Mayor Cline is right to worry. Minnesota-based, privately-held and fabulously wealthy Cargill has no right to fill and pave its easily-restorable Bay tidal and marshlands in Redwood City with a new green-washed mini-city. They know this, and so they've hired top PR firms and Arizona-based luxury home mega-developer DMB to "sell" RWC and surrounding cities and stakeholders on their plan to cajole the RWC council to upzone their old and no-longer economically viable salt evaporation ponds in the Bay to allow a massive housing development. Cargill knows that as long as they can spend years selling their pastel-colored and "green-washed" vision of their plan for unsustainable sprawl onto Bay fill, whose levies will soon be threatened by rising sea levels and other costly maintenance nightmares, they have a good chance of getting enough votes on the traditionally very developer-friendly Redwood City city council to upzone their property.

Under their current "tidal plain" zoning designation they can't do any of what they want. And if everyone else has to abide by the zoning on their property, and expects to be protected by the zoning on their neighbors' property, why should Cargill's spending millions on PR and whatnot to get the zoning changed be rewarded, allowing them to destroy our precious and threatened Bay purely for their selfish desire to make hundreds of millions (or billions) and leave us with the after-effects of poor and unsustainable development in the path of sea level rise?

The Redwood City council can and should put an early stop to all this nonsense, which is not doing anything good for anyone. Everyone knows damn well that we need good transit-accessible infill growth -- especially in cities like Redwood City. And that filling the Bay for any reason -- let alone for out-of-state corporations and developers to extract obscene profits at the expense of our natural resources and quality of life -- is not something anyone would (or should) stand for around here. So the council should stop playing like the flirty girl in the corner batting her eyes all innocently while saying "gee, I don't know, do you think we should dance with these Cargill/DMB predators? They sure talk a good game, so maybe we will, maybe we won't, we just can't make up our minds yet ..."