Traffic Initiative and County’s Future

Re Measure A, the traffic initiative:

I am a developer who, like all developers, is aware of, and hurt by, traffic and environmental problems.

I am a developer, like all developers, who is earnestly seeking constructive and affirmative answers.

I am a family man with children who want a better world.

I am a concerned citizen and taxpayer who wants a meaningful answer to problems whose roots lie far beyond my industry.

My close-up look tells me the beginning and end of all this is in the amazing growth of affluence in America that creates an overwhelming demand for more houses, more cars, more skis, more clothes--more of anything, and everything.

When the market responds to those demands for all those nice things, that response is a result. The cause is that amazing affluence . . . and nobody wants that to go away.

My hard business experience tells me there will be no real solution until all of us work to provide the infrastructure that those nice things require: more freeways and public transportation; more sewers and more fire stations.

Demagoguery and soaking the other guy in the style of Measure A won’t do it.

Measure A cuts off all that desperately needed mutual affirmative support. It only offers a terribly depressing (almost a billion and a half dollars) new Orange County tax burden, or public debt, to “upgrade” already existing parks and fire stations to an impossible fairyland level and a grossly exaggerated list to stop growth and solutions of any sort.

We have a mutual problem with mutual roots, mutual burdens and mutual benefits in its solution. America needs constructive and affirmative answers, based on mutual efforts.

HERB TOBIN

Newport Beach