OPPOSE SB79: Insufficient historic protections
Senator Becker,
We urge you to vote NO when SB79 comes back to the senate for its concurrence vote. While the bill was amended in the Assembly to allow some protections for buildings on a city’s local historic register, these will be insufficient to preserve the look and feel of Mountain View’s Historic Retail District H and the immediate vicinity, which includes buildings not only on our city’s local historic register, but also eligible for the California and National Historic Registers.
The key point is that many buildings on these historic registers are adjacent to others which are not on those registers, but complement their look and feel to provide a historic presence in the core three blocks of our downtown. SB79 would allow these adjacent buildings to be demolished and replaced by 7 story or higher modern buildings. These new buildings would tower over our few remaining historical buildings leaving us with a sad reminder of who we once were and what we once had. Our former historic retail district would be ruined.
Thank you for considering our views on this critical issue.
Robert Cox, Louise Katz, Nazanin Dashtara, Muriel Sivyer-Lee, Toni Rath, Peter Spitzer, Maureen Blando, Jerry Steach, David Lewis, Carol Lewis, Hala Alshahwany, Carole Griggs, Leslie Friedman, Nancy Stuhr, Natalie Solomon, Sean O’Malley, Diane Gazzano, Lorrie Wormald, and Alice DeGuzman
For the Steering Committee of Livable Mountain View
