Saratoga News

Letters & Opinions

Speak Out

Council should move
slowly at North Campus

I wholeheartedly support council members Chuck Page and Jill Hunter in their efforts to "take it slow" insofar as the North Campus is concerned. There are too many unanswered questions regarding the gym proposal.

What is the real cost of this project, and how can the taxpayers be assured that the investors have the funds necessary to complete it? The cost seems to be a moving target. First it was $850,000, now it is $1.2 million. Anyone who has built or remodeled a home recently in Saratoga should be looking critically at those numbers. What happens if there are cost overruns and they can't finish the project? Would the city be forced to complete a partially constructed gym? What would be the impact on our general fund if such a scenario were to take place?

To purchase the property, the city council emptied the Hillside Reserve Fund (originally established to pay for damage caused by earthquake/mudslides on city-owned roads in the hills) with the intention of refunding it at a later date. What has happened to this fund? I would hate to think that the council would be forced to bail out a gym and never get around to public safety priorities, or return again to the voters with a request for a utility tax to pay for the debacle.

We have ample evidence of taxpayers being stuck with the bill. We've all heard about how the taxpayers of Oakland got stuck with the bill for the Raiders. Closer to home, in the late 1990s the city council had to bail out the Hakone Foundation (it was termed "forgiving the debt" and it was only for $200,000) when it couldn't meet its obligations incurred in the construction of the cultural center building.

Finally, it is interesting to observe that the folks who screamed the loudest about the "secrecy" surrounding the previous council's efforts to sell the North Campus have been silent when it comes to the current effort under way to fast-track the gym proposal on a quiet summer evening.

Stan Bogosian

Lomita Avenue

Antennas fine, but
no large structures

On June 27, the planning commission considered an application to install cellular antennas atop a building in the Village. The central question was whether the small antennas should simply be painted foliage color to match the background against which they would be most commonly observed, or attention should be diverted by attaching them to a larger faux structure.

One commissioner apologized for the commission's now-obvious mistake in having approved a faux penthouse for the same purpose in 2005, but the commission ignored that. They ignored two commissioners who said they had never noticed the dozens of foliage-colored cellular antennas that have been atop Village buildings for more than 10 years. They ignored the interests of the applicant and the many people who daily view the Village skyline from the windows of the office building across the street.

Rejecting the public input, Commissioner Linda Rodgers persuaded the commission instead to give precedence to the assumed tastes of hypothetical people in the driveway behind the filling station, who would walk to the only small area where the antenna would not be observed against a foliage background.

With future cellular antenna installations, you may now anticipate more giant faux penthouses, etc., "decorating" the Village skyline, allegedly to divert attention from tiny antennas. As though strapping fake fans of peacock feathers on pig's tails would make them less noticeable.

Don Whetstone

Vickery Avenue