Helping Our Peninsula's Environment

 

HOPE letter to Landwatch

Landwatch Ducks Vital Growth Questions

(c) Copyright 2005 HOPE

Landwatch

Board of Directors

October 12, 2005

 

Landwatch Ducks Vital Growth Questions

 

Greetings:

The Salinas Californian published a Landwatch editorial advocating for huge county growth and disavowing "slow-growth" and "no-growth" in November 2004. HOPE forwarded this editorial to hundreds of our readers and expressed our very serious concerns. Landwatch wrote HOPE a letter on February 23, 2005 but failed to address all but one of our many grave concerns.

HOPE wrote back asking Landwatch to disavow supporting 40,000 new housing units and 126,000 population increase. Landwatch sent HOPE a final letter on March 10 ignoring our request, trying to trivialize HOPE's concerns, and still missing any substantive response.

Overall the Landwatch letters ducked, or failed to respond to, all but one of our very serious questions.

The following are some of HOPE's unaddressed concerns --

 

  • Landwatch did not deny they made the secret decision to adopt 40,000 more housing units used in the "Community General Plan."

 

  • Landwatch failed to explain a) why their "Community" General Plan opposes the wishes of the hundreds of people at their forums who firmly rejected using AMBAG's huge growth numbers; and b) when, where or who made the decision to use AMBAG's huge growth numbers in that plan.

 

  • Landwatch did not explain why they excluded HOPE and other long term active community public interest groups from those decisions.

 

  • Landwatch deceived the media by continuing to allow them to believe that 18 organizations support the "Community" General Plan, when their letter admits none of them did.

 

In razor sharp contrast HOPE clearly does not accept growth. HOPE is unambiguously dedicated to fighting environmentally harmful growth, to protecting our area's imperiled habitats, animals and plants and our human quality of life. As Elizabeth Leeper observed - As long as there is no water, we cannot grow without causing harm.

Perhaps Landwatch needs to clarify whether it is an affordable housing construction advocate or an environmental advocate. While our county endures so many environmental emergencies and crises including imperiled species, their habitats, water and traffic, we suggest you carefully consider that one cannot at the same time both bulldoze and save an imperiled species habitat.

 

With all due respect,

David Dilworth, Executive Director

 

This letter as a PDF file

Landwatch Correspondence

For more information on this topic

and on a sustainable General Plan see our website at -

www.1hope.org/gp 

Search HOPE's Website:


powered by FreeFind

Or Search the whole Web with IxQuick

Home

General Plan Update Page

 

 

This Page Last Updated October 17, 2005

 

, 2005