The arrival of the new year is an artifice
– a day plucked from history in which we trade our old, tattered
calendars for new ones with rows of empty boxes carrying with them
promise and hope. It’s a time to reflect on what has taken place,
and the promise of the future, bright as all those empty calendar
pages. It’s a time to hope, to res
olve to do things a little better, to wish for more.
In that vein, we have some 2006 wishes for our communities.
The arrival of the new year is an artifice – a day plucked from history in which we trade our old, tattered calendars for new ones with rows of empty boxes carrying with them promise and hope. It’s a time to reflect on what has taken place, and the promise of the future, bright as all those empty calendar pages. It’s a time to hope, to resolve to do things a little better, to wish for more.
In that vein, we have some 2006 wishes for our communities.
First, we sincerely wish that San Juan Bautista’s sorely needed water project moves toward fruition. As 2005 ends, that hope may sound a bit like Polyanna talking, but if any community ever deserved consideration from the feds and other outside agencies, it’s San Juan. Residents there receive periodic orders to boil their tap water if they intend to use it for drinking. Providentially, few residents are still rash enough to continue using whatever comes out of their taps to quench their thirst after all those warnings. The water project would accomplish several things, all good. It would bring promise of additional jobs, because it could supply abundant clean water to nearby vegetable processing plants that already have grown quickly over the last decade. It would provide water of such high quality that salt-injecting water softeners would be rendered superfluous, thereby keeping salt out of the groundwater basin in the agricultural cornucopia of San Juan Valley. Most important, it would give the people of San Juan safe, healthful water.
Related to the water project, we fervently hope for a new era of transparency in San Juan City Hall, where the water project is now cloaked in layers of secrecy and intrigue. Several members of the city council were elected on platforms advancing the idea of openness in government. Only one – Chuck Geiger – is showing the backbone to keep that promise with respect to the water project.
We wish our communities the best in stemming rising gang activity. When we say “community,” we do not mean someone else. We all share the obligation if we are to remain a community in the truest sense – a place where we all are bound by shared devotion to the common good. We seem to be coming to that revelation, as neighborhood groups join law enforcement and educational institutions in the effort.
We wish for civility in the upcoming elections, and we challenge all those running to eschew the whispering campaigns and finger-pointing in favor of the relevant issues. Candidates would be wise to follow that advice. Polls conducted recently in connection with a number of local initiatives revealed a common thread: that trust in our elected representatives is abysmally low, and that people are tired of the petty bickering.
In the same vein, we hope that the protracted legal back-and-forth between attorney Mike Pekin and the unnamed clients he represents in a variety of actions against San Benito County reaches a fair and just conclusion.
We wish Morgan Hill residents the best as they move toward re-inventing their downtown, and hope that efforts in Hollister and Gilroy that are not quite as far along lead in a hopeful direction.
Finally, we wish that the joy so many of us feel this time of year lasts through the coming months and sustains all of us as we share in finding solutions to these and the thornier issues of job production, residential growth and transportation that dominate our pages and the agendas of our policy-makers.
Happy New Year!
