Kate Sessions has drawn the partying crowd from the alcohol-free beaches. Drinking alcohol is still permitted at the grassy, hill-top park. Here’s what the locals have to say about the new scene: Alcohol ban fooled you It’s a shame that the fools who voted for the alcohol ban at the beach weren’t bright enough to know that they would just drive the drinkers and partiers inland. PB was like a huge house party. I have watched PB change for forty years from residential to a party place. If you want to live in PB, you should enjoy what you can and quit complaining about the rest. Accept the fact you live in a beach area or move to a quieter neighborhood. Sandra Conklin, Pacific Beach NIMBYISM doesn’t work Perhaps Mr. Winkle is trying to be humorous with his letter about Kate Sessions Park being “discovered” as a new drinking destination now that we have alcohol-free beaches. [Mr Winkle’s letter ran in the July 23 issue of the Beach & Bay Press]. I am sincerely hoping that he is not attempting to sound snobbish when he says he was “intelligent enough to buy a home away from the beach.” Either way, I cannot pass up responding about my fifty-year experience of being either stupid or smart when my family loved the beach community enough to buy property in Crown Point. I have lived with the issues we have with the young students and professionals for years. The desire to push a problem somewhere else is not a responsible solution, but unfortunately it has been the result. I would hope that the intelligent thing to understand is that the entire area suffers from these problems, not just “my area.” When La Jolla, Coronado, Imperial Beach and many other coastal areas declared beaches alcohol-free, was it not sensible to think our few remaining areas would be affected? Hopefully Mr. Winkle was not thinking that it was okay for the beach area to endure the problems as long as his area was immune. When Fort Lauderdale finally got tired of the regular spring break crowd and removed alcohol from their beaches, it took a couple of years, but the changed tourist economy actually improved. Rather than allowing college-aged students and young professionals to take over their town, businesses discovered that families spend more money as tourists and get involved in their communities as residents. This town, our beach town, used to be a community with people who really want to live and stay here. It is naïve to think that Pacific Beach can ever be what it was when I grew up here, but we do need more sense of community. Rather than complain about the growing problems in your neighborhood, please get involved. Rather than demonstrating an attitude of “my part of town,” how about realizing that the entire town is “your town?” Diane Faulds, Crown Point/Sail Bay, Pacific Beach Town Council and Discover Pacific Beach boardmember What about the gorilla? The endless beach-booze-ban saga continually misses the point. The not in my backyard mentality that gives rise to such articles – yesterday it was the beaches, today Kate Sessions Park – always addresses the problems caused by the Gorilla, yet never the Gorilla himself. Irrespective of the location, irresponsible drunks are always the cause of the problem. Sure, most are young, if not under-age, but age is not an excuse to behave irresponsibly. For every young drunk at Kate Sessions Park on July 4, there were probably 999 young people managing to enjoy themselves somewhere else, responsibly. The answer is not in finding a place for these clowns to congregate. The answer is to hold them accountable. Sometimes when character is lacking, external motivation will do the job. Perhaps something similar to Phoenix, AZ Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s Tent City would offer a good disincentive. Sheriff Joe runs work crews in the hot Arizona sun and offenders live in conditions not unlike our soldiers in Iraq. Drunk in public is a misdemeanor punishable by up to six months in jail. We could certainly use work crews tasked with removing trash, plastics and cigarette butts from our beaches, waterways, roads and parks. Thus, the offenders have an opportunity to learn a valuable lesson, and some pristine locales are once again enjoyable for the other 99 percent of the community. (You know, the ones who pay to maintain our beaches and parks.) Ed Lynaugh, Pacific Beach Debauchery at Kate Sessions will worsen Allow me the opportunity to describe for you my family outing to Kate Sessions Park on August 9. Our plan was for my wife, two year-old daughter and I to walk over to the park and enjoy the children’s play area, as well as to attend the “Concerts on the Green” show. Upon entering the park we were immediately “greeted” by a large group of – what appeared to be – gang bangers listening to a live DJ (seriously! spinning records through very loud speakers) and drinking from a keg. This, of course, was coupled with the obligatory foul language, smoking and public intoxication. Deciding to forego the children’s play area, we headed over to the sloping grass hill where the “Concerts on the Green” was being held. The first image we were greeted with was that of two gentlemen using a beer bong next to a keg. What is going on here? Kate Sessions Park is quickly becoming the annexed property of SDSU frat row. This behavior is making the park completely unusable for my family and the many other families that use the public facilities. The police do nothing to rid this public place of such debauchery. I thought drinking in public was illegal. I thought public intoxication was illegal. I thought littering was illegal. I thought public indecency was illegal. Apparently not in Pacific Beach in 2009. The only way this behavior will cease is if you, good neighbor, become proactive in ridding our neighborhood of this interloping filth. Write to your local paper, call the police department, and attend city council meetings. If Kate Sessions continues on its current path, property values will plummet, to be sure. Your house will have to be worth less if, right across the street, you have a den of iniquity. C. Douglas Johnson