Guest View

John McKay in a recent column said the city must grow. But how do you define growth?  He mentions the good work of General Plan Advisory Committee (GPAC), but does not mention the 30,000 additional residents the GPAC is considering adding to the 40,000 already here. Such numbers would overwhelm our community, change it and put it at risk.Thirty thousand new residents will place overwhelming demands upon municipal services and infrastructure. You would think that the city will gain from the new property tax but the city receives very little of that as the state, county and school districts siphon most of it. Cities that relied on a residential tax base suffer and are at risk of becoming insolvent.This city struggles to meet its current demands. It has difficulty in maintaining what we have. The city has deferred millions in needed street and other projects but it does not have resources to address them. We spend millions on property for ball fields we don’t need for which we have no resources to build. Point being we cannot grow without revenue to support such growth. We have to grow with all other considerations, including our quality of life. It must be a planned and balanced approach.Realtors and developers have been engaged, and are salivating at paving over precious farmlands and open space. I attended a number of the public meetings of the GPAC and attendance was few in number and always the same people: property consultants and developers. But that is not public engagement.  If you want to gather information from the community, you also scientifically survey and/or present the projects for municipal vote, neither of which has happened. At the moment, county landowners and developers run this city and gave the council an ultimatum last week to which this weak council yielded. So who is running this city?When you start addressing interest in the downtown, John, I would expect you would have many business owners interested as the effects are immediate and close by. But many consider the Southeast Quadrant, where most of the growth will occur, as a distant project and cannot fathom the impacts of traffic, crime, noise, pollution, sewage and the need for higher taxes to support a massive new population.The City has thousands of acres of land within its existing city limits. There is plenty of land to grow up, if not out. Building within the existing city limits/framework is the most cost effective and efficient means of growth—no ifs, ands or buts. Annexing county land and paving over farmlands in light of climate change without a mitigation and adaptation plan and a constrained city budget is irresponsible leadership.John McKay, if you want to discuss the future and growth of Morgan Hill, I would surely like that conversation. Your perspective in my opinion is not aligned with what I believe the residents of Morgan Hill really want and more importantly the protections they absolutely need.—Mark Grzan is a former Morgan Hill City Councilmember/Vice Mayor.

I love Morgan Hill for both its small-town community and its rural open space. Since I love open space, I also love the Santa Clara Valley Open Space Authority (OSA) and Measure T.

Last August, I had the opportunity to speak at a Hitachi conference for Chief Information Officers from companies in Vietnam. This conference was held in Danang, Vietnam, which was in the area of operations during my tour in Vietnam. I took this opportunity to visit some of the battle sites I was engaged in 50 years ago.One of the areas that I visited was Tinh Binh near Quang Nhai. This was the site of Operation Utah where my unit, 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines, engaged two regiments of the North Vietnamese Army. After a day-long battle, we were overrun and had to call air strikes down on our position to survive.I found a villager that lived in the area who was a 16-year-old Viet Cong at the time. He did not participate in the fighting, but he helped the North Vietnamese Army dig their fortifications. He later became an officer, and he and his wife were honored by Ho Chi Minh and General Giap. We walked the battlefield together using my old military map and later he invited me to his home for tea where he and his wife showed me their many citations from Ho Chi Minh.My best friend in the Marine Corps was the executive officer of G Company when he was shot through the chest on the first day of Operation Utah. He survived Operation Utah and we both joined IBM after we left the Marine Corps.Over the past 50 years, he has sent me a Christmas card every year, with which he encloses a picture of his family. I have seen his family grow with kids, marriages, grandkids and now their wives and husbands. All this would not exist if the bullet had hit him a few millimeters either way or the helicopter had not evacuated him in time.Operation Utah was a success for the Marines in the way they kept score in that war. There were 98 Marines killed in action versus an estimated 600 North Vietnamese. If you visit the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C., you will see the names of these Marines on the wall in the time period, March 4 to 6, 1966.When I visited the area of Operation Utah this August, there was a large military cemetery where hundreds of Vietnamese soldiers were interred. These were North Vietnamese soldiers who had travelled from their homes in North Vietnam to fight and die and be buried in this area so far from their family homes. I said a prayer for them as I prayed also for our Marines.Now 50 years after that war, I wonder at the loss we all suffered and the senseless waste. I work with my Vietnamese colleagues in Hitachi, whose fathers and grandfathers fought against us in the same war. There is no hatred or distrust—only a shared sense of vision and cooperation in our work.Thomas J. Watson, the founder of IBM, made many speeches on “World Peace Through World Trade.” I am hopeful for that vision. In Hitachi, our corporate strategy is Social Innovation, developing solutions to make society healthier, smarter, and safe. That means a world without war.Hubert Yoshida is a Morgan Hill resident.