By Norm Ihle ?letters to the editor
I am writing this as a follow-up to my earlier comments about the Cristallago development. This is truly all about the money!
I was surprised to find two Web sites explaining Cristallago”s home and golf course “vision.” This vision is to take our beautiful countryside and make it look like Tuscany, Italy. Excuse me? Home buyers will be able to choose from only four styles of homes. So, in fact, everything will look the same. One of the endearing aspects of living in the country is the diversity of the landscape: the rolling hills, the oak trees, etc. If Cristallago has their way, they will rip out the oaks and move 500,000 cubic feet of earth to change the countryside forever.
This vision is not one of countryside, but rather a raping of our land and replacing it with cookie-cutter homes. All this to make these developers and land owners multi-millionaires at the expense of the people of Lake County! This sounds more like a nightmare than a vision!
Cristallago wants to build a golf course before upgrading the sewage treatment plant. The proposed golf course requires 576 acre feet of water per year. The water will be coming directly from Clear Lake. Building the golf course first without completing all the upgrades to the sewage treatment plant will result in tons of nitrogen running off into the creeks (as well as farmland) and ending up in Clear Lake. This will wreak havoc on the lake”s bio-system.
The golf course should be a minimum of five acres away from any farmland. I know some pear farmers who are up in arms about the close proximity of the golf course to their orchards. These good men having been farming for years, but the Cristallago developers do not care about them. They want this golf course in at all costs.
The homes are listed on the Web site at a cost of $425,000. This would equate to $276 million to Cristallago. Add the 325 timeshare units, the 100-room hotel and the golf course, and we are talking approximately $300 to $325 million.
The planning commission and board of supervisors should require the developer to submit a performance bond for the total cost of the project. This bond will help insure that the project will be completed. If it is not completed, the county would receive enough money to return the land back to normal. Absolutely no work should begin until this project has insurance that it will be completed. We do not want Lake County looking like Rio Vista (where the developer went bankrupt mid-project and left 800 concrete pads with no homes and just walked away.)
As you can clearly see, Cristallago”s plans are all about the money. The major question becomes: Will the planning commission and board of supervisors have the courage and the integrity to send Cristallago back to the drawing boards?
Norm Ihle,
Lakeport
