Letters: Vote for Kranz, Measure K

Many Americans have an aversion to paying taxes. Some even boast about avoiding it. But I’ve noticed that whenever Americans travel to other developed countries, they’re surprised by how good life is there.

The trains are fast, the airports modern, the roads smooth. There’s even healthcare and childcare for everyone. This is possible because they generate more money from taxation.

Of course, if you don’t care about unsafe walking and biking, mediocre schools, potholes in the roads, and bad public transportation, fighting taxes can make sense.

In Encinitas, when folks argue against the proposed Measure K, they’re usually making the same old knee-jerk anti-tax argument about not trusting the government to spend wisely. But here in Encinitas, we really do need improvements to our infrastructure, which was built before Encinitas was even a city. If you’ve ever seen the winter flooding problems in Leucadia, you know what I mean.

And if you look at what our city council has spent money on over the last several years, it’s pretty impressive. The new Pacific View Arts Center is fantastic. The Cardiff Rail Trail is beloved. And it’s impossible to bike from northern Leucadia southward past the Pannikin, where Streetscape has been completed, without noticing how much safer you feel.

Of course, all of these improvements were decried as wasteful and unnecessary before they were accomplished. You may recall how the naysayers whinnied about the cost of purchasing the Pacific View property. (Somehow, they hadn’t noticed that its three acres were selling for the same thing as three tiny lots on Neptune Avenue.)

Now, of course, everyone realizes it was a steal and loves the arts center.

This is just a reminder that foresight and courage are required to make such things happen. That’s where my friend Tony Kranz comes in. Thankfully, he (and a few key others) understood the property’s value ten years ago. That’s because Tony has a vision — a no-nonsense, steadfast vision.

This no-nonsense vision also enables Tony to see our local housing situation so clearly—unlike his opponent, Bruce Ehlers, who pretends we can ignore state housing laws.

Tony knows that ignoring those laws is disingenuous. That it’s a pandering to pie-in-the-sky notions about preventing development. That it aligns with regressive NIMBY values. Tony and I went to San Dieguito High in the 70s, and we’d love Encinitas to be just like it was then.

Unfortunately, like the mythical isle of Atlantis, Encinitas is lost to time. And hey, there’s still plenty of magic here! But we do have a statewide housing/homelessness crisis, and the laws some folks are trying to ignore are merely an effort to fix those problems.

Really, it’s kind of immoral to wear blinders here in our little paradise and pretend they don’t exist.

For these reasons, and many others, I encourage you to vote K—for Kranz and Measure K. I also strongly recommend votes for Allison Blackwell and Destiny Preston, who share similar values.

Darius Degher
Leucadia