Respect for Community Planning

Joan Hartmann won’t try to be the mayor of Los Alamos. That’s why I am voting for her.

For five years our Los Alamos community worked with the county to write the Los Alamos Community Plan as a guide to land use policy. We don’t need a mayor; we just need a supervisor who will respect our community’s unique goals and sensibilities as expressed in the Los Alamos Community Plan. Joan Hartmann will.

Hartmann understands the value of community plans. As a planning commissioner she voted to deny a controversial zoning change that would have contradicted our community plan.

As a private citizen she worked with her fellow Buellton citizens to protect the character of that city against an onslaught of growth pressures. The result was that a vote of the people would be required to expand the urban growth boundary.

Hartmann’s opponent Bruce Porter is openly hostile to community plans, dismissing them during a candidate forum as “a religion” that made “handcuffs to progress.” (Read: handcuffs to the developers who have backed him financially and stand to gain by sidelining community plans.)

And he didn’t play fair. He wrongly claimed that the Los Alamos Community Plan had delayed the renovation of our newly reopened library, implying that the Community Plan had harmed the interests of children! Baloney. I should know. I serve on the library board, and I chair the committee that spent five years writing our community plan.

Voters have a clear choice. Who gets to decide what our communities become? The communities themselves? Or those who seek to exploit them?

Like I said, my vote is with Joan.