Thank you, thank you for your very clear piece on the un-greenness of malls and the building industry. I just wish that we could get members of the television media to develop programs that help people understand what people like you and me — people who read extensively and ask questions — seem to “get.”

One only needs to visit a town like Northampton, MA — or parts of New York City and Boston — to see that
when people can browse stores along a street and take time to stop and share conversation over a cup of coffee in an outside cafe, they find much more pleasure than they do driving an hour to a huge mall and then having to study the categories of shops in the directory to know where they want to turn. Syracuse could be that community, with bike trails and walking trails. New Haven, CT. has changed their buses to “trolleys,” and their bus stops to “trolley stops.” They are so much more colorful than the silver centros, and might tempt people to want to use them instead of cars. (Of course, I’d like the real thing because it might slow the pace of traffic, as they did in my childhood.)

We appreciate you pointing out that UGAs are designated so that infrastructure will be compact, and supposedly, costs to taxpayers will be reduced when developers pay their fair share (or pass on to new buyers). With 59.9% of the land in Skagit being untaxed, sprawl (at any rate) is a recipe for disaster to the citizens, all 107,000 of them.

You may want to write next about how this phenomenon seems to have invaded state agencies, especially in Skagit County where most of the 3,000 acres of agricultural lands converted to other uses in 2008 were purchased by agencies for various “projects”. We count another 10,000 acres of the 83,000 zoned Ag-NRL are proposed for future conversion. At this rate we can fully wipe out the largest economic driver in the county in a few years and transform the Valley into Lynnwood. Where we will grow our food is another matter.

Thanks for the great column about what AFLC is threatening to do to the forests of Kittitas County.

We already have one over-priced gated community between Cle Elum and Roslyn, Suncadia, and here someone is trying to start another.

Needless to say many of us are entirely against it. Our local chapter of National Audubon Society is one of the pponents. It seems it is ne thing after another and our county commissioners haven’t learned that more houses don’t bring in enough more taxes to pay for the additional services. It’s not a new concept. My dad preached it way back in the forties when he was on the King County Planning Commission.

I always look forward to reading your columns. What you say makes sense to somebody who was introduced to these ideas at an early age.

Frank