Mailbag: 2 opposing views on Costa Mesa Measure Y

Measure Y would help the city

This is in response to Byron de Arakal’s commentary (“Measure Y is unwise and unneeded”, Oct. 13). Measure Y was promulgated, and circulated for signatures, by citizens of our city who were fed up with the Planning Commission’s indifference to their wants and needs, and with the City Council’s absolute support of the commission’s indifference.

Had either of these two entities paid the slightest attention to citizen entreaties, and engaged them, even minimally, in dialogue, had they, in fact, been true representatives of citizen wants and needs, this measure would never have been constructed, let alone circulated for signatures.

Mr. de Arakal states: “The public already has the ability to exercise its vote to overturn bad development projects. City councils are the legislative bodies duly vested with the authority to make planning decisions on behalf of the public.”

He entirely ignores the fact that city councils are elected to represent the people of the city. In his parlance, the fact of election to the City Council, or appointment to the Planning Commission, is a grant of absolute, dictatorial power, not to be modulated by the opinions and entreaties of the citizenry, their electorate.

De Arakal goes on to say that the public “can un-holster its power to recall its council members.” I’d quote from our Declaration of Independence here: “Prudence, indeed, will dictate, that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and indeed, all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves, by abolishing those forms to which they are accustomed.”

In other words, we, the citizens of Costa Mesa, would in general adopt a wait-and-see attitude rather than recall our governing body. But the smart-growth initiative was crafted, promulgated, circulated, signed and presented because “when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.”

Terrell E. Koken

Costa Mesa

Measure Y would harm the city

Costa Mesa’s Measure Y will not solve the problem it was advertised to solve. If passed, it will do terrible damage with probably no benefit. It was sold with emotional, fear-based appeals, which is easy to do.

Anything can be made to be scary. But there is one main fact that negates the reason for Measure Y.

People were asked to sign the petition to “stop the rampant high-density development that is flooding our streets with people.” And who can blame them for signing that petition?

But now comes the important decision: to make it law or not. This time it’s not as casual as signing a person’s petition on the way into the grocery store. This has serious consequences for our city.

The people who signed the petition on that basis were misled. There isn’t traffic because old structures are finally being replaced; there’s traffic because our region is growing and people are in their cars a lot more, often passing through Costa Mesa to go somewhere else. This is the cause of the commuting traffic on Victoria Street for instance, not new housing in our city.

If it was, that means there are a lot more people here, right? Well guess what: the population of Costa Mesa has changed little in 10 years. Don’t take my word for it, take it from the state Department of Finance. In 2006, it was estimated at 113,143. This year, 2016, it was estimated at 113,952. It went up and down a little in between and ended at the same place. These numbers can be verified at the “Demographics” section of dof.ca.gov.

Everything we will vote on has a cost and a benefit. I urge my fellow Costa Mesans to actually read Measure Y. Aside from council seats, it is the single most important city measure we will have to vote on.

It will stop a lot of great improvement and momentum that Costa Mesa is enjoying now, and it will simply not bring the benefit it was advertised to bring. Then ask yourself, “Why Would We Y?”

Rich Russell

Costa Mesa