Riverbank needs to rethink gigantic Riverwalk growth proposal

We all can’t live in the garden. This garden, this one in the heart of California. The one that produces over 300 different crops, a bounty that produces thousands of jobs, helps to feed families of the world and make life more enjoyable.

To propose that senior citizen housing would be a better use of the incredible soils that exist under the proposed Riverwalk project west of Riverbank and north of Modesto is like saying we seniors are stupid! That we didn’t learn from our parents, that we weren’t paying attention when the Los Angeles basin turned from agriculture to acrimony. That we didn’t notice when the Bay Area became concrete and noisy and that Stanislaus County started to become the end of a 100-mile commute sucking up hours out of people’s lives for a dream that seldom comes true.

No, we are not stupid. We do remember the 1997 floods that sent the Tuolumne and Stanislaus rivers over their banks, destroying homes and property. Are we to expect that Riverbank officials and the Army Corps of Engineers will hold back the Stanislaus River as it floods again within the Riverwalk project?

How is adding over 1,000 acres of more people to Riverbank going to prevent the cost of water from going sky high for existing residents who are already rationing under our current drought?

I heard that the Riverwalk project is wanted by the property owners. Not entirely true, and so what? Nobody can do more than what it is zoned for. You can’t have a hog farm in the middle of a residential zone, and you can’t build senior housing over the best farmland in the world without community approval.

And there’s the rub.

Are community representatives going to be so naive as to wipe out more of our best farmland with hundreds of acres within Riverbank’s currently approved (3,728 acres) borders? Why? Where is the need?

Care more for the needs of residents than the wants of some who see sprawl as a means of personal enhancement, while Riverbank citizens pay more for water, fire and police services.

We already have plans to consume 88,558 acres within existing cities and their general plans in Stanislaus County. Plus 16,647 acres urbanized or planned to be urbanized in unincorporated communities like Salida and Keyes.

The entire community of Stanislaus would lose some of the very best crop-growing land to concrete and congestion under the cutesy name of Riverwalk. No thank you. Sprawl hurts us all!