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E-Mail Bulletin #13 - 27 October 2002
- Initiative Kick-off
- Politics and the Open Space Initiative
- Endorsements
- Letter to the Editor
- Town-wide Mailing
Initiative Kick-off:
The next step - the gathering of signatures to quality our initiative for the ballot has arrived! This coming Saturday (10 AM to 2 PM) we will be inviting residents to come to the Town Hall parking lot to sign our LAH Open Space Initiative and celebrate!! Saturday will be the official kick-off of our open space initiative campaign.We can actually begin signature gathering on Wednesday, October 30th following publication of the legal notice.
On Halloween Day we are looking for volunteers to join us in down- town Los Altos to gather signatures. Please contact Nancy (941-4808) if you can help on Thursday or Saturday. If you can sign up for a two- hour shift on either day, we would appreciate it. This is the fun part of the campaign, and we look forward to the involvement of those of you supporting this effort.
We continue to be grateful to all of you who have donated, offered your homes for our coffees, and helped in so many other ways. This truly has been a team effort!
Politics and the Open Space Initiative:
As part of the political campaign, the Council-sponsored initiative is being touted as the real open space initiative and a couple of mailings (Steve Finn and Amir Rosenbaum) have surfaced distorting the real objective of the Council-sponsored initiative - to confuse residents and to provide the "Council candidates" with their own open space initiative. It's ironic that Westwind Community Barn should be the first target (Steve Finn's letter).Westwind currently has a "private recreation" designation because prior to 1976 it was operated as a private stable, similar to Fremont Hills. When Countess Bessenyey donated the Barn and the 13 and 1/2 acres to the Town, the designation should have been changed to "public". However, like many of the properties identified in our initiative, no change was made to the General Plan to bring the designation into conformance with its intended use.
Westwind Community Barn has been operating since 1977 as a public barn, with priority given to Hills residents. It is overseen by a Board of Directors (the majority of whom are required to be Hills residents), and for almost 25 years it has been providing a 4-H therapeutic horseriding program for the wider community. More recently Westwind has become the focal point for summer recreation programs. No suggestion has ever been made by the Recreation Committee to change the use of Westwind Barn to "soccer fields." Rebecca Hickman, Co-Chair of the LAH Parks and Recreation Committee, in a letter written to a local newspaper states: "In our planning as a committee, we have never considered soccer fields or any other construction of recreation facilites on the Westwind property."
The real worry for Westwind is the locking in (as would be achieved by the Council's initiative) of the "private recreation" designation which could result in its public use being lost. As pointed out in a prior bulletin, the Council could decide to lease it to a third party for purposes of developing and running a "private recreation" facility of some kind (perhaps as an exclusive club.) The present use of Westwind is highly valued by both the neighborhood and the entire community. We believe that Mr. Finn is well aware that this is the case but is trying, nevertheless, to use the tactics of fear as a way to divide supporters.
Endorsements:
Our list continues to grow. Check out our website www.lahopenspace.com If you are not yet listed, just e-mail Nancy at couperus@mindspring.com
Letter to the Editor:
The following letter representing the LAH Open Space Committee appeared in both the Los Altos Town Crier and the Palo Alto Daily:Congratulations to all the residents and supporters of Los Altos Hills Open Space! We've achieved a major first milestone: in six months, our efforts to preserve Los Altos Hills Open Space heritage have succeeded in turning the Council from discussing what to do with the money from the sale of open space, to developing their own open space initiative!Thank you, Roger, for expressing this so well!This turnaround is unprecedented in recent Los Altos Hills history, and is due to the overwhelming citizen support that has arisen from the dedica- efforts of our many volunteers, and in no small part to the two candidates for the next council election, Breene Kerr and Dean Warshawsky, who have brought attention to our cause by actively supporting us in their campaigns.
However, there is still more work ahead. We must assure that any Open Space legislation truly provides legal protection; in particular, we must assure that the town's General Plan is properly amended. In so doing, we also hope to continue changing the Town Council's approach to working with concerned citizen groups like ours, to insure that effective communi- cation and trust are restored to our local government.
Roger Spreen
On behalf of the Los Altos Hills Open Space Committee
Town-wide Mailing:
We want to thank all the voluneers (22 in all) who helped us put the town-wide mailing together. The Committee for Green Foothills/Santa Clara Valley Audubon Society mailer was awesome!
E-mail distribution list:
If you have friends or neighbors in Los Altos Hills who would like to be placed on this e-mail information list, please have them contact either Nancy Couperus at couperus@mindspring.com or Val Metcalfe at metcalfes@worldnet.att.net