PUBLIC FORUM : TUTTLE: DAILY NEWS `REVERSED ITSELF' ON LAX.

On Oct. 14, the Daily News published an editorial titled ``Piling on at LAX'' that stated, in part: ``If the law and the facts are on the city's side, Los Angeles would be cheating its own taxpayers if it failed to press its case through appropriate legal channels. The city is entitled to have its day in court. It is totally wrong for (Secretary of Transportation Federico) Pena and (Sen. John) McCain to attempt to use their political muscle to pressure Mayor (Richard) Riordan, (City Controller Rick) Tuttle and other city officials to back off.''

There were other words of wisdom in that editorial about how linking other federal grants would be ``reprehensible,'' and how the ATA (Air Transport Association) should quit using Congress and political friends to fight its legal battles.

The Los Angeles City Council, to its credit, stood up to this pressure and this powerful special-interest lobby - the airline industry - and voted to follow the advice the Daily News offered in October.

So, imagine my surprise when I opened the Dec. 2 paper to find that your editorial board has now completely reversed itself. In an editorial called ``It's time to back off,'' you wrote, ``the council would be well-advised to fold 'em because the other side is playing with a stacked deck.''

Has it occurred to you that this is what the fight is really about? We are a nation of laws, and raw political power, and ``stacked decks'' are not supposed to rule the day.

As you said in October, ``we would be cheating (our) own taxpayers'' if we fail to press our case in court.

- Rick Tuttle 

City Controller

Los Angeles

GOP and the environment

I was pleased to see that Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., has gotten the message that the environment is a powerful political issue (``Republicans must regain trust on environmental issues,'' Opinions, Nov. 25).

McCain recognizes that Americans oppose the anti-environmental legislation vigorously pursued by the Republican Party in the past Congress.

Will the Republican Party rise to the occasion and, as McCain asks his party to do, ``leave posterity a land in better condition than they received it?''

Based on the senator's own voting record, Americans will have to wait and see. McCain voted for a number of damaging environmental laws, including a grazing bill that virtually gave our public lands to subsidized ranchers, a wilderness bill that would have ruined 4 million acres of wilderness in Utah, a logging bill that has brought unconscionable damage to our national forests, and legislation that would have undone decades of progress toward cleaner air and water.

So, while Republican leaders fret over our perceptions of their environmental efforts, we will continue to watch what they do in this new Congress. Action, as we all know, speaks louder than words.

- Bill Corcoran

Culver City 

It is refreshing to read that Sen. John McCain feels that the Republican Party is out of touch on the environment.

However, Sen. McCain was more than a bit disingenuous when he implied that his party was spooked by ``environmental extremists.'' The laws that the Republicans wanted to eliminate were worked out in a bipartisan manner originally, and there were environmentally sensitive members in his own party who had helped craft these compromises - members, incidentally, who had much better records than the senator from Arizona.

In the past Congress he voted against Sierra Club positions 10 times out of 11. He voted for our position only once again out of 13 times the year before that. The one vote was at the end of the past session for the Safe Water Drinking Act, which had been under attack the previous year.

- Emil Lawton

Chair, Political Committee

Angeles Chapter, Sierra Club

Los Angeles

A role for CSUN 

The Daily News was right on target with its editorial concerning the San Fernando Valley's increasing role in the entertainment industry (`Hooray for Valleywood,'' Nov. 29).

As pointed out by the Daily News, local schools must get on the entertainment bandwagon before it is too late. Right now, every studio in town is crying for skilled workers and is desperately looking for more space to construct new sound stages.

One partial and glaringly obvious solution to both problems is at the campus of Cal State Northridge. Not only does CSUN teach classes in media technology - the only school in the Valley to do so - but it also has plenty of room on its north campus to build sound stages, theaters, editing rooms and other production and postproduction facilities that can be used as classrooms and rented to studios.

The construction of such an entertainment complex could turn CSUN into the country's premier show biz production training ground and could bring much-needed income into the school's treasury.

In addition, students would be able to augment their classroom training by serving as interns at the facilities, learning hands-on how to create and edit TV shows, music videos, commercials, motion pictures and other entertainment products.

The Northridge Chamber of Commerce has suggested many times to CSUN that it scrap its plans to build a strip-mall shopping center on the north campus. The shopping center is not needed and not wanted by the community and will serve only as a long-term irritant to CSUN's neighbors.

In its place, the chamber continues to encourage CSUN to concentrate on lining up investors to build a first-class Media Technology Center that will allow expansion of the CSUN media department, bring rental income to the school and provide jobs for tomorrow's artists and production talent.

The university's mission is to educate its students. A media technology center will do just that. A shopping center will not.

- Walter N. Prince

Chairman

Planning and Land Use Committee

Northridge Chamber of Commerce

School lunch program

The U.S. public school breakfast/lunch program, has a longer history than most people realize. In 1912, just 15 years after the national PTA was founded, PTAs all over the United States started the hot lunch project in public schools. These ``penny kitchens'' expanded where they were needed to include even the adults in the community.

Ironically, the largest period of expansion for school lunch programs began in 1941 as a Defense Department Program. Many of the draftees for World War II were rejected because of nutritionally related health reasons. It became obvious that a nutritious lunch at school was necessary if the United States was to have enough healthy young men to fight our wars.

Now the debate over lunch programs has shifted to the family's moral obligation to provide for their children. It is true that a homemade breakfast can be very inexpensive.

Cost is not the reason these children are not being fed. It is because the parents - sometimes still children themselves - are not being responsible. However, we as a society have usually decided that we will not ``punish'' children for the ``sins'' of their parents.

All of us, in the long run, benefit from children who have at least their basic nutritional and health needs met. It is penny-wise and pound-foolish to deny these needs. These children are much better able to learn, to behave, to benefit from the billions of dollars spent on their education if we spend the extra two to three dollars per day to provide adequate nutrition.

- Diana Dixon-Davis

Chatsworth

`There is still kindness'

I am an international student who just arrived here three months ago. In this foreign land, I have to get ready to handle my whole life by myself and only a few people could help me.

On Nov. 3, I lost my wallet, which included my ID, credit cards, ATM cards, pictures and over $40 in cash, as well as some other items. While wondering and worrying about how to handle this problem, I received a phone call from the person who picked up my wallet and wanted to make sure the wallet he picked up was the one I lost. He said he would send it back to me as soon as possible.

I tried asking him for his name and telephone number and if there was any way I could repay his kindness. He said it would be no inconvenience to send me back my wallet and he preferred to remain anonymous.

I was very grateful when I received my wallet intact, as when I lost it, including the $40 in cash.

People often say that there is less kindness and human concern in this extremely industrialized world. By describing my wallet incident, I hope to show people there is still kindness and warmth in our society.

We still have warm-hearted people in this world, which at times seems cold and unkind. If you try, if we all try, our society could be like a beautiful flower, warm and fragrant.

- Kusang-Min Hsieh

Northridge

DNC excuses `hard to believe'

The Democratic National Committee can surely pull in illegal campaign contribution money faster than the public eye can see. It is hard to believe that the smart politicians of the DNC would claim that they didn't know that the campaign contribution money was illegal, and found it out only after the re-election of President Clinton. How convenient.

The Democratic Party will have a hard time convincing the public that the party didn't use the money for the re-election of the president.

Now, the party is saying that it has returned the money to the contributor. This scheme is just like borrowing millions of dollars from foreign nationals and returning it after it has been used. But of course, we all know that these foreign contributors will not shell out money without some strings attached to it for their own benefit.

Returning the illegal foreign contributions will not right the wrong that was already done, and no amount of explanations will cover up this bad-smelling scheme.

- Benjamin Resella

Valencia