Area Growth and Transit

Rather than being shortsighted, as your Nov. 8 editorial claimed, the rejection by Ventura County voters of the half-cent sales tax increase for transit improvements showed 20/20 vision. You can’t really believe that two-thirds of us would vote no just to save $50 on $10,000 of taxable purchases; it wasn’t for that reason.

When I was growing up in the Valley of the ‘50s and early ‘60s, I was excited by the new freeways going in. My parents’ old home movies show a sky so deep blue you’d think it was Hawaii. But the sky went pale blue and then brown as developers relentlessly used the freeways as justification for increasing the spread and density of housing.

Ojai here in Ventura County has prevented Highway 33 from being turned into a freeway to its door, and has successfully used the two-lane road as justification for holding back developers and retaining its low population. The voters here have acted in a similar manner. When you deny the money to fund mass transit or to widen the roads, you deny the developers the justification for their subdivisions.

Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino, Riverside and San Diego counties can do what they want--they’re pretty much trashed out anyway; it’s too late to stop the rape of those counties. But we still have vast areas up here that haven’t yet been put to the “highest and best use” by the developers, and if slowing road improvements will slow their march, then that is what we must continue to do.

TONY SCOTT

Camarillo