LAH council opening the wound

What do the children of Los Altos Hills need? The city council would say they need a new school district, their needs are not currently met.

I disagree. The children of Los Altos Hills - and their parents - need a community where neighbors smile at each other and wave when they drive by. They need a community that welcomes everyone. It takes a village, after all.

The issue of schools has torn our town apart. This fact surely is not contested by anyone, regardless of his or her position on Bullis. The wound is raw in our community, and I have friendships that have been cooled, if not permanently scarred, by it. By reopening the issue every six months, the Los Altos Hills City Council continues to pick away the scab that is tentatively helping to heal the hurt feelings on both sides.

Perhaps, in the long run, the community will pull together and decide it needs a school district. For now, we need forgiveness. Many of us are trying to put this issue behind us. The city council should be taking the lead to help us heal, not reopening the hurt.

Katie Roper

Los Altos Hills

Charter opposition led to resolution

The Los Altos School District board reaped its bitter reward at the Los Altos Hills City Council meeting March 23 when the council voted to forward a resolution to the county Board of Education to form an independent school district serving Los Altos Hills. Their intransigent behavior against the establishment of the Bullis Charter School has led to the current state of affairs.

Few people can argue that Los Altos has poor schools, but despite all odds and opposition by the school board, Bullis Charter School far exceeds the test scores of the district surrounding it.

The superintendent and members of the school board and the assistant superintendent of the Palo Alto Unified School District could see the depth and intensity of the feeling that Los Altos Hills has been done wrong by the local education establishment.

The council showed more grace than necessary by allowing 30 days before delivering its resolution to the county Board of Education.

Only a permanent campus at the Bullis site will do for the charter school. Promises to rebuild Bullis school have come too little and too late.

William Downey

Los Altos Hills

Irresponsible planning

A number of years ago, California faced a crisis in many condominium projects as the homeowner association (HOA) fees, which were purposely kept low in order to sell units more easily, didn’t keep pace with maintenance needs.

Later buyers ended up facing the music, due to the gross underfunding, by paying for these repairs with large assessments and increased HOA fees. The state legislature fixed the problem by enacting laws requiring HOAs to establish their fees based on future maintenance requirements.

We need to pass a law requiring the same due diligence from our local city and county governments, school districts and the VTA.

All these agencies have had their collective heads buried in the sand when it comes to planning their future replacement needs and have relied on bond issues to bail them out. How many bond issues will it take before homeowners start screaming the same way condominium owners did?

We should not give Santa Clara County or the VTA one more cent of sales-tax revenue until they are held accountable for their past failures. Los Altos should have been budgeting for sewer replacement ever since the sewer system went in. They did not. The school districts, including Foothill-De Anza colleges, are to blame for the same lack of forward planning.

Government needs to move away from fuzzy math and do a proper accounting.

If it requires a law, we should demand that our legislature enact it and make it apply to the state as well since they don’t function any differently.

Edward Kelley

Los Altos

Get used to big projects

Regarding your article of “Building Costs Through the Roof,” I see several issues not specifically identified in your article that I believe significantly contribute to these cost overruns. First, many initial proposals take overly optimistic views of what will be delivered, after all it is much easier to get spending approved if you take the most optimistic outcome and use it to sell the project.

Second, many initial proposals take an equally optimistic view of the costs to build them, again facilitating approval. These factors combine to create projects that have less functionality than promised and/or cost more than expected, both of which create unhappy citizens.

Third, many projects take on a life of their own and take much longer than originally projected to actually get built, these delays almost always create unanticipated cost increases, the Bay Bridge would be the poster child for this issue.

Finally, we have had outside events occur that are really driving construction material costs up, including the on-going economic growth in China and the rebuilding of the Gulf Coast. The impact of these outside events will not be subsiding anytime soon.

I don’t think any of these issues are going to go away anytime soon so we had better get used to most big projects either costing more than we expect or delivering less than originally promised.

Eric Lutkin

Los Altos

Brown Act abused

Recent events surrounding the Los Altos City Council and the threatened lawsuit by a former member of the council, King Lear, about a violation of the Brown Act, has saddened me greatly.

As a former member of the Los Altos School District Board of Trustees, I was subject to the Brown Act for 14 years, and took that obligation very seriously.

The Brown Act is specifically designed to serve the public as a whole by precluding public bodies from enacting measures outside the public eye. It is NOT meant to be a means of “beating up” our elected officials when they enact measures in the public eye which happen to be either unpopular or in opposition to one’s personal views. If you disagree with a decision, use the system to find support for your views and bring it to the elected officials or replace them via a public election.

The particular issue in the recent event is not at all relevant to my concern. It is the purported use of Brown Act to bring attention to a vote taken by a sitting council, in public session, which disagrees with the position of Mr. Lear.

In our over litigated society, this is taking the litigation process too far. Specifically, in all the years I served on the school board, the one board member most unlikely to violate the Brown Act would be David Casas (who is the current city councilmember Mr. Lear purports to have violated the Brown Act).

While the Santa Clara prosecutor handed the allegation found no evidence of wrong doing by Mr. Casas, the stigma of the accusation remains. I would call for Mr. Lear to make a very public and well documented apology to Mr. Casas, Mr. Packard and the rest of the City Council. This type of allegation has no place in our community, and should not be tolerated.

The public record is available to all, and is the place where the media, which is supposed to represent all the people, has the obligation and responsibility to look for compliance with the Brown Act.

It is not the means to be used to disagree with a public body’s vote on any issue.

Duane Roberts

Los Altos