Managing Growth

Re “Wasting the Land,” June 4.

I think it’s the Planning Commission members who don’t get it. Maybe we need to remind them who they work for. We do not want to be like Los Angeles. We do, however, want to set a new standard in quality of life.

I think, as usual, it’s all about money. They want to collect fees and taxes to justify their jobs and large staffs. We have grown and grown and made all the usual mistakes. It is time, right now, to say whoa. Let’s have a complete moratorium on all building until we, as a community, get our collective bearings.

What do you do when a boat is full? You don’t keep adding people until it sinks. There are so many other problems that go along with overpopulation of an area, besides traffic and crime. What about sewage, water and runoff into our ocean? When is enough, enough? We said no to overgrowth with SOAR [Save Open Space and Agricultural Resources], and we meant it.

I think we can take a look at a local city that said no to more growth and has survived exceedingly well despite all the state law mandates, potential developer suits and gloomy planning commissioner projections mentioned in your article. In fact, this particular local city has done such a great job saying no to outside interests and growth that property values and land prices make Ventura County’s pale in comparison. Do you think Beverly Hills will ever build low-cost, dense housing? I don’t think so.

Here in Simi Valley, we have major problems brought on by shortsightedness. The Ventura Council of Governments (whatever that is) says we need to cram more people into a smaller area but, really, what will that do for us? We will have more crime and more traffic, just like Los Angeles. Who needs it?

So what do we do with all the people coming here? Simple--send them to Palmdale; they want them.

CHRIS ARNOLD

Simi Valley

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Let me see if I have this right: The new city planner, Susan J. Daluddung, announces that the city has put aside a miserly $500,000 of next year’s budget to help budding cultural groups. Sounds good until, further along in the same article, we read that the same beloved city of ours has subsidized the Olson Co. of Seal Beach--”the biggest inner-city housing builder in the state”--to the tune of $200,000. Presumably the $400,000 asking price [for property on which Olson will build] was beyond the means of this multimillion-dollar company!

The goal of providing higher density downtown housing to obviate the need for eastward sprawl is laudable, but since Olson has three other lucrative projects going in Ventura County as well as having, by its own admission, a strong desire to continue to build here, is it really necessary to mete out our county to them, wrapped in a birthday bow?

That $200,000 could have provided funding for Rubicon Theater’s valuable educational outreach to Ventura schools, or gone toward seed money for a proposed new Cultural Arts Center in downtown, or helped promote the annual Chamber Music Festival, which brings tourism to our city and immense pleasure to our citizenry.

Next time Olson et al come cap in hand, perhaps we should be mindful of the old saw: Charity begins at home.

SALLY OGLE DAVIS

Ventura