The San Jose Mercury News reports:
They have owned their property not for years or decades, but for generations.
Janet Baird Burback's great-grandfather bought the ranch she lives on near Morgan Hill in 1918. Vince Garrod's family began farming in 1893 above Saratoga with apricot orchards, and today the hillsides are home to Cooper-Garrod Estate Vineyards. Marilyn Levinson's grandparents bought her 330-acre nest egg outside of Cupertino in the 1940s.
Different lives, different histories, different backgrounds. But less than a week before Election Day, many of Santa Clara County's rural landowners are expressing the same concern. They worry that Measure A, a Santa Clara County ballot proposition written by environmentalists to slow sprawl, will harm them financially and limit their -- and their heirs' -- ability to use their land as they wish.
Measure A in many ways pits urban residents against rural landowners. The rural landowners are overwhelmingly outnumbered: Only 98,000 people, or 6 percent of the county's 1.7 million residents, live in unincorporated Santa Clara County. The rest live in cities such as San Jose, Palo Alto and Sunnyvale.
``This would take away rights from people who own the property,'' Garrod said. ``We have to pay the cost. Why should we, just because we happen to be here, pay the cost of their viewshed? If you want to determine how the land is used, just buy it.''
Here's a great example of how socialist planners feel there's no limit on confiscating property.The only way to limit this theft through the ballot box is the elimination of eminent domain.You can't be for eminent domain and property rights, the two can't co-exist.To understand the madness, here's another gem of quote from the article:
Measure A is 28 pages long, much of it written in planning law jargon.
Simply put, it would reduce the number of homes that can be built on 400,000 acres of hillsides, ranches and farms -- half the land in Santa Clara County.
Big Brother owns you.
