Pace of Growth in the County

We all understand the continued need for housing, and we realize that sensible growth stimulates a good economy and jobs, but this is ridiculous!

If you haven’t already seen the ugliness of the show, just go to the southern Orange County area of La Paz Road and Aliso Creek Road near the Laguna Niguel Regional Park and cast your eyes in any direction. See the cutting down of what was once our southern Orange County traditional rolling hills and filling in the valleys to make a flattened and dull but more intensely developed series of massive tracts.

Our roads are presently jammed with traffic, and more massive developments mean even more traffic. And is anybody thinking about water and the crisis when we have our next water shortage? And with uncontrolled growth comes other scars such as air pollution and general congestion.

Raping the land, adding many times more vehicles to our roads, overselling our resources may bring good profits now, but it’s bad business for our future.

And who are the culprits? A few large and what I consider to be irresponsible and greedy developers, most of all in unincorporated county land.

Now, there are county efforts to approve for years in advance additional large tracts that may some day be incorporated as cities, approving them in advance so that the new cities will be unable to manage the growth of their own land.

With recent public awareness of the leveling of the land, the Building Industry Assn. of Southern California and the Orange County Chamber of Commerce and others are placed in a position of having to defend the continuation of all building--reasonable and otherwise.

But isn’t it a little late for them to impress the community on the merits of development? Seems like that should have been done long ago. I hope it’s not too late to start thinking “responsible growth” in our fragile, already crowded southern Orange County environment.

BEN BLOUNT

Laguna Beach