The letter from the Sierra Club last week about their dream for Klingle Road was puzzling in several regards. They insisted that their position remains unalterably opposed to anything there except a car free 22 foot wide park that would twist its narrow way up the sharp hill from Connecticut Avenue. Yet their urgent e-mail message to their members in July was to either support no road or a road plus a recreational path.

The sad fact is that we have had such an impractical park for the last decade while this street was closed for lack of repair. Far from reverting to a beautiful nature preserve, it has caused the adjacent water course to deteriorate from one of the most pristine creeks when the road was open to a barely functioning open sewer eroding further with each storm.

The distressing thing is that the Sierra Club is diverting so much energy from real issues facing both the District and the Nation in its doomed attempts to close this historic old road around which the entire North West web of roads has grown. The issue was settled years ago when City Council voted to spend the money to fix both the road and the water system surrounding the creek. By threatening law suits and forcing an expensive and time consuming full Environmental Impact Statement, the Sierra Club achieving nothing except delaying the restoration of Klingle Valley. If they actually got their way and the road was closed, the land (given to the public only to be used as a road) would revert to the Klingle family, the City would not pay to fix the water system, and the ecological problem there would become the very ecological disaster that the Sierra Club works elsewhere to prevent.

Gabe Fineman
Porter Street