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Published on 06/22/1998 All articles from this issue

Letters to the Editor

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What about noise, litter and vagrants?

After reading Lynn and Fritz Liepertz's comments about the gas station (June 17), I feel that the readers need to know that the Liepertz family live on Estate Drive, directly behind the station.

Removing the gas station may improve the quality of their lives, but the inconvenience takes away from other residents like myself. Is convenience not a part of the quality of life?

Once again, this is an example of a small group of self- interested citizens who ruin things for the majority. After all, 400 Los Altos residents signed a petition to keep the station open. That gas station was a very customer-oriented business, something our city should have been proud of. If the lack of an operating permit was an issue, why did it take three years for somebody to say anything?

Unfortunately, there is something that the residents of Estate Drive do not realize. Once the gas station closes, they will put a chain link fence around it while the tanks are removed and then ... the soil could be contaminated, delaying construction. It will grow weeds, have graffiti, and it just gets uglier from there. Look around at the other gas stations that have closed.

How soon do they rebuild those areas? If and when it becomes a park, they will have strangers behind their houses. They will have to deal with noise, litter and even vagrants.

Phil MenasceLos Altos

Wrong - this affordable housing law is better

I was surprised at your lack of understanding of the issues, evident in the editorial of June 17 "City can't afford affordable housing law." Your facts are wrong, and you miss the whole point of the change.

In the first place, 2,364 lots are greater in size than 13,000 square feet and thus are still available for SLUs, not 400 lots as you stated. Secondly, affordable housing does provide a sufficient return to warrant building an SLU. I calculate an annual return of 11 percent, for a 600-square-foot SLU constructed for $90,000 and allowing $2,050 for taxes, insurance and maintenance.

Depreciation creates a tax savings of $1,145 and the low income affordable rent for two persons is currently $11,040 per year, and rising each year.

Finally, you imply that the new ordinance was implemented for the purpose of avoiding an increase in housing density, and that the change may violate our affordable housing plan. Wrong again.

In a two-year test the old ordinance produced only four affordable SLUs vs. the 20 units promised in our affordable housing plan. Only two of these were on lots less than 13,000 square feet.

The new ordinance has a significant change in philosophy that your editorial missed. It is predicated on the concept that no owner has an inalienable right to build a second living unit on a lot that is too small to subdivide. Owners who wish to build at a higher density than the zoning allows, can now do so only if they contribute to the city's affordable housing goal.

If the new ordinance had been implemented in April 1995 and the same SLU decisions had been made in the following two years, we would have one very low income SLU and six low income SLUs. This would be an increase of 75 percent above the results of the prior ordinance.

I believe that the new ordinance will be more effective in achieving our affordable housing goals, and have less negative impact on neighbors.

King LearLos Altos City Councilman

A reminder to school board

At a recent Los Altos School District board meeting, four of five members of the board demonstrated that bureaucratic thinking is not restricted to capitals and fairness is not to be found in our educational community.

When the Santa Rita School playground committee came before the board to ask for monetary help in placing a new play structure at the school, the board hid behind a previously unrecorded policy to minimize the district's investment.

The playground committee asked that the board contribute the same amount of funds that they had approved for playground projects at Almond School.

In the end, the board offered less then half of that amount. The one dissenting board member, Victor Reid, stated after the vote, that the motion was unfair and a travesty.

The particularly galling thing about this action was that it came on the heels of a presentation by the Masters Swim Club, which asked the board to donate school property worth at least $750,000.

The board members could not help themselves as they gushed praise and cooperation to the project which would serve 1,500 community members over a year.

Yet, 30 minutes later when asked to contribute $16,000 to help build a playground for daily use by the 550 children at Santa Rita School and countless other community members on weekends and evenings, they balked.

The Masters Swim Club proposal for a new pool is certainly a worthy project and deserves the community's support. However, the hypocrisy demonstrated by the board's reception of the glamorous pool complex juxtaposed against its cool and defensive response to the Santa Rita project left me with a very unsettled feeling that board members have forgotten who their constituents are and where their responsibilities lie.

So as a reminder to the school board, "It's the children ..."

James D. Stephens

Los Altos