To the editor:

I want to know why there isn’t more being reported on West Park. (Developer) Gerry Kamilos is nothing more than a politician. He is a multi-millionaire land developer. He doesn’t actually have the West Side’s best interests at heart. People can’t honestly believe that.

There have been many people saying that the only supporters are those from the Bay Area and they don’t understand the impact. I grew up in the Bay Area and completely understand the impact, and all of it is negative. If anyone out here has ever seen the actual Port of Oakland they would be dead set against this project. Even a miniature version of the place would be bad. The outlying neighborhoods around the Port of Oakland are terrible. They have tried to improve them a number of times over the years, but they are still undesirable places to live. Who wants to live around a train yard? This has been a high-gloss, expensive campaign to get the West Side to approve this project.

It looks shiny and promising, but it is all a trick to make people think it will be the valley’s saving grace. I strongly believe it will be quite the opposite. If you read deep into the intentions of this developer you will read that the amazing promise of 37,000 jobs is nothing more than a slight probability, and that even that number is at the end of 30 years. This is a three-decade project if it goes the way the developer plans.

Most of those jobs will be forklift drivers anyway.

Also, they promise to bring income to our communities. Where are those people going to spend their paychecks? Right, in Modesto and Turlock. What’s the point?

Can you imagine double-decker trains crossing Highway 33 several times a day and night?

His fancy ad campaign also boasts of taking large trucks off the interstate, but what it doesn’t say is that they will be leaving the interstate to drive down into our communities.

All they will be doing is taking those big trucks off the Bay Area highways, not ours. I am sure that we have dangerous materials already traveling through our towns via the rail system. This project will easily triple that likelihood. There will be a lot more than nuts and apricots on those boxcars.

Why aren’t more people talking about the other side of the coin?

Danielle Davis
Newman

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