Choose wisely

Dear Editor:

This upcoming mayoral runoff election presents a starkly different choice for the future of Aspen.

There is Mick Ireland whose support base is socially, politically and economically diverse. Mick is a candidate who fundamentally embraces an environmental and community ethic, and wants only to support and enhance a vibrant social, business and tourist community in Aspen.

And then there is Tim Semrau, who is supported primarily by special interests. Semrau is running on a "less government" mantra that dismisses the overwhelming environmental impacts we experience today from construction as mere "stress." Semrau's only commitment to growth management is to slow down the city's affordable housing efforts by including them in the existing growth management quota system, while most free-market residential development would continue to be exempt. Under a Semrau regime, undesirable free-market projects like the kind Semrau voted for when he was on council would continue to get approved without pause, while there wouldn't be much new affordable housing built.

As Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings wrote many years ago in Cross Creek: "We cannot live without the earth or apart from it, and something is shriveled in a man's heart when he turns away from it and concerns himself only with the affairs of men."

Please vote for Mick for mayor on June 5.

Marcella Larsen

Aspen