We can celebrate St. Patrick’s Day because when our fields of lettuce, onions and peppers are green they must look like the green isle of Ireland.
We must carefully view the spoken brogue of those in public office because not all want to preserve our green like what happened in San Jose where green orchards and farm lands have all been covered with houses and roads.
Many want pell-mell growth like what is happening right now.
The biggest collateral catastrophe is our beloved Hazel Hawkins Memorial Hospital. Consider our hospital green because it is the largest jobs provider in the county providing green for hardworking dedicated employees. Yet funds and fees from housing growth are insufficient to maintain our roads and to grow our hospital and encourage doctors to live here in this very desirable place in which to live.
Wanting a good hospital would be a reason to expand a medical community that provides full medical service including all the special categories of medical practice. Medical groups in place would remove the need to travel away for medical care and would cause our hospital to thrive. Green funds for medical groups would be like watering the growth of our hospital.
Currently a plan researched by our San Benito County Board of Supervisors could be put in place to save our hospital from purchase and lease. The Hazel Hawkins Memorial Hospital Board will need to concur on this plan. The Hospital Board continues to favor a sale/lease plan. If a sale option is selected, that option goes to the people for a vote because the people own the hospital and could reject a sale.
If, on the other hand, the Board of Supervisors and the HHMH Board agree on the county plan of hospital growth, the hospital is saved.
I hope for cooperation between both boards, hospital and county, because serving the common good is the highest priority of those in public office. Serving the people weighs heavily on the shoulders of unselfish individuals who understand the need for cooperation in order to keep our hospital.
Mary Zanger
Hollister
Dear Friends,
If the Supervisors’ plan is anything like the bankrupt-from-conception County transit boondoggle, then they’ll have us on a faster Road to Serfdom than they presently have us. Public sector “solutions” to insolvent business of any kind is like throwing gasoline on a fire to extinguish it. What answer do the Supervisors give to the “crucial question,” posed by the late Honorable Norman Y. Mineta, while he was still in the House of Representatives: “The crucial question in transportation today is: “What should government do, and what should it leave to others?””
Norm’s “crucial question” remains our crucial question. Just ask yourself: How high will gas taxes have to go to pay for all the radical socialist “solutions” in the public sector, e.g., COG, VTA, FAX, TAMC, SCCRTC, MTA, Caltrain, ACE Train, SMART Train, Lite Rail, BART, Amtrak, Bullet Train, etc.? My estimate published by the Editor of Gilroy Dispatch before the election in 2009, Prop. 1A, was $10/gallon. Now today I think that I was wrong: it’s going to be more like $20/gallon to get Bullet Train running. But, if we tax people out of their cars, will we return to horses, mules, jackasses? If the Supervisors were serious about helping the taxpayers, they’d put COG in Ch. 9, cancel all burdensome contracts as the Bankruptcy Code permits, spin-off the boondoggles to anyone in the private sector foolish enough to pick-up the loosing boondoggle, and then convert the case to one under Ch. 7, liquidation bankruptcy. Better to cut-off the malignant tumor than to allow it to spread throughout our body. Of, if COG is a separate, stand-alone entity of governance, then the Supervisors ought to adopt an ordinance requiring the County to cease all participation in the unelected governance abuse at COG, where the COG “directors” govern without the consent of the voters. Caveat viator.
Joseph P. Thompson, Esq.,
408-848-5506; E-Mail: [email protected];
Past-President 1999-2001, 2006, Gilroy-Morgan Hill Bar Assn.; Past-Member, Executive Committee, SCCBA’s Debtor-Creditor-Bankruptcy Committee when my office was in San Jose; Past-Chair, Legislation Committee, Transportation Lawyers Assn.,