The 13 disappointed authors of the commentary on West Hill annexation (Renton Reporter, Nov. 26. “West Hill faces uncertain future”) perhaps fail to see the irony of their position. They rightly say that “the City of Renton worked tirelessly in our favor, investing considerable time, effort and finances” toward producing a ‘yes’ vote. And yet still they lost. Not only that, they did so by close to a dozen percentage points. We can debate further whether annexation to a city struggling to provide even basic services to its existing residents would somehow have led to the streets of the West Hill being paved in gold, as the authors of the piece seem to suggest. Speaking personally, I seriously doubt it. What’s beyond debate is that a significant majority of West Hill residents like myself took a long and hard look at the annexation plan as outlined by its proponents and decided that it was ill advised at this particular moment in the City of Renton’s budgetary crisis. To characterize such people as somehow inherently conservative, frightened of change, or otherwise morally faulty strikes me as a singularly graceless reaction by the losers in this debate. The people have spoken. And we did so in the full knowledge of the facts, at the grass-roots level, without the aid of the “considerable time, effort, finances” and other resources flaunted by our opponents.

Christopher Sandford, Lakeridge