Danessa's Speech on traffic, air qualify, water shortage

Speech by Danessa Techmanski 

Feb. 2, 2016 City Council Meeting

If you take The Hills, the Oaks, Main Street, Apple, and the Rose Bowl and lump them all together it will add at least 32,000 people to our city every day, not even including the added retail customers. In this area 68% of people drive to work alone which means those developments will bring an additional 21, 700 cars every work day, effectively doubling the number of workers on the road. Due to the locations of those developments they will clog 280, 85, Wolfe, DeAnza, Steven’s Creek, Homestead and Foothill. You will not be able to get into, out of, or through Cupertino. So having all of the extra office space in the world will be useless because no company will want to locate here if their employees can’t get to work.

Secondly, all of that traffic will cause our air quality to plummet. Just  one average vehicle idling in traffic for an hour a day will be dumping 1,239 lbs. of Carbon monoxide into our air each year (3.4 lbs. daily) causing our air quality to worsen anywhere from 30-50% depending on weather factors.

With the additional 32,000 people added to our city we will need to provide a minimum of an extra 2,552,400 of gallons of water per day that we just don’t have., and that’s not even including the extra water for restaurants or hotels.

You also need to calculate in the added water for Vallco’s 30 acre green roof. Sand Hill is trying to wow us with orchards, vineyards, olive trees, and vast expanses of grasses which will require soil depths of soils of 4 ft or greater render the project as an intensive type of green roof. You must also consider that we live in a drought area where storm recapture isn’t going to be huge. 

In summary,  you just can’t pull water clean air, and roads out of a hat. We have to live here, and we elected you to be OUR representatives, NOT the facilitators of greedy developers and investors from overseas.