Proposals to Reduce Growth in Orange County

History always repeats itself!

Now the slow-growth activists with their unreasonable, unfounded and unrealistic ideas are trying to persuade Orange County to commit economic suicide.

The lessons of history learned in the state of Colorado over the last 10 years should be known to Orange County voters. The governing elite of Colorado were no-growth activists, and their liberal followers created a no-growth atmosphere and attitude in the early 1980s.

The no-growth policy took its toll in 1988! The unemployment rate in Colorado is nearly 10%, business and personal bankruptcies are at an all-time high and climbing, and real estate foreclosures are rampant. The embryonic shale oil industry that would have brought billions of dollars into Colorado was destroyed, real estate values have fallen 40% or more, and growth industries have left the state for a more favorable economic climate.

No-growth has destroyed Colorado! Now the Orange County slow-growth activists with their negative thinking, tunnel vision, lack of understanding of macroeconomics and their naive solutions to problems will create the same result in Orange County.

Developers do not create growth. They are in business (at great financial risks) to provide housing, shopping centers and industrial facilities to meet the demand of the public. Growth is the natural component of a vibrant free-enterprise system. Common sense dictates that the solution to traffic and other congestion is to expand the roadway systems in the area.

The slow-growth initiative will generate high unemployment, push housing prices ever higher, create more congested freeways and force business and capital to greener pastures!

A slow-growth initiative anywhere in California will kill the goose that laid the golden egg.

GEORGE C. HALLSTEIN

Fullerton