La Roca Mexican Restaurant

Starting Monday, October 30, 2006, La Roca will be opening for breakfast. Juan, Maria and Marselo really want to be able to offer a wider variety of things to eat and they want to hear from you if you have any more ideas. Please comment and let's help them all we can.













Tasha and Kacie enjoy a great lunch

Halloween in Tangent

Halloween is near and a resident who lives at the Ashwood Estates has decorated her home in preparation

Free?

A resident, Jay Sperling, asked me to post this topic. Here is his letter:

FREE?

If a bus stopped in front of your house and offered to take you to
Fresno for FREE, would you go, even if Fresno wasn’t a place you wanted
to be?

Apparently TAP-PAC thinks that’s a great idea for Tangent, according to
their latest letter. We’ll get a bunch of “free” stuff to turn Tangent
into a place most residents don’t seem to want.

And how is all this stuff free anyway? Don’t we pay county, state and
gas taxes? FREE? Nonsense. We’re paying.

TAP-PAC will probably tell us that since we’re paying for it anyway, we
should get it. Yes, we should – if it’s something we want.

TAP-PAC and the Council are stoked up about “free” culverts and asphalt
from the County. Why aren’t they equally excited about getting
planning and codes enforcement help from the County. It’s just as
“free.” We’re paying for it already. But not a word about those.

And we sure need the help.

When our neighbor Ron Oliver contacted Linn County Building and
Planning last spring to get help with the drainage problem on our
properties, the County Codes Enforcement Officer said he was “getting
dozens of calls from people in Tangent” desperate for help with
drainage and other issues.

Does that sound like a city that is ready to grow?

And when the city let the Linn County codes enforcement into Tangent
temporarily, in 45 minutes he saw through a problem that the Council
has dithered about for nearly a decade. That’s what happens when you
bring in experts.

And when the Council refused to act after the Codes Enforcement
Officer’s inspection? He said, and I quote, “I feel sorry for people
in Tangent. If it was me, I’d get out.”

Does that sound like an endorsement for business as usual? Does it
make you confident we’re headed in the right direction? Are you
convinced Tangent has the right infrastructure, planning and review
processes – no matter who pays for it – when the newest subdivision
floods in its first winter?

TAP-PAC tells us that if we exercise our right to vote NO on Measure
22-65, it will mean more expensive staff time and money.

It’s not the citizens of Tangent who are wasting expensive time and
money.

We aren’t the ones who failed to take the Planning Commission’s
recommendation to give them a year moratorium to get a new
Comprehensive Plan in place. If the Council had done this, we wouldn’t
be in this fix and we sure wouldn’t have this much anger here.

The citizens aren’t the ones running a process that has twice been
kicked out by the courts. TAP-PAC can’t blame us for wasting expensive
time and money – look in the mirror! By the way, among the
“particularly sad” things we haven’t been told is how much have we
spent on all this already? We’re nearly $20,000 over on the auditing
contract (per the last Council meeting). What do the other accounts
look like?

Well-managed growth is a lot more than getting developers to pay for
stuff, or getting tax money from some other pocket, or even setting a
population estimate. It’s planning for the community that residents
want, not the community that somebody else, like developers, wants to
give us. It’s being able to promise people they can move here and know
their property will be protected. It’s believing that people are
entitled to their opinions without being called names or accused
unfairly.

I know we’re only one example, but for our family the cost of business
as usual has been a lot higher than ZERO.

It takes courage to do stuff like enforce ordinances, and listen to
everybody’s opinion – even if it means you might not get the answer you
want. That would be the kind of RESULTS we could be proud of.

Jay and Alice Sperling

Tangent Extremists?

The TAP-PAC or Tangent Accountabilitty and Performance Political Action Committee, currently has a membership of two people. City Councilor Curt Smith and the treasurer, Brenda Perry. They sent out a mailing titled Know the Facts. In this document, Del Shirley and I am accused of being anti-growth and I am accused of opposing growth on the Brush property something I have never said. I have always advocated well-planned and well-managed growth. I, along with many others, are also accused of being extremists. This prompted a resident of Tangent to submit a letter to the editor. I am reprinting it here for your chance to review it.

"Tangent ‘extremists’?

Thanks to an anonymous letter circulated to Tangent residents on Wednesday by something called TAP-PAC, we now know what to call people who believe they have the right to have a say in the future of their community.

We used to call them good citizens. According to TAP-PAC they are really extremists, a label used repeatedly in the letter.


Helpfully, the letter even names these Tangent “extremists,” although — are you surprised? — the letter itself is unsigned.

In taking aim at these so-called extremists, the letter says — among many other things — that “misinformation has been circulated about the drainage (problem) in Tangent.” Funny, we and our neighbors always thought that was water flooding our yards every winter. It’s likely the homeowners in Tangent’s newest subdivision, which was flooded in its first winter, thought it was water too. It sure is great to know it’s not water but only misinformation.

The fact is, for years the Tangent City Council has ignored repeated attempts to solve wintertime flooding on our property and our neighbors’ properties. This summer, thanks to the leadership of the Council’s newest member, Tammy Caspar, the Linn County code enforcement officer was brought in to inspect the problem. (Tangent itself doesn’t have any effective code enforcement, another problem conveniently ignored by the Council and TAP-PAC in their rush to develop the city.)

We have been forced to spend lots of money in legal fees trying to protect our home, all because some members of the Tangent City Council don’t really think enforcing ordinances is their job. They don’t think protecting residents, the people who live here already, is their job. They’d much rather waste money and lose court cases in a rush to develop.

Personally, we prefer the extremists.

Jay and Alice Sperling, Tangent"

A Citizen's Initiative comes to Tangent, Oregon

According to the Democrat Herald, and to invitations received in the mail, there will be a meeting at the Central Electric Training Center, 33309 Highway 99E, Tangent, from 7 pm to 9 pm on October 12, 2006, to listen to a proposal for a different population projection, (1501 by 2026). Once again the question arises; 1501 or 1798. According t o the invitation, this is not another council meeting. It is a citizen's meeting initiated by citizens to talk about the consequences of the city's measure and to ask for input on a the citizen's measure. According to the Democrat, the city elected not to give the citizen's a choice of population projection. "councilors who voted for the higher number said there is no legal basis for 1501." With this initiative, the presenters will be offering a choice again. Please share your thoughts.