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Speak Out
Baby ferret cause of terror, nightmares
I don't think we should allow ferrets in this state. I'm a 10-year-old girl and I've had experience with a ferret.
One night my dog saw a baby ferret. It was out in our patio. When everyone was trying to see where it went (except for me), it ran into the house where I was standing. I turned around and screamed bloody murder. After that night my mom had to sleep with me for three nights.
So, I don't think we should have ferrets because they can be vicious, they aren't that good around other animals, they can escape real easily, and they scare me.
Ricki Nicholls
Briarwood Drive
City Hall is ugliest design since the Convention Center
I have questioned the wisdom of moving the San Jose city hall to Santa Clara Street and attended most of the meetings about it. One thing the city's report fails to mention is that almost all of the several thousand people who attended those meetings opposed the plan.
Now that I have seen the proposed design I too am emphatically opposed to it. I have not seen anything that ugly since the construction of the San Jose Convention Center.
That actually gave me an idea that could make everyone happy. What if we could move city hall downtown with no major expense and have it close to hotels, light-rail, parking, performance centers and an auditorium while eliminating the $100,000 per year revenue loss incurred by the convention center? Wouldn't that be great?
This could all be accomplished by simply turning the seldom-used convention center into the new city hall. It has plenty of room and if the city needs additional office space they could use the empty portions of the IBM and Adobe buildings across the street.
Current estimates of additional costs for moving it to the Santa Clara Street site exceed $51 million dollars plus the $140 million of the city hall itself, plus another $50 million for additional land acquisitions. This will vastly exceed the limitations specified in Prop. 1.
In addition, the Environmental Impact Report (EIR) for the proposed Santa Clara Street site has identified dozens of major problems the committee could not find solutions for. The whole purpose of the EIR is to ensure that solutions are in place before a project is started. Yet this report was approved with the admission they failed to surmount numerous identified problems of traffic congestion, parking, etc.
San Jose appears to be rushing into another of Frank Tailor's follies like the Fairmont Hotel the city built for $140 million and later sold at a $100 million loss; or the Pavilion which was another $100 million or so loss. (I think they should have used the Pavilion for the new library instead of building one on the San Jose State University Campus one block away.)
John Messina
San Jose
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Willow Glen, California Since 1992
