Lakewood neighbors: Keep your eyes open
The Lakewood neighbors should fight as if their lives depended on it, because it does. It's a sad testimony to our neighborhoods that beauracracies such as County Transit should have the power to come in and ruin our neighborhoods as they are doing with my neighborhood--Tasman Avenue. I await with dread the ripping out of the beautiful trees lining Tasman to put in a $50 million-a-mile joy ride light rail system. Ron Gonzalez and his cronies at County Transit have pushed for this project at any cost. They have pushed the myths of light rail on us. Light rail will not take any considerable traffic off the roads; the ridership is questionable for the cost involved; the ripping out of the trees will create more pollution, not cleaner air as they claim; and after spending billions on highway expansion to encourage traffic, now they have come up with a new high-cost program to keep county transit in business.
County Transit would not have had the funds to build this project if they had not surreptiously gone to the federal government, which granted them $350 million of taxpayer money. It would have been better spent on other transportation programs, such as BART, better bus routes, etc.
The federal government had no business sticking its nose into local affairs.
Not only is my neighborhood being invaded and destroyed, but I'm expected to pay for it with a half-percent sales tax hike. Yes, Lakewood residents, fight for your neighborhood with all your might, for while you're away at your jobs, working hard to make a living, County Transit and political bureaucrats are working away at their grand plans that will make your lives miserable and unsafe.
It's really a sad state of affairs in Sunnyvale, where I've lived for more than 15 years, when the only place left with open space and a view beyond the nearest sound wall is the city dump.
Sandra Skolnik
Sunnyvale
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This article appeared in the Sunnyvale Sun, April 30, 1997.
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