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Letter: Another move to fill in the Bay

It feels like 1960 all over again. At that time developers were filling San Francisco Bay for profit. It took the dedicated effort of many individuals and organizations to educate the public about the need to restore the quality of Bay water, to enhance its natural flow, to preserve and improve the natural habitats for wildlife, and to recover as much shoreline as possible. The result has been a much healthier Bay.

Now we are looking at a developer from Arizona planning to fill in the Cargill salt ponds in Redwood City. They intend to create a new city of 25,000 people with 12,000 houses. The developer, DMB, has plans for 1,436 acres, threatening the only deep water port in the South Bay and creating roads, traffic, pollution and a huge demand for water.

They suggest people could live near where they work but I think we all know there are already hundreds of empty office and business spaces near residential areas. New business will be a drain on what is now in place. It is the same for water. Even if they have a water source for this new city, it is the same water we all share from limited sources.

I hope the citizens of the Peninsula will write to the Redwood City Council insisting that they consider the impact of such development on the entire Peninsula. They need to understand we do not want to fill the Bay, we want to protect it.

Mary Paine

Mapache Drive, Portola Valley

Posted by Curmudgeon, a resident of another community, on Mar 2, 2010 at 2:01 pm

At a time when thousands of people are *still* commuting into local jobs from as far away as Stockton, spewing who knows how much car exhaust and wasting precious natural resources (most notably Time, the most precious and finite resource any of us have) the myopia of a good many "environmentalists" is stupefying.

Posted by Curmudgeon, a resident of another community, on Mar 2, 2010 at 2:03 pm

To say nothing of how many critters were displaced by development out in the remote San Joaquin Valley, rather than here in an already urbanized area.

In short, fill in the swamps, let another Foster City bloom, and give your children (and by extension your granchildren) a chance to live near you, rather than many miles away.