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Tina Walia asks the right
questions for Saratoga
I have lived in Saratoga for 30 years but didn’t become active in local politics until the Mountain Winery annexation/rezoning project would have allowed a 300-room hotel on a site at high risk for wildfires and served by inadequate roads.
Ultimately, the City Council voted 3-2 against the development, but I fear it could be revived. That’s why I support Tina Walia for Saratoga City Council.
Current Council members initiated the hotel project and spent much taxpayer money trying to persuade residents that our opposition was wrong and our questions were misguided.
Ten-year Planning Commissioner Walia expressed concern about inadequate notification to residents and insisted on more time to absorb thousands of pages of documents made available at the last moment.
With her expertise, due diligence and hard work, Walia asks the right questions, insists on complete answers and listens to everyone.
Saratoga residents need straight-shooter Tina Walia.
Sandy Reed
Saratoga
ICE detention facilities
fit a more sinister name
We’ve all seen the pictures. Hundreds of bodies huddled on the floor covered in emergency blankets and often the faces of small children peering from across a barbed-wire fence. We’ve read the articles stating these camps are breeding grounds for disease and are rife with abuse.
ICE detention camps are no longer simply detention facilities for undocumented immigrants to be held in as they are in the process of deportation. With ICE detaining 50,000 people and counting in these facilities we can no longer afford to look at these places as anything but concentration camps.
History will not look back at us kindly during what is clearly a total moral failure on behalf of the U.S government. We must do better by asylum seekers.
Ruby Veloz
Santa Clara
Plenty of hypocrisy to go
around in court fight
In 2016, an election year, the Republican leadership said that the selection of a new Supreme Court justice should be delayed until the presidential election was decided.
Now, that same leadership is saying in 2020, also an election year, that the sitting president should be able to select a new justice.
Democrats call this hypocrisy. Is it? In 2016, that same election year, Democrats said President Obama should be able to select a new justice. Now, in 2020, with a Republican in the White House, Democrats are saying, “Voters should have a say in the selection.” Just who is being hypocritical? I despise the current president. But I also despise the hypocrisy of both parties in this whole process of selecting Supreme Court justices. A new process is needed.
Gene McHone
Santa Clara
