May 12, 1973
Play That Tune Again!
What Can We Preserve?
Government
Has To Cooperate!
By Ronald Reagan, Governor of California
YOSEMITE
VALLEY - - Now that we've come to a little more static population,
we have time for taking stock and asking what we can do to preserve
the things we want to preserve.
For instance, we can look up and down the
coast at areas not in public ownership and see if any of it should
be preserved for future generations. We can't tell an owner to keep
his land but do nothing with it. If that land is important to the
rest of California, then the state should buy it.
In California 91 per cent of the people
live in urban areas. And obviously there is going to be a sprawl
around those areas. Some developers are now building with the idea
of creating a country atmosphere -- what California had when there
was more space and fewer people.
What inducements can we offer a subdivider,
for example, to build around just a portion of the land and leave
the rest as open space? The government has to cooperate.
You can't encourage a builder to leave
the open space and then tell him to pay taxes on it as if it were
land ready for subdivision. If he is willing to declare it open
space, local government should tax him only on what it is being
used for, not what it could be used for.
[Editor's Note: The Ronald Reagan display was featured
at The Hoover Institution and Library, which held a free
exhibit open to the public on May 12 through August 15, 1998. The
exhibit was displayed at the Memorial Exhibit Pavilion, next
to The Hoover at Stanford. One of the displays was "Tower
Sunset Magazine: A Century of Western Living, 1898-1998".
It featured posters, documents, photographs and memorabilia tracing
one hundred years of the West's rich historic connections to Stanford
University and Herbert Hoover .]
Comment
©1958-2003 Bulldog Newspaper Foundation.
All Rights Reserved.
|