Mailbag: Screen elected officials for mental illness

We need a mental health bill for elected officials now! Mental health is not only an issue in our schools, but can also play a significant part in the shaping and maintenance of our community and culture. The people we put in office, even at the lowest levels, must have a clean bill of health from a mental health expert. It is without question that we have politicians running all areas of our city, state and country with low-level to severe mental-health issues.

We are at the mercy of privacy acts that allow this be sealed, and this needs to change now!

This is not “casting the first stone.” This is a warning to be careful who is running and steering the ship that this country is sailing on . Our own local governments here in Orange County are filled with these types (yellers, name callers, narcissists, power-grabbers, dual personalities). All signs of mental illness!

The outbursts we read about, the infidelity, the damaged character decisions by some of these people are all signs of true illness. If the people of Connecticut would have been able to identify the man who committed those atrocities and been aware of his apparent illness, who is to say the lives that may have been saved? We have that ability with our future and present elected officials if we act now and come up with a law requiring all elected to under go a thorough mental health evaluation.

Imagine the leaders in both parties being mentally stable. Imagine what they would be able to accomplish and agree on. The yelling, the name calling, the reputation-thrashing would all go out the window. These behaviors come from mental illness. We, the public, have just passively sat back and watched it in commercials and on TV and print for years!

Let’s all get together and require mental-health testing for all applicants and current electees for public office across the country . Maybe this will help save the country and help solve some of the recent issues we have all been going through with taxes, school funding, firearms, etc.

Mike Palitz

Newport Beach

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Parade noise

Now isn’t this special. News choppers thumping away drowning out the audible part of the parade with their incessant hovering. What total disrespect.

Dennis Baker

Corona del Mar

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19th St. bridge

Thank you for publishing your recent article, “OCTA kills proposed Bridge,” (Nov. 28) acknowledging the role of former Huntington Beach Mayor Don Hansen in the successful removal of the proposed 19th Street bridge from the Orange County Master Plan of Arterial Highways. With their vote, the Orange County Transportation Authority Board of Directors has ended this issue.

Now that all stakeholders from Huntington Beach, Costa Mesa and Newport Beach have had an opportunity to be heard, as an incoming OCTA director and Huntington Beach city councilman, I will uphold this decision to stop the previously proposed 19th Street bridge from getting built.

Matthew Harper, mayor pro tem

Huntington Beach