Kudos to Katcho! 

We appreciate Katcho Achadjian’s vision for Nipomo by keeping it user friendly for walkers, joggers, and equestrians. A framework for multiuse trails has been laid out, but only a few have been accepted by county parks. Ride Nipomo, through its membership, has been cleaning, clearing, and trying to keep easements open as housing has flourished into unending subdivisions. We have been told that these easements are good for 24 years and to be patient. Just try asking someone who has extended their landscape to the street—see if they will give back the dirt or landscaped easements that were intended to be there in the first place.

It won’t happen. You won’t be greeted kindly, nor will the land suddenly reappear. Our four remaining supervisors had a chance on Dec. 1 to share this goal with Katcho, but unfortunately they declined to be part of a partnership between government and volunteers. For more than eight years, many volunteers/activists have been providing, at no cost to the county, free labor, landscaping, tools, dump fees, and other services they can offer to keep Nipomo clean and rich with its heritage of open space not culminating in a cement/asphalt jungle plaguing us from L.A. to S.F.

Maybe this is one of the reasons government is failing us: too much volunteerism and not enough paid staff members. We must have been born into the wrong era.