Editor,
There are FOUR major, proposed developments we must be aware of
which will impact this county, East of Fairview, West of Fairview,
D.M.B. and Del Webb.
Editor,
There are FOUR major, proposed developments we must be aware of which will impact this county, East of Fairview, West of Fairview, D.M.B. and Del Webb. We need to express our opinions to our elected officials if we don’t want to become another expense of concrete, freeways, parking lots, traffic and congestion and rows and rows of houses, instead of crops. Our identity will be lost and we will look like every other metropolitan area or huge bedroom community!
San Benito County and its two incorporated cities have the opportunity to learn from other counties from their sensible growth decisions and the disasters allowed by others! We should not make the same mistakes!
Have you seen the mess caused by huge developments allowed to be built in the once beautiful, bucolic Contra Costa County? Where does San Jose start and end? Where are the boundaries of the South Bay cities and counties and those of the Los Angeles Basin? You only know when you pass a small road sign that you’ve entered another county or city.
Don’t be swayed by promises of more property taxes. Remember your property tax pays only for the services of your property. The more homes the more taxes BUT that necessitates more services for more people so we really don’t gain!
Downtown Hollister still has streets with deteriorating surfaces, major cracks, streets growing weeds and moss, potholes and lack of street maintenance getting worse by the day. These are the same streets that needed repair when we moved here 28 years ago! More traffic passes over these same streets but the Redevelopment Agency funding area of the city, still only comes from the same properties in that area. Many of the streets just continue to crumble and fall into even further disrepair each year. I’ve even seen city workers spraying the weeds growing in the streets cracks, rather than repairing them. The city had a multi-year plan for street repair but many residents feel ignored when their streets get worse and they are told to patiently wait year after year after year!
We must be pro-active while we still have the moratorium, rather than reactive when it’s too late. With no businesses and industries, our bedroom community will just continue to grow with sales taxes benefiting the surrounding counties, not ours!
We can be the voices to make this county the best it can be! We don’t all agree on what that might be, but let’s work together before we become another county just like so many others. Our unique identity is worth saving.
Ruth Erickson Hollister
