By Marla Painter
President, Mountain View Neighborhood Association
Your editorial on the proposed Sector Plan in the South Valley's Mountain View Neighborhood was striking in its lack of understanding of the neighborhood and the particular challenges we face.
Residents, business owners and landowners spent months working together as a community to develop our sector plan with the help of professional planning staff. All in the community were encouraged to attend, including the business community. All were notified by the county; in fact, a number of the same business people who proclaimed they were never notified actually attended the first meeting and never showed up again.
The neighborhood association, which has business owners who are board members, spread the word and rented mobile signs that were placed on the main thoroughfares. The business owners were notified of the plan's development with as much rigor as everyone else. Where were they when we welcomed their participation?
The residents of Mountain View are not asking for businesses in the neighborhood to be evicted— zoned out— as some outside lawyers suggest. We understand that compromises will have to be made. If we are going to live with the current industry, the industry will have to abide by certain conditions if they choose to operate next to family homes.
We want a healthy, safe and contented community. This is a basic human right. Current business can live in sound relationship with residential and commercial life, incorporating the high-test standard of environmental practice, safety and aesthetics. Operating a sound business that protects the environment is a part of the cost of doing business. Others do it. We can, too.
Another place for future industrial development must be located. We have reached way beyond our carrying capacity in Mountain View. Putting concrete plants next to the community center is not healthy for our children. Huge trucks that barrel down small, residential roads are not safe. Sewage odor is not acceptable. Unregulated auto salvage yards that do not follow state-of-the-art operation guidelines cannot be tolerated.
We all must abide by what is acceptable to human health and for the health of the Rio Grande, which sits blocks away from many of these unregulated auto yards. A lack of a usable air monitoring station is not OK. Unregulated fugitive dust in this area with a high incidence of childhood and elder asthma is not good public health practice.
People here have as difficult a time as any person living with bad odor, bad air, unsafe roads, industrial-grade lighting, constant noise and just plain ugliness. We have the right to a livable community with useful retail, walking opportunities, recreation and emergency evacuation routes.
The residents of Mountain View were not asked in the 1970s if they approved of the zoning changes to attract heavy industry here. We were not notified that those changes had been made. Now we have an opportunity to make past wrongs right again and fair to all.
Other communities around the country have instituted sound solutions to similar situations. In East Austin, Texas, for example, they rezoned incompatible uses, adopted a neighborhood approach to planning, enacted overlay ordinances, expanded public participation, and addressed environmental and public health risks at city-owned properties. The story is very similar in Chicago, Boston and Los Angeles, among other places.
The costs of not rectifying the wrongs in this community are high, not only in terms of dollars but in terms of ethics and morality.
We who live and work in Mountain View labored for months to shape a reasonable and fair solution. We will work with the businesses that have come in at the last moment to block our work, but we will not back down on the basic foundation of this plan. We intend to make it happen.
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