Dear Editor:
The last several months have been an educational experience.
What began as a fight against sprawl and congestion turned into
a crash course in local political agendas.
Dear Editor:
The last several months have been an educational experience.
What began as a fight against sprawl and congestion turned into a crash course in local political agendas. In all the articles recently published in your newspaper one fact keeps being left out. The GUSD has chosen to place the new high school in a location where it can only be served by a single access road from one direction and will be competing with the traffic generated by the Catholic grade school that will be their immediate neighbor. The logistical implausibility of this decision is confounding.
Ultimately, time will be the judge of such a decision. When parents, students and commuters find themselves stuck in the gridlock trying to funnel down the only road that serves the new schools, will they be applauding the foresight and resourcefulness of the board that made that decision? When taxpayers discover that the board did not include the costs of widening Santa Teresa as part of their budget and we are all forced to “subsidize” this oversight, will we be happy with how our elected officials managed public funds?
My experience has been that anytime one takes a position on an issue there will always be those that take the opposite position and are entitled to do so. Healthy debate is a good thing. But reducing arguments to sophomoric name-calling only demonstrates an inability to deal with the issues head-on. While inflammatory remarks may help sell newspapers, they do not represent good journalism.
Mr. Taylor, I am frankly confused by your article. On the one hand, you lament the destruction of our beautiful hills along the Santa Cruz Mountains in west Gilroy. On the other, you accuse a group of local citizenry trying to preserve the rural integrity along those same hills of being the mindless puppets of your political enemy.
We hate the sprawl and the destruction of what makes Gilroy a beautiful place to live. It seems every buildable inch of this town is being covered by concrete and stucco. What will be left when the developers have had their way with this place we ALL call home. In fact, our city limits and gerrymandered urban service areas have been laid out based on developers‚ land holdings. So much for urban planning.
Neighbors for Responsible Development is a highly organized and motivated group with resources. We have met with nearly all elected officials in both the City Council and the School Board and will continue to do so. We communicate with various county organizations and regional environmental groups. More than 150 people from northwest Gilroy alone signed our petitions.
We completed a successful mailing that WE designed to over 4,000 residents funded entirely by our membership, not one of them an elected official. We attend public meetings en masse and aren’t afraid to voice our concerns. And you can bet we’ll be paying close attention to various upcoming elections. We invite anyone to join us!
Cammie Brown, Gilroy, Neighbors for Responsible Development
Submitted Friday, June 27 to ed****@****ic.com
