Saratoga News

Letters & Opinions

Speak Out

Homeowners do
not wish to sell
their property

Shame, shame, shame on the Madronia Cemetery board to even consider taking property from two families who do not wish to sell. The board is raising havoc in a very peaceful, loving neighborhood.

The cemetery does not need more land. All the board wants is to make the cemetery a Taj Mahal. We want to keep the cemetery just the way it is.

Jeanne Alexander

Oak Street

Let the cemetery
board members
hear from you

The Saratoga cemetery board wants to change the flavor of the Madronia Cemetery by creating a larger presence on Oak Street. They want to build a new entranceway through the family home we have loved for 29 years. They have solicited drawings for a chapel, fountains and a scatter garden.

The board of trustees for the Saratoga Cemetery District is comprised of five men: chairman Phil Boyce, Dr. Joseph Clevenger, Andre Bogart, Dr. Gregory Fox and Robert Leonard. These are your Saratoga neighbors. If you have questions or feelings about "friendly eminent domain" or expansion of our pioneer cemetery, let them hear from you.

Nikki Teeter

Oak Street

Saratoga does
not need a
'McCemetery'

Just before Thanksgiving, you ran an article about the Saratoga historic Oak Street neighborhood's outcry against the expansion plans of the Madronia Cemetery board of trustees. I appreciate that your reporter and photographer covered the cemetery meeting where Saratogans were treated with arrogance by board chairman Phil Boyce. The other silent board members that were in attendance were only referred to by Mr. Boyce to assist him in cemetery details that he and every Saratogan in attendance already knew. It not only exposed the dynamic of the board, but it exposed his weak attempt to be nonchalant and not fully poised and empowered to literally change the "footprint" of not only the cemetery, but the historic village neighborhood.

The article's placement also exposed the Saratoga News' allegiance, and I question your priorities to the community you serve. How could the Saratoga News not place an article that ran on the front page of the San Jose Mercury News only days prior on their own front page, about their own people?

All of Saratoga needs to ponder what the cemetery expansion vision holds: a "McCemetery," like Colma and Piedmont, hardly holds the values of the historic Village and surrounding neighborhoods. My hometown of Saratoga holds history in its heart, but certainly doesn't want the old orchards and current homes to be covered with contemporary and fashionable gravestones, scatter gardens, fountains and a funeral chapel.

We are a working community of the living, and the historic cemetery would become a modern, overdramatic grave sprawl that would reflect values so shallow that not even the deep graves could excuse such ostentatious cemetery-industry grandeur.

There is no reason to bully cemetery neighbors into selling their lifelong properties. Perhaps we should really look at the leadership, accountability and tax allocations. Perhaps such an issue deserves the front page of the Saratoga News.

Cynthia Taylor

San Francisco
Cynthia Taylor was raised on Oak Street and is a 1986 graduate of Saratoga High School.

Editor's Note: When we have a news story that is accompanied by a news photograph, it always appears on the first page of our news section. Our cover photograph almost always goes with the cover story, a feature that appears inside of the newspaper. That has been the policy of this newspaper for many years. We did run a headline across the top of the front page to indicate that the story about the cemetery controversy was inside. The placement of the article has nothing to do with any kind of "allegiance" but only "exposed" our normal newspaper policy, which we followed today in the placement of the cemetery story--without a photograph--on page 1.

Voicing concern
over use of funds
of taxpayers

As a long-term property tax payer in Saratoga, I am concerned about the recently revealed proposal by the Saratoga Cemetery District Board to build a grand entrance on Oak Street. This is an inappropriate use of these funds for several reasons:

* The Madronia Cemetery serves only part of the population. Statistics indicate that fewer than 25 percent of the annual deaths in Saratoga are being buried at the cemetery.

* The existing undeveloped cemetery land is more than adequate for its needs well into the future.

* The proposed entrance would be totally out of place in this long-established residential neighborhood.

Please let this otherwise unchecked board know that as representatives of the public interest they are not fulfilling their civic responsibility to spend taxpayer funds wisely and for the common good.

Links to contact information and architects' drawings of this project can be found at oakstneighborhood.googlepages.com/home.

Lynn Weber

Pierce Road