Editor:

A few “locals ” are seeking to control our urban limit line. These individuals and what they are planning to do will have huge control over what will happen to the 45,000 of us who live in Brentwood. It will affect our quality of life.

They have circulated a petition (again) to try and annex their land to the City of Brentwood. They have used the emotionally laden argument of “school traffic” as the means to get those who have arms filled with groceries, children waiting, and under the pressure of families waiting at home or an appointment to sign a petition without disclosing the real meaning behind the need to put this on the June ballot.

The plans for this area, if it were annexed to the city, include more high-density housing. The voters in Brentwood have turned this idea down in the past for very good reason. Everyone knows having more of something does not help property values increase but rather further decreases them. Many people are buying our foreclosed homes as rental properties; few others are buying homes in Brentwood as their primary residence. Measure F will result in 1,300 more new homes, approximately 4,030 additional residents and 35 acres of retail/office/commercial space on 740 acres in the beautiful green hills of west Brentwood. The city has already approved 4,153 homes and 1 million square feet of retail/office/industrial space that has not yet been built. This is not what Brentwood needs.

Measure F will lower our property values, bring more traffic and cram more students into our already overcrowded schools. These types of developers benefit from making promises that never come to fruition, like the Deer Ridge Golf Course clubhouse and maintenance building.

None of the suggestions they have made in their professionally promoted advertising are actually part of the wording in the measure. I encourage everyone in Brentwood to read the measure and vote No. I have no desire to look like Antioch or Dublin, where developers have created blocks and blocks of homes on every hillside and valley available.

These “locals” promoting Measure F and the resulting destruction of these western hills and wildlife corridor do not live in the neighborhoods in Brentwood. Why should we give up our green space in Brentwood when it was bought by developers as is? Does greed always win over the populous?

Wise up, Brentwood! Ask the most important question of all: How did the City of Brentwood not plan for the egress and ingress of traffic for the two schools in the first place, and now how will they plan for it with 4,000 more residents? Did you know we could solve the traffic problem by widening Balfour and changing the existing streets leading into the schools? That is the petition we should all be signing!

Patrick MacIsaac, Brentwood