Letters To The Editor
IN WASHINGTON STATE
People didn’t vote to trash education
Reports about the budget gridlock in Olympia leave out one crucial fact: Whatever the contract representatives “save” under the $7.9 billion cap will never be replaced.
House leadership badly desires a $600 million savings coup, but maybe we on the East side should try to save the cutters from themselves.
Think about the following realities:
Washington is still last among the 50 states in the percentage of young folks being college educated and trained.
Thousands of additional youths will be seeking college degrees by 2000 A.D.
Tuition for public higher education is approaching the limit that the market in young students will bear.
For three years, administrative structures in higher education have been flattened and faculty salaries put into reverse.
Proven, experienced instructors will continue to leave for jobs which allow them to support their families.
Scattered small tax cuts aren’t as important long term as economic health in the eastern counties due to educated and employable local work forces. Neither are they as important as teachers’ compensation.
Legislators should be reminded that the people who voted Initiative 601 into law know what that law meant: avoiding overfunding and underfunding. It meant stability based on last year’s expenditures plus or minus population changes, and stability based on growth or decline in inflation.
Initiative 601 did not sanction a radical cut at the expense of education and other programs in order to spread symbolic tax cuts, a shortsighted investment. Business people and other citizens counting on the votedin legal intention of 601 limits should clog the legislative hotline. Don Goodwin Sr. Spokane
Tax deal better than California’s
There have been several letters recently from my fellow ex-Californians about how crummy the Washington tax system is and how idyllic Proposition 13 made the California tax system.
I could throw similar numbers around: My old $150,000 California house cost me under $500 a year, and my similarly priced (but four times as big) house up here runs about six times that. The thing that nobody has yet mentioned in these pages is that California also has an income tax that ranges up to 12 percent over and above your federal income tax.
I just calculated out the total of what I would have paid to California, had I still been living there, and I am personally getting one humongous tax break by living and working here. All the other taxes I can think of are about the same: license plates, sales tax, local nickel and dime fees, e.g. sewer rip-off fees. But here, as yet, there is no state income tax.
The downside is, what happens when you retire? My understanding is that there is some sort of property tax break for elderly people in Washington. I will have to investigate this in another decade, but have not done so yet. Dennis DeMattia Spokane
Chilberg of mud wallow fame?
Skip Chilberg is a perfect political appointee by a lame-duck governor. After his Idaho fiasco, he should be an expert on how to tell others how they should use their land. Ken Bryant Spokane
Support parental notification
I read with interest G.A. Clark’s letter (April 22) regarding HB1523. This bill would require a parent, guardian, school counselor, pastor or other reliable adult to be notified prior to an abortion being performed on a not-emancipated female child under 18 years of age.
This bill was passed in the state House in mid-March and sent to the Senate. After no action was taken, the bill was sent back to the Rules Committee on April 23. Nothing will be done in this legislative session unless it can be resurrected through budgetary procedures going on now in special session.
The tattoo bill for children under age 16 did pass both the House and the Senate. It was sent to Gov. Lowry, who is expected to sign it into law. This means parental permission will be required, which is fine.
But a bill regarding parental notification - not permission, just notification - on abortion for a child has been left hanging. Legally, a child also needs parental permission to get ears pierced.
G.A. Clark, send your letter to your legislators, Gov. Lowry and as many newspapers as possible. Working together in small ways, we can make a difference in children’s lives. Teens are still children who need our love, time, encouragement, knowledge and protection. If they cannot get a tattoo or their ears pierced without parental permission, they certainly shouldn’t be allowed to receive an abortion without parental notification.
Let’s give parents the responsibility and the privilege to have control of their children’s lives. Georgia A. Curtis Soap Lake, Wash.
SPOKANE MATTERS
Dirty doings along popular trail
I’m really tired of Goodale & Barbieri’s underhanded tactics with the Centennial Trail next to Cavanaugh’s.
First, the city of Spokane had to compromise the trail width down from 12 feet to 10 feet. Anyone who uses the trail knows that with its popularity, the trail is barely safe for people to pass each other sometimes. At 10 feet, apparently Goodale & Barbieri is willing to risk possible litigation in the event of an accident.
Now the company has reneged on even that agreement by failing to pave the trail. There is no way that a gravel trail will pack well enough to facilitate use by the disabled. To verify that, all they would have to do is ask the disabled. But people who know all the answers don’t waste time asking questions.
I think the city should insist on a proper trail for us. Tom Cameron Opportunity
Taxes go one way: up
Linda Wolverton’s article on property taxes didn’t exactly hit the nail on the head. The politicians are taxing us out of existence.
In 1994, my property taxes went up from $1,449 to $1,820 - an increase of 25.6 percent. The public was told the tax would not go up more than 10 or 11 percent when the system was computerized.
I paid my 1994 tax in protest because of the huge one-year increase. I was told there was nothing I could do about it; if I didn’t like this bill, I would be reassessed and my taxes would be raised even more.
My 1995 taxes went up 6.4 percent, to $1,937. My retirement income went up 2.8 percent, approximately.
With the large building boom since 1990, the tax base must have increased at least 25 percent, plus the sales tax on all the materials and labor. Where is all the money going?
Politicians should be role models for the younger generation. Come on, politicians, get real. K.E. Dyer Deer Park
Return sales tax revenues to sewering
In response to Dan Hansen’s April 24 article, “Aquifer tax collections stagnant”:
The county is bemoaning the fact that $1.2 million remains uncollected, dating back as far as 1986. It bemoans the fact that it is losing double that amount due to state matching funds.
Why didn’t Hansen mention the fact that the sewer fund is losing more than that amount every year, plus state matching funds, just because the county removed the one-quarter percent sales tax, that voters approved, from the sewer fund and placed it in the general fund? With the tremendous tax increases of the last couple of years, I would think the county could place the one-quarter percent sales tax back in the sewer fund.
In 1964, we purchased our home. Principle, interest, taxes and insurance came to $76 per month. This year, our taxes alone are $108 per month. In the last two years my taxes have more than doubled, and most people have had the same experience. I believe there would be sufficient funds in the county coffers to restore the one-quarter percent sales tax to the sewer fund and help keep the sewer hookup costs down, besides installing sewers at a faster rate. Edwin O. Weilep Spokane
GOVERNMENT AND MINING
Babbitt undermining key agency
In light of the campaign being waged by Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt against public land users in the West, it was inevitable that the U.S. Bureau of Mines would be targeted for major revamping. To my horror, I see an essential government service - mineral resources data gathering and analysis by the Bureau of Mines - being dismantled at a time when access to accurate and timely data is needed by public land managers as never before.
The secretary’s motivation is clearly to downgrade the status of the Bureau of Mines to the degree that it becomes a discredited appendage of the bureaucracy with no capacity to influence critical land management policy. To accomplish this end, one would:
1. Close the western mineral resource data gathering field offices in Reno, Spokane, and in Anchorage and Juneau, Alaska; and reduce the Denver staff from 300 to less than 30.
2. Concentrate the Bureau of Mines administration in the East.
3. Reinvent, without Congress’ consent, the Bureau of Mines’ mission in order to diffuse its focus on mineral resources and mining.
4. Create a 15-member advisory committee composed almost entirely of non-mining people to guide the agency’s activities.
To no one’s surprise, given the outspoken animosity Secretary Babbitt exhibits for the natural resource industries, these are exactly the reinvention steps being implemented.
Hopefully, Congress will recognize that the intent and purpose of this action is to render policy makers blind to the facts about the natural resources in dealing with public land use issues. Wallace McGregor Spokane
PEOPLE IN SOCIETY
A day for disabled to speak up
May 7 is National Barrier Awareness Day, a day to heighten recognition of obstacles faced by more than 49 million Americans who have disabilities.
Take the opportunity to alert the temporarily able-bodied portion of the community to the barriers being experienced. Tell them that unless they speak on the microphone, you can’t hear what they are asking. Ask them to read the fine print or make you a large print copy.
Show them how the threshold to the store or the curb cut nearly threw you out of your wheelchair (or your child out of a stroller). Tell them that the sign on the door saying to come to the customer service desk for assistance doesn’t help if you can’t get through the door or ring for assistance from outside. Time how long it took them to notice you or your children over the tall counter and let them know.
Tell them that questions on their job application asking about your disability are potentially discriminatory and illegal.
Let’s eliminate the “I didn’t realize…” barrier as a first step in making our communities more accessible. Krista Kramer Disability Action Center - Northwest
TERRORISM
McVeigh a study in twisted genius
Accused bomber Timothy McVeigh ushers in a new era of criminal monstrosity, one in which evil is both fiendishly clever and inordinately stupid.
For instance, according to the media, McVeigh allows himself to be solidly identified while renting the bomb truck, parks it by his motel for a day, drives hundreds of miles with an unstable nitro-like payload, asks for directions to the Murrah building (this monster was so enraptured with his bomb that he didn’t even know the route to his objective), lets himself be seen hanging around the target area before zero hour and then blithely drives off in a car without license plates.
When he’s stopped for speeding (more stupidity), this man who has just blown up hundreds of men, women and children, surrenders meekly to a state trooper, despite being armed with the dreaded Glock assault pistol.
For all his stupidity, McVeigh displays frightening genius in the construction and placing of a device (or devices) that had the capacity to take down half of a ninestory building from the outside - an incredible feat of demolition with tragic loss of life. An investigation should be held as to how McVeigh acquired this highly specialized knowledge and expertise. Jim Jackson Coeur d’Alene
Bombing aftermath a liberal plot
I’ve read the editorial pages every day since the bombing in Oklahoma City. I am not surprised to see how many people have joined in on the liberals’ attempts to take advantage of that tragedy.
That bomb was set off by a nut, no one else. This talk about him being inspired by talk radio and about Rush Limbaugh, Speaker Newt Gingrich and Sen. Bob Dole having blood on their hands is a joke. Nobody knows what Tim McVeigh’s politics are; it’s only assumed he is right wing. And if he is, so what? Are you trying to tell me that a left-wing bombing would be politically correct?
Men, women and children are dead, and it’s absolutely pathetic that President Clinton and the liberal media take advantage of them for their own political gains. Dave Detrolio Moses Lake
FRINGE GROUPS
Lesson of history is, cool it
The rise of right-wing extremist groups and the spread of their paranoia about government conspiracy to suppress civil liberties is most alarming.
Of particular concern are such groups’ refusal to lawfully submit to federal authority and their rhetoric of armed insurrection against the federal government. This is hauntingly reminiscent of the voices heard through the antebellum south prior to the outbreak of the Civil War. The parallel of the rise of the Southern militias at that time is another disquieting coincidence.
Recent events at Ruby Ridge and Waco, the bombing of environmental groups’ office in Arizona and, most tragic of all, the bombing in Oklahoma show an alarming trend toward ever more-violent confrontations.
One can only hope more moderate voices and level-headed thinking can reverse the present trend. A good place to start would be to stop the vilifying of the government and tone down rhetoric filling the airwaves. Broadcasters have it in their power to help defuse some of this rising animosity - if they have the courage and foresight to do so.
If the present trend of rising anti-government sentiment and action does not reverse, the future may hold far greater violence than we can at this time imagine.
To quote Abraham Lincoln, “Those who do not learn the lessons of history are destined to repeat them.” Robert Kerr Spokane
Review history before deciding
Amber Clough (Letters, April 30) appears to believe Hitler or Stalin could not take over our country because “We the people are the government, and we make up the armed forces.” This attitude is frightening and suggests a lack of historical knowledge. Hitler never broke any of Germany’s laws to accomplish what he did. His police and armed forces were governed by Germany’s laws.
One of the first laws that Hitler’s new government passed was to confiscate all firearms with the reasoning that “the police will protect the citizenry, and criminals will be deprived of firearms by the law.” Sound familiar? It is interesting to note that the British government attempted to control and confiscate the firearms of the American colonists in the 1760s, with exactly the same reasoning.
I reserve my opinion on the advent of local militia, but it has been said those who do not know history are bound to repeat it. May I suggest a short study of Hitler’s government, as well as of the American Revolution and the writing of the U.S. Constitution? G.K. Wilder Spokane
Good people are alert to danger
Following the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, the world soon realized an attack against America was a huge mistake. Today, as the dust settles after the bombing in Oklahoma City and the sad images of small caskets fill our television screens, another sleeping giant is emerging.
These giants are the millions of Americans who deplore random violence, find talk show hate rhetoric offensive and believe their government is not their enemy. Our eyes have been opened. They will be focused on dysfunctional groups in our nation that breed hate, encourage violence and spread discontent. We know who you are now and we will be watching. Yvonne Lopez Morton Spokane