Let BART board clean up

Regarding “BART’s directors get dose of reality” (July 14): The story on the BART directors visit to the Powell Street Station cites a BART employee saying that to keep the elevators clean, they’d need to post a janitor at the elevators full time. There are nine members of the BART Board of Directors. Let them each work eight-hour shifts as janitors at the Powell Street Station every day for a couple of weeks, months or as long as it takes. I am confident that the Board of Directors will make Powell Street Station great again! They promised!

Tom Peck, San Francisco

Tourist housing is to blame

Recently, a friend seeking affordable housing found it a nearly impossible task. However, there was an abundance of Airbnb rentals and other shared-economy units advertised throughout the Bay Area that were probably affordable rentals at one time.

Do we really need another 180,000 new housing units per year when there is already so much traffic and congestion that it takes over an hour to go a few miles? So much new housing will not improve our quality of life. Many housing units are available, they are just being used for tourists, which is a crime when so many longtime residents need places to live.

Sherry Goodwin, Brisbane

Keep social reform programs

Concerning “On health, history is watching” (E.J. Dionne Jr., July 17): Social reform programs like Medicaid and Social Security have made our country a more humanitarian place. Conservatives have always advocated for a freemarket economy and reducing the role of government in our daily lives.

However, as one of the world’s wealthiest countries, the U.S. should not ignore the needs of its most vulnerable citizens: the poor, the sick and the elderly. There is no shame in offering such people a helping hand, but rather in turning our backs on them. If Republicans repeal the Affordable Care Act and cause millions of Americans to lose their health coverage, they will be guilty of a great moral malfeasance.

Cecilia Ventigmilia, San Francisco

Excellent column on media

Regarding “Attempts to discredit media threaten flow of information” ( July 16, Insight): Thank you to Audrey Cooper for her excellent column on the media, especially her opening salvo: Politicians’ “fears of a citizenry informed by tenacious media have time and again prompted them to make government activities more opaque or conceal essential information.”

Having just read a colossally disturbing report on how the government goes out of its way to spoon-feed the public by releasing only the information it feels won’t upset voters (such as on conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia and the Mayaguez incident, Grenada, Latin America, Iraq, and so on), she nails it when she also says, “No government official should think it is his or her responsibility to decide what information the public is equipped to handle.” “The truth comes out in the end.” It sure as hell does!

Ken Malucelli, Daly City