June 5, 2000 | By Madeline Moss
Hi everyone, I just got back from the "let's widen Interstate 50" meeting. There will be three more of these, where Caltrans meets with the citizens. It was going to be a meeting where they tell you what is being done and you can feel free to use airspace asking your questions, but a few people asked some really good questions, and then Ms. [Lauren] Hammond [Sacramento City Council member] showed up and told us she really didn't like the idea, which made me feel much better. 

It was presented as a description of the expansion, and the "alternatives" we were offered were about where we would like the extra downtown offramps to be. 

www.dot.ca.gov/dist3/Planning.new/master.html is their website.

You can comment to them on line and get a better idea of what it was I was trying to tell you all. I recommend you put in your 2 cents. 

To me it seemed bad, bad, bad. Adding more lanes seems to enable more sprawl to happen, while not addressing air quality and public transit concerns. And, the El Dorado Hills to Sunrise portion of this is already in process, bacause it is being funded by El Dorado County. How nice! 

Ms. Hammond is on the Air Resources Board and the Public Transit Board [whatever their true names are], and while it was my impressions she was not in favor of
this, she didn't have any solutions to offer-up Other than this either.

In other words, while she did say how much she did not like this and state her reasons, she also said she felt backed into a corner to agree to this, as the transporation problems are already in existence and will only be getting worse.

I say "light rail. light rail, light rail" and while I did ask at the meeting [in several different ways] how the light rail project for Folsom was coming, they hemmed and hawed and said the money might not be there. They also said that the people they asked preferred cars to any other type of transportation as their mode of vehicle to work. I think that was ridiculous! Like asking a 2 year old if she wants a bath. 

Nobody likes change. But we can't live in the SUV bubble forever without compromising our children's health. And you know downtown air quality is what's being impacted - not the El Dorado Hills air quality. 
 

Madeline Moss is a member of the Sacramento County Green Party County Council.

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