Janet Turner
Field Deputy for U.S. Representative Ted Lieu
California’s 33rd Congressional District
Los Angeles Office
It’s been brought to my attention by several people who attended the Nov. 7 Brentwood Community Council meeting where you spoke and announced Nov. 10 was the last day to register either support for or opposition to the City of Los Angeles’s free public dog park, free public recreation center and free public parking lot on Veterans VA land.
And why shouldn’t it be free to the public because the City of LA has never paid any rent whatsoever over more than two decades while war-injured and destitute Veterans are forced to live homeless and hungry at skid row and in back-alley squalor?
Los Angeles remains our nation’s capital for homeless Veterans in spite of the VA / ACLU promising to end it by Dec. 31, 2015. Veteran homelessness in Los Angeles increased 57 percent over 2016 and your boss remains “silent” about that.
This whole land-fraud scam is manipulated by your office through the neighboring communities of which the vast majority are not Veterans. You offered no way for attendees to contact your office – only those “in the know” – know who to contact and everyone knows this is already a “done deal” dog park.
How do homeless Veterans get a chance to voice their opposition to the dog park, etc.? If it wasn’t for the Old Veterans Guard, they would have no voice whatsoever.
This letter is to go on official record – again and again – that the Old Veterans Guard, on behalf of thousands upon thousands of war-injured homeless Veterans in Los Angeles, is adamantly opposed to the illegal and immoral misuse of this land that was deeded exclusively to house and care for war-injured and impoverished U.S. Military Veterans.
It is our understanding that these 12 acres, estimated to be worth as much as a half-billion dollars, will continue to be illegally used by the City of LA – “rent free” – in exchange for an insulting $100,000 “Veterans Memorial” that consists of nothing more than two large rock piles, five cheap plaques supposedly representing the five Branches of our Armed Forces and a nondescript flagpole, presumably to display a “placard” because that is what the Los Angeles VA bureaucrats call the American Flag and your boss refuses to defend otherwise.
Please note that “memorials” are for the dead. We already have the National Veterans Cemetery and construction has begun on a Columbarium.
There’s an old saying, “We honor our dead Veterans by taking care of our living Veterans.”
Stop the public dog park and all other misuse of Veterans VA land and immediately establish a humanitarian emergency-crisis “Sanctuary Tent City” to protect our war-injured homeless Veterans the same way your boss protects illegal aliens and foreign refugees.
Sincerely,
Robert L. Rosebrock
Director, Old Veterans Guard.
