Well, I’m not happy with the price nor with the ensuing taxes, but I am going to vote for the purchase of Tollgate. I can’t stand the thought of that beauty being inundated with dish-topped roofs (antennas are passe) surrounded by blacktop leading to the required rear garage. Blacktop really improves the area, you know. Blacktop drains beautifully into ditches already full after one of our gentle November rains.

Of course, all the new houses, warehouses or four-story businesses would extend our tax base, and then the new taxes would be spent to improve the services to those lovely new homes and buildings that block the view of Mount Si, displaces the cattle, the smell of newly mown hay in summer and the greening in spring.

Ever count how many pictures you have seen of the view? Photos, water colors, oils? Good pictures, poor pictures, all kinds – each one meaning that the photographer or the artist was so struck by the view that he just had to put it on paper or canvas.

Aside from the aesthetics, blacktop and houses do not grow food. When our nation needed food during World War II, the fields yielded vegetables. Maybe one of our presidents wouldn’t eat the broccoli, but the rest of us did, and we didn’t have to have it shipped in half-green or overripe from Mexico and Chile. Hopefully, this need won’t happen again, but if it does … well, it’s awfully hard to plow blacktop and $400,000 houses.

Also, I do not agree with some of the city of North Bend’s plans for the area, but let’s get the land, save Lucinda’s house (the original Tollgate) and fight about the use later.

Zara Fritts

North Bend