To the editor:

In response to the Nov. 12 letter from Jane Seward and Lynn Gas, “Don’t rush Taylor Run Project,” I’d like to augment their environmental concerns with an observation that there are additional issues here – climate change concerns and the lack of sensible spending priorities.

Tearing vegetation out of Taylor Run has four immediate physical and climate-based impacts: an incremental increase in both greenhouse gasses and temperature due to a loss of vegetation, a loss in stormwater retention and the erosion and instability of the stream banks. Given that stormwater and climate concerns are already issues in the city, I’m not sure why Mayor Justin Wilson and City Manager Mark Jinks, both finance and contract guys by training, want to intentionally and knowingly exacerbate existing issues.

If we take it as a given that this method of “natural channel design” isn’t, as its original designer has observed, suitable for small streambeds such as Taylor Run, I’m left wondering why Wilson and Jinks are so committed to the project. The bulk of the issues with Alexandria’s lack of federal compliance lie in failures of the built infrastructure of the city and not in a small stream flowing through a stretch of woods.

While Alexandria’s pollution issues are anchored in maintenance, design and capital spending decisions made well before Wilson and Jinks came on the scene, ignoring those problems in favor of this sort of illusory project is, in equal parts, myopic and foolhardy.