| Opinion - Friday, May 21, 2010
Letters
A challenge to Mayor's claim on housing project
In her guest opinion last week defending her support of the Minton/Prometheus development proposal, Mayor Ronit Bryant made the profoundly misleading claim that no studies in the case indicated "significant impacts on the neighborhood."
The main "Study/MND" report in January concluded as follows: No increase in site car traffic. (Assuming the "existing use" is a hypothetical big-box store with 1,717 daily visits. It isn't.)
No garage overflow, based on "six similar developments." (Four had heavily occupied garages and one had unspecified street parking, none of which was counted; only two sites had known tenancy percentages.
From the site with the least data, the report estimated the proposed garage would be 97.7 percent full at full apartment occupancy. No current use of existing streets by Caltrain commuters to park cars overnight was mentioned. (Resident Annette Nielsen simply waited for morning commute trains, and promptly photographed 20 of them.)
All of this information was in the council's hands when they made their decision.
Max Hauser
Loreto Street
Drawings not needed to make rail decision
I didn't get particularly excited about the urban designer concept drawings for high-speed rail in Mountain View. It was obvious a long time ago that the only reasonable alternative for Mountain View was a trench or tunnel option for the train — everything else is a disaster.
I did get excited about the $100,000 that the mayor or council spent on these drawings, when the city has a structural budget deficit requiring cutting a variety of services, and our schools are suffering as well. I'm shocked that those on the council who voted for this expenditure couldn't use the judgment and intelligence we presumed they had when we elected them to office.
Any reasonably intelligent person could have figured out what the city's position on high speed rail should have been on his/her own. The $100,000 could certainly have been put to better uses.
Carol Lewis
Oak Street
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