Dana Point Redevelopment

I am writing to express my opposition to the Dana Point City Council’s Urban Redevelopment Plan. After reading the Redevelopment Plan, talking to the staff and communicating with other members of the community, I have reached conclusions.

Although the council says that they do not plan to condemn my home, the plan clearly gives them the power to do exactly that.

If, like God in the Garden of Eden, we could re-create Dana Point in our own image, we never in a million years could agree on what the finished product should look like. Would it be like Saint Hubert’s Plaza? Would it be like Tom Brown’s Bicycle Cafe? Would it be like my old Spanish house?

For every person asked to participate, it would look different. That is why there is chocolate and vanilla ice cream. The point that the City Council is missing is that the vast majority think that Dana Point is just fine the way it is. The only thing we ask is to be left alone.

The businesses are, for the most part, prospering. The citizens are happy here or they are affluent enough to move elsewhere. There is no need to displace these people, unless there is a reason that we have not been told of yet, like a deal with a developer who wants to make the council rich and famous, and the hell with the rest of us. I really don’t believe that this is the case.

The economic forces of free enterprise will serve us well as they have in the past if we are patient. There is no need to put anyone out of business, or throw anyone out of their home, just because the City Council cannot wait.

The appropriate place for urban redevelopment is in the inner city, or depressed areas of rural America where it is their only hope, where the property owners, businesses and citizens are desperate and are begging for the miracle that redevelopment could bring them.

I beg the council to put an end to this scheme. The majority of the people have not fully realized what this is really all about.

The truth is very powerful, and when the truth is known by the voters of Dana Point and they realize what a bad deal it is, and how threatening it is, there are sure to be serious political repercussions.

The council still has time to give urban redevelopment the burial that it deserves, but the clock is ticking.

JACK ROBERTS, Dana Point