An Open Letter to all Mercer Island Officials and City Council

April 2, 2017

An Open Letter to all Mercer Island Officials and City Council

I have reviewed the proposed revisions to the Residential Development Standards and I am completely opposed to all of these changes, as well as the philosophy driving them.

Contrary to the absurd assertion in the new language, there is no such existential thing as "community values" (Page 16). Values are only possible to living and thinking individuals. When the document claims:

"The city's goal is to balance community values inherent in the neighborhood character with property values."

what this is clearly saying is that, "we're tossing out some mumbo jumbo as a weak excuse to justify the further theft of your property, and we hope you property owners are too stupid to recognize this." Well, the emperor has no clothes and we are smart enough to see that. Property belongs to the individuals who purchase it and the city has no business asserting control over and destroying our actual property rights in the name of some fiction called "community values."

The job of the mayor and council is to protect the rights of the residents of this city—not abuse them. With this proposal, the city bureaucracy has simply asserted the authority to impose your standards upon the rest of us—something to which I never agreed and which I certainly do not authorize. The authoritarian nature of the proposal is made clear when the document states:

"... while also allowing flexibility in the project design."

Allowing? Allowing!! We've come full circle. Where is the concept of private property rights represented in such a statement? Where is the freedom of every individual to control their life and property as they see fit while pursuing their own happiness? This language makes it clear that rights are not an issue. Instead, the control of all property belongs, by simple assertion, to the state and certain privileges may be doled out by a higher authority, as it sees fit.

The numerous specific details of the revised standards are unimportant. They are almost uniformly bad for everyone, but they should not be opposed on a case-by-case basis, as to seriously discuss them is to concede the city's right to engage in these actions at all. I do not. I reject the entire enterprise and urge each of you to recognize the inherent abuse being done to every property owner on Mercer Island. Please block these oppressive restrictions and instead work to return not less but more direct control to each person over their property.

Sincerely,

C. Jeffery Small

Mercer Island, WA 98040

[A link to this article can be found at: http://smallthoughts.com/mi/De...]