail. Remember the $500 billion that taxpayers were soaked for in the savings and loan deregulation disaster, while most of the perpetrators laughed all the way to the bank?

If we have to be saddled with a bond to rescue Edison and PG&E;, it’s about time we demand a payback of our own--public ownership.

KJERSTEN JEPPESEN

North Hollywood

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* I opened my electric bill for my home and found it was $60 for December and surely going up. But then I opened the natural gas bill and was shocked to see a bill of $253 for the same month, after trying to conserve by freezing all the time. Has somebody forgotten the gas charges are already high and going higher too?

FRANK GLASER

Rancho Palos Verdes

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* My wife and I like to work as volunteers at mission hospitals in developing nations. We have just returned from a stint at Patan Hospital near Katmandu. So we are accustomed to power outages, scheduled and unscheduled. Everyone knows the explanation for this in countries like Nepal or Kenya or Madagascar: the general inefficiency, bordering on chaos, which results from the widespread corruption permeating those societies. But how are we to understand the same occurrence here in the land of the enlightened, participating citizenry? What? Oh, no . . . that couldn’t be possible.

NORM CADMAN

Claremont