Opinion: Any change to Measure S should only be for bike trails

To the community,

There is an important meeting about bike paths coming up June 30 at 9am at the South Lake Tahoe library. If you support bike paths, you should attend and make yourself heard.

Remember Measure S? Money from it was designated to go to bike paths, ball fields, the ice rink and Tahoe Paradise Park. Well, the money for everything except bike paths has been spent or is allocated, but the bike paths haven’t been built and there is a pile of money there that the ball field people see and they want to get their hands on it.

Now we have the proposed Measure R, written by ball field proponents. Its purpose is to divert money from bike paths to ball fields. The voters voted for bike paths and ball fields in measure S. The ball fields already got their money. We still don’t have our bike paths. We need bike paths. Our economy needs bike paths. We don’t want the bike trail money diverted to ball fields. We need to complete our bike path network.

If the JPA (who manages the money) wanted to do what the voters want instead of what the special interests want, they would have written measure R to allow the unspent bike funds to be spent on bike paths other than the ones specified in the original Measure S. It’s simple. The problem is that they don’t want to do that because they want to divert the money instead to their pet ball field projects.

Measure R should be re-written to re-allocate bike path money for other bike projects that weren’t covered by the original Measure S. Keep bike path money for bike paths like we voted for or thought we voted for in the first place. Please attend the meeting and voice your opinion.

Hank Raymond, Meyers