Dear Editor:
This letter is in response to the overcrowding, congestion, air pollution, lack of housing codes and the building quagmire ruining Moab.
For over 40 years, my wife and I, from Golden, Colorado, have visited Moab to bicycle, hike and photograph Arches and surrounding areas.
This past month, we found ourselves backed up in horrendous traffic. We discovered what it means to live in an overcrowded, overwhelmed and overpopulated city: Moab.
We saw more motels springing out of the dirt than weeds in a vacant lot. We sat in gridlocked traffic. We saw incredibly poor city planning with no housing codes. We witnessed no sense of complimentary “theme” in the buildings springing up without any sense of complimenting the colors of the mountains. Your town looks like an Erector Set gone mad. Junk piles and debris all over the place. Moab looks like it’s lost touch with nature. It’s suffering “exponential growth” which, in the end, leads to collapse.
Your loss of quality of life shows in the gridlocked traffic, hordes of people hiking and biking the trails, and the mob overwhelming Arches National Park. You’re allowing developers to build 10,000 beds in a city that can only handle 5,000 people. What’s the point? Edward Abbey would vomit in his grave if he saw what you’re doing to yourselves. It’s a Faustian Bargain with a nasty result. Any chance you town folks might attend your city council or run for city council, and advance a “Moab Population Stabilization Policy” for your city while you still stand a chance for some sanity?
If you fail to act, you will become another congested, gridlocked, polluted and horrible American city that lost its ability to coalesce or function with nature.
Frosty Wooldridge
Golden, Colorado
