Open Letter - We Will Not Be Silent

Open Letter to the Council: We Will Not Be Silent.

Speech at January 19, 2016 Cupertino City Council Meeting

For over a year, the citizens of Cupertino have voiced their concerns about the amount of development in the community and the government’s apparent desire to restrict our involvement in the process. We exercised every viable and conceivable avenue to get you to listen to our concerns. We have spoken before you, and spoken individually to you.  We have rallied, we have written, to no avail.  The council has been tone deaf; we hope you hear us now.

The council must represent us, but has used every conceivable avenue to silence us. And our access to the process has been limited by the following:

• December 2014 – Stating that a vote on the General Plan Amendment would be postponed, only to approve a wholesale rewrite of the General Plan.

• Packing the agenda so that items are not scrutinized properly making the public input process less effective. This takes two forms

• Compressing several complex issues into one agenda item thus giving public insufficient time to study and respond or comment on the issues separately.

• Placing so many items on the agenda that individual item cannot be examined adequately.

• Spring 2015 - Promising a workshop for residents on Community Benefits that was never held while quietly holding a series of them with developers.

• May 2015 - Bowing to public pressure to limit building heights, only to circumvent the limits by offering 2 open-seasons for General Plan Amendment requests encouraging developers to request them.

We have been polite, patient and bided our time. We hoped that you would listen to reason, and you have not. Instead you brushed aside our reasoning and concerns as fringe and lectured us on our behavior as if voicing our concerns was a violation of the law.  We are concerned that our municipal government does not have the will or ability to act in the best interest of the city and so we have been forced to act.

It is never an abuse of the system to exercise one’s constitutional rights.  It is in fact, honoring those rights.

This initiative is not solely about building heights, density, millions of square feet of office space, or adding more students to our already over- crowded schools; it is also about democracy.  It is about whether the citizens of this city have the right to a voice in the future of their city or if they are to be regulated to the role of mute bystanders while the right to our future is delegated to outside interests by the council.

You have decided that we should suffer and be silent, and WE have decided that WE WILL NOT.

Liang-Fang Chao, Peggy Griffin and Govind Tatachari

Members of the Committee Supporting Cupertino Citizens’ Sensible Growth Initiative