COMMUNITY COMMENTARY:City needed to act years ago

This is not now, nor has it ever been an issue of religion, as some will argue. It is and remains as issue of overdevelopment. Fortunately those who don't live nearby don't have to live with the consequences of the costly mistakes of the city's planning department that didn't have the foresight to see that a public high school and two churches, both with schools of their own, cannot co-exist as neighbors, nor did they give a second thought of how this might affect the neighborhood.

We would have thought, if nothing else, the city and its planners would have learned from their mistakes. Apparently that is too much to expect. They seem bent on repeating their disastrous decisions, much to the detriment of those of us who have the misfortune to have purchased homes here 35 years ago and who put their faith into their elected representatives and City Hall to protect their investment and the quality of life we all have the right to expect.

To put it in terms that even the planning department and the City Council will understand: The only reasonable solution is to either relocate the high school (which should have been downsized) and another facility built to accommodate the thousands of new homes, many with four and five bedrooms, that the city allowed developers to construct without the foresight to build one new public high school that would have reduced the burden on Corona del Mar High School, or leave Our Lady Queen of Angels as it is, or relocate it to an area that is better suited for a project with such proportions. The plans speak to the very issue that those behind the proposed expansion have demonstrated little, if any, real concern for proportion, and the proposed design is completely out of place in this residential community.

It became painfully obvious more than a decade ago that something needed to be done to address the egregious traffic woes that Corona del Mar High School, Our Lady Queen of Angels and St. Mark's, all of which are responsible for the problem itself, create. These are issues that the city has and continues to ignore.

That is not what we consider progress. It is negligence.