I know this is late for writing a rebuttal to Michael and Claudia Donnelly’s letter in the June 15 letters to the editor, but I get tired of people complaining about things that don’t affect them. I had a house built in Renton in 1987; at that time there was a policy in place, at least that was what I was told, that the city did not allow builders to cut down trees that did not interfere with the house. Therefore, the builder was going to leave an ugly, bent tree in the front yard of my house. I told the builder that I did not want the property unless he got rid of the tree. I should have noticed that there was a “huge” maple tree between my property and the neighbors. I had to pay to have the tree taken out so that we could build a fence between our properties, and my dear neighbor told me that if I had the tree taken out that I would have to have to root ground out, which I did. The house behind mine had a maple tree not four feet from their backyard sliding door, which they had to have taken out.
Now, almost 25 years later, a maple tree, fir tree and cedar tree that were left there have grown to be huge. I get no sunlight in my backyard during the winter months, and during the rest of the time, I get huge maple leaves all over the backyard, helicopter seeds on my roof and gutters, and cedar needles on the roof of my shed and ground, plus an added feature is that it is the perfect thing for raccoons to climb up onto the fence. One morning, I found four young raccoons on my garage roof!
Another case of people meddling in other people’s business was that someone I knew had a large farm in Bothell. The father was getting too old to farm. They had a buyer for the farmland, but, a university professor said that he liked driving down the freeway and seeing the farmland. Well, the good old professor put up litigation preventing the sale of the property. It was in litigation for a couple of years so the buyer backed out. Why didn’t the professor buy the land so that he could watch vegetables grow instead of meddling in someone else’s life.
Yasuko Yamamoto
Renton
