Re: Closed Session Council Meeting 1/9/07/Derry Project
Referendum

The attached points out that transit housing is defined as an area
within a 1/2 mile radius of a fixed alignment transit station.

In the Guest Opinion of Irwin Dawid, former chair of the Sustainable
Land Use Committee of the Loma Prieta Chapter of Sierra Club in the
Daily News of 1/5/07 he applauds the San Carlos plan for transit housing
but states that:

...While the train station location along with the mainline bus route
stops is an ideal setting for accessing public transit, the air quality
problems presented by busy El Camino Real, with its diesel trucks, buses
and heavily used local traffic, as well as the 96 daily commuter trains,
plus freight train traffic, means that residents must be protected from
the particulate pollution coming from both sides of their new homes...

We feel compelled to point out again that these particulates are
cancer causing, among other things, and the developer of the Derry
Project should take note of this and the fact that the other injuries
from the acoustic trauma to the human nervous system from the train
horns blasts alone in such close proximity are actionable now or in the
future.

The shame is to the city officials who approved this project without
necessary mitigation which cannot take place until the railroad is
changed. There may have been lack of education and knowledge but there
certainly was not lack of information relayed consistently for decades
on the dangers of the air and noise pollution of the railroad in its
present state and at the first meeting of the Derry developer and the
EIR consultants.

A first step of the new council might be to correct this neglect and
resolve to protect the built environment and its inhabitants.
Clearly, there should be no additional housing alongside these tracks
until the extreme makeover of the railroad is completed and its air and
noise pollution is lessened. The mistakes of other cities along this
heavy rail and freight line with transit housing up against the tracks,
while their residents cry out for relief, should not be repeated here in
Menlo Park.

Margaret Petitjean

attached mail follows:

http://www.abag.ca.gov/cgi-bin/newspro/viewnews.cgi?newsid1165341554,52956,
Received on Wed Jan 10 00:46:22 2007