This is in response to Joan Woodward’s column and Paula Anderson’s letter to the editor:

Paula said that she and others have worked to stop the developers from tearing out the orchards and having more housing stopped. I was wondering how many acres that she and her family farmed. Or does she live on a 2-acre plot that someone else made and then once she got hers no more for anyone else. As she worked for the city/county planning, why didn’t she and the folks helping her make the city annex all of the subdivisions that came under the central sanitation district. If she would have, then the city of Grand Junction may have been able to build a new sewer plant that was needed instead of taxing all the county folks.

Joan is all worried about a couple of subdivisions on South Camp Road. I can remember when I did the dirt work for Wingate Elementary School. You would have had to shoot a 30.06 to hit more than one house from that site. Seems like a good baseball player could throw a ball and hit a lot of houses now.

Maybe the problem is not the new subdivisions, but the folks who live in a very few of those houses now. You would probably also like to know that when I started the roads into the Ridges subdivision we thought that would be a great place to live. Do these two women think that was a mistake, too?

You talk about having more air pollution because of more people, you are a newbie. If you had been here a long time then you could remember when we had the cheapest gas in then state. Along with the cheap gas came the Gilsonite plant at Fruita. Remember the times when the valley smelled of rotten eggs because of it? Or the real brown cloud?

They want to save our farm ground. Where were you when Stouffer Foods tried to come into the valley? Stouffer wanted to set up a frozen-food plant north of town and ship with refer trucks. The city/county would not let them do that. They wanted both the plant and the shipping to be done though the Railroad Park. Wonder who owned that place?

If they had fought for Stouffer’s then farm ground around here would have been worth so much that the farmers would not have sold to developers and there would no houses on it.

You talk about saving our water. The farmers would have used less growing crops than the average household uses. You want less air pollution that would have helped too. But that is all water under the bridge now.

They talk about the lifestyle that they enjoy. What about the lifestyle that a large part of the community enjoys? I am talking about those that build for a living. How many would you like to put out of work so you can enjoy your lifestyle? How many folks would have to move, and then where to? No jobs here. If other people with your way of thinking in other places have their way, there would be no jobs there either.

How about all the kids who get out of high school ready to work? There would be no jobs for them either. All the collage grads, where will they work and live? With mommy and daddy?
No more houses and no more jobs. I wonder how you lifestyle would be then?

BRIAN HARRIS
Grand Junction

This entry was posted on Friday, April 11th, 2008 at 8:27 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.