Patterson Irrigator

Developer Gerry Kamilos was in town Wednesday to speak before the Rotary Club, which had plenty of guests in the audience. His major pitch for the 4,800-acre West Park project he proposes for the former Crows Landing Air Facility was 34,000 new jobs (37,000 on his fancy mail piece received this week and 24,000 in a previous presentation, but we won’t be picky).

By comparison, Patterson is about 3,700 acres. That includes the Village of Patterson housing project getting under way on the city’s east side and another 600-plus acres of undeveloped industrial land in the West Patterson Business Park, where Keystone is already proving to be an attractive addition to our city.

Next week, Kamilos will start a series of community meetings to give out information about his project near Patterson’s southern boundary. He will meet three times here in Patterson and once each in Grayson, Crows Landing and Newman before the week concludes. Other meetings will follow in Riverbank, Oakdale, Turlock, Ceres and Modesto, cities hardly faced with a colossal industrial project in their back yard.

But the purpose of this column is not to challenge the developer about his plans or his figures, but to urge West Side residents to afford themselves the opportunity to attend one of his sessions. There, they can weigh the proposal, ask questions, and decide for themselves whether the West Park development would benefit or injure Patterson’s future — and whether an inland Port of Oakland is what we want next door.

West Park’s schedule of meetings is listed on this page.

So is next Tuesday evening’s membership meeting of WS-PACE, the local grassroots organization dedicated to battling the Kamilos plan. WS-PACE acknowledges it has an uphill battle against a well-financed developer who has chosen (with the approval of the Stanislaus County Board of Supervisors) to plop in our midst the largest California development of its type north of the Tehachapis.

So give up a few hours next week. Register in advance for a Kamilos meeting — it’s required — and head on down to City Hall at 7 p.m. Tuesday to hear WS-PACE’s side of the story.

RECOMMENDED READING

Arriving in the mail the other day, a gift from a relative, was the small book titled “Geezerhood.”

Author Ben Goode writes about “what to expect from life now that you’re as old as dirt.” You may remember Goode, who wrote other serious essays including “The Fine Art of Worrying” and “If Life Were Fair, Horses Would Ride Half the Time.”

I highly recommend “Geezerhood” to my peers. It has enlightening chapters such as “What’s in store for your body now that you are chronologically disadvantaged” and “Pick-up lines for Old Goats.” One of the more educational is “Tax strategies for senile old saps,” but I’ll have to admit I got nothing out of “High-tech geezing and the Internet.” Couldn’t understand a word of it.

Author Goode claims you definitely need the book if “after two years of intimate friendship and great conversation, you finally notice that the guys you have been sitting next to down at the park are really bronze gargoyles.”

And, if you need further incentive, the book is published by Apricot Press in Nephi, Utah. How could you go wrong?

FOR THE SPORTS FAN

You’ve undoubtedly heard of “tennis elbow,” “soccer knee” and “bowler’s wrist.”
But beware. The latest affliction that is spreading worldwide is “cell phone ear.”

Remember where you heard it.

AND FINALLY …

Don’t tell anyone, but I heard Babe Ruth took an abnormal quantity of vitamins.

Ron Swift is editor/publisher emeritus of the Patterson Irrigator. His column appears weekly in this space.

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