May 3: Growth Implications
In your editorial Sunday, April 27, concerning the mayor's race you expressed satisfaction at the direction Tyler has taken over the past dozen years.
You suggested either Barbara Bass or Laura Corbett would continue on essentially the same path and and this I am in complete agreement. Both those candidates are committed to the path of "growth and development" that is supported by the political and financial establishment in Smith County.
But I would like people to consider the full implications of the growth being promoted.
Consider the many stories carried in the Tyler Paper over the years in which various citizen groups asked government for relief from this or that development project only to be rebuffed. Whether it is a high rise hotel looking onto their back yards, a gigantic development scheme that will bring traffic and pollution to a formerly green space or the building of dangerous petroleum facilities in a residential area, the answer is always "we must have development."
When people wonder why traffic congestion has become unbearable, why tens of millions must be spent on a new jail or why people must be driven from their homes to accommodate yet more roads and highways, the answer is, in fact, "growth and development."
Growth certainly brings profit to some people. The real estate broker, the property developer, the banker and the land speculator have all enriched their bank accounts with proceeds earned through growth and development. I begrudge no one a fairly earned profit but ordinary people have fared considerably less well.
Costs of new jails, new courtrooms, new roads, airport improvement, new schools, new government office buildings and inevitably, more government employees will not be the only burden on our citizens. The increase in crime and traffic congestion is an indirect tax levied on everyone in Smith County as is the general degradation of the quality of life and the environment. While the few have profited from growth, it is everyone who will pay the costs.
If Tyler and Smith county were places of high unemployment there might be some justification for pursuing policies of high growth, but that is not the case. I have yet to see any serious discussion of whether people, not just the elites, want Tyler to become another Dallas, replete with crime, high taxes and all the other ills big cities demonstrate.
To say we can become a major metropolis and escape the negative consequences is, at best, naive and, more probably, self-serving.
The time has come for a full and forthright public debate on this issue and I would like to hear all three candidates for mayor give their views on this subject as the start of that debate.
Eric Rathbone
Smith County Chair
Libertarian Party of Texas
Smith County Chair
Libertarian Party of Texas
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