Dear Editor,
It is easy to become embittered toward the Mayor, city council, and city manager for withholding vital information from Oakdale citizens, whose credit may have been damaged from doing business ‘on line’ with our city regarding water, sewer utilities. All citizens, not just our newspaper, should be alarmed that vital information needed to serve its readership was kept from the Oakdale Leader.
What has happened, I feel, is that Mayor Paul and that group kept from us during the two weeks of council hearings regarding the “Trieste” real estate hearings, the fact that $118,000 had been stolen from Oakdale City Government. This deception created an artificial calm in our city until the Trieste project passed council twice (if it has actually passed).
But, okay, citizen taxpayers know what to do regarding the abyss made by city council and mayor and by an expensive developer’s attorney paid for by the Oakdale city government.
Meanwhile, we can be happy and mightily thankful for the continuing flow of much freely given information from our working level city staff who are doing their job, and doing it for all of us. When I asked for a brief, sequence of what will occur once things do really start at Trieste, Community Development & Services Director Danelle Stylos gave us this sequence: at North Stearns Road, this is what will begin to occur: (taken from a Stylos letter — The applicant will need to submit a final tentative map for approval. Once that is approved, then the applicant can proceed with submitting building permits to construct the residences. The building/grading/civil plans will include all the roadwork, pipes, utilities, landscaping/irrigation, residential construction. Once the ‘plans’ are approved (all fees paid), the work can commence (infrastructure first then construction of residences to follow).
We are talking about hundreds of jobs here at a project Oakdale citizens will be carefully watching as it progresses. Thank you, Danelle, and all of Oakdale City’s working staff.
Larry Kay