Letters To The Editor

WASHINGTON STATE

Roach puts family values to work

Re: “State scores well for policies, reality is harsher,” if Washington’s children’s policies are so great their results would be great.

I train public school educators nationally on family issues and have observed the results of differing policies. The states mentioned with favorable climates for raising children (Utah, Vermont, North Dakota, Iowa and Wisconsin) are family friendly vs. child’s-rights states.

Policies and courts uphold parent’s rights in Utah, including runaway and drug treatment laws.

Public school administrators respond as advocates for parent concerns.

Students are expected to abstain from sex so contraceptives and forms of sexual behavior aren’t taught (or inadvertently promoted). Utah has abortion notification and consistently has lower teen out-ofwedlock pregnancy rates.

North Dakota has similar policies and rates. Washington state can do the same by electing Sen. Pam Roach as governor. Elections determine these policies, so voters should ask tough policy-revealing questions.

As the mother of five Eagle Scouts and member of the Senate Social Services Committee, she plans constructive changes by exploring alternatives.

Roach will expand school funding while increasing parents’ rights and continue to untangle child protective services. She first called for hearings in the Wenatchee sex ring. Elect Pam Roach governor. LeAnna Benn Spokane

Senn is not the consumer’s friend

Here’s a simple economics question: If your business expenses are 160 percent more than your income, how long will you be in business? Impossible to survive, you say? Yet that’s exactly the rules of the game that Insurance Commissioner Deborah Senn is forcing insurance companies to play.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Principal Mutual Insurance Co. says it paid about $32 million in claims in Washington last year, but took in only $20 million in premiums. So for each dollar that came in, $1.60 went out the door.

Commissioner Senn would have us believe that Principal Mutual, like all other insurance companies, is raping its customers with allegedly high prices so it can protect exorbitant “profits.” If the insurance market is so lucrative in Washington, why have more than 30 companies packed up and left the state?

Pierce County Medical reports it is losing $1 million a month on individual policies. Senn has so abused her regulatory authority that 16 lawsuits have been filed against her. Insurance companies have had to go to court to get rate increases that normally are approved through an administrative process.

It’s hard to imagine a worse scenario for consumers. Yet Senn is regularly, even gleefully, defended as a Ms. David who has self-righteously crippled giant Goliaths.

As for me, I hope the giants don’t fall. Then the only insurance player left would be the government, which has been Senn’s plan all along.

Don’t let Washington suffer through four more years of consumer-oriented “reform.” Send Senn home in November. Berge A. Borrevik Spokane

LAW ENFORCEMENT

Bad rap for WSP dispatchers

I am responding to Cynthia Taggart’s June 23 story regarding the swim coach who did not like the response she received from a State Patrol dispatcher (“Woman upset over encounter with deer, WSP,” Handle, June 23).

Carolyn Magee now realizes the potential hazard of abandoning her damaged vehicle on the side of the freeway. She fails to understand, however, the tremendous stress dispatchers must face daily.

State Patrol dispatchers are trained to be professionally polite and must not become emotionally involved in situations. They face tragedies daily and cannot maintain their professionalism when emotions interfere.

Calls like Magee’s are received many times a day and are handled efficiently, as distraught, excited and angry callers are put at ease by the calm voice of the dispatcher. The State Patrol Communications Center is frequently extremely busy with telephone and radio contacts. You may realize this when you call the State Patrol to ask a routine question and your conversation is continually interrupted because that dispatcher must also handle all radio traffic for officers in up to seven counties.

Unlike the way things are handled at other police agencies, State Patrol dispatchers, respond to all incoming and outgoing telephone calls as well as to citizens who walk through the front door. Magee would have seen this for herself if she had stopped at the State Patrol office that morning instead of driving past the front door as she headed east on the freeway.

Before criticizing State Patrol dispatchers, I think Taggart needs a lesson in reality. Walk a mile in a dispatcher’s shoes before commenting on compassion. Susan Spencer Spokane

SPOKANE MATTERS

Duplicity behind road deterioration

During the 220th anniversary of independence of this country, I am reminded of the reasons this great country fought for and won independence: the right to represent ourselves, to govern ourselves, and the opportunity to better ourselves.

More often than we realize, these rights are slowly being taken away. Our taxes are going up at an amazing rate. Due to new computer programming, the county is able to reassess our property and reevaluate on a more regular basis. In the process, our taxes in the last three years have doubled and tripled. Our wages seldom increase and never at that rate.

Remember when the city wanted to float a bond for schools, roads or whatever, and your property was valued so low? The bond that was just a few extra dollars a few years ago now makes a sizable difference on your newly evaluated property.

What have they done with the double and triple taxes that we now pay? Why do they need a bond for repairing the streets? Why not use this newfound money from the extra taxes?

I sincerely hope people will note this when they vote for or against any new bond issues, starting with this new one for repairing the streets. The city has let the streets get into a deplorable condition just so people will vote for the bond. I think we should know where all the extra money has gone before we vote to spend another nickel on taxes.

Soon, some of us may not be able to afford our own homes. Mike R. Etten Spokane

Review, follow the street money trail

Arsenio Hall used to have a segment on his show: “Things that make you go hmmmm.”

If the Spokane City Council and media hounds would spend more time investigating how to solve the problems of our streets, rather than spying and hounding Councilman Chris Anderson, could we get some issues resolved in a timely and financially prudent manner? Hmmm?

I also wonder if Anderson had been spending his time off with California developers who wanted to expand the Spokane market, if it would have been a news story.

It appears Spokane reporting has moved from the old-fashioned investigative reporting on serious problems of the day to politically driven, Enquirer-style tabloid news.

I think inquiring minds want to know how the city came up with an alleged $1.5 million to support a soccer arena when it is crying for a $30 million bond to fix streets. What about the previously consumed street money?

The old general fund seems to be the snake pit of government consumerism. Why isn’t anyone reporting on where the purported $11 million a year has gone to fix the streets? Which streets got fixed? How much was spent? Does patching a street constitute fixing it?

Spokane’s streets can throw the best of all-terrain vehicles out of alignment. The patchwork-quilt asphalt and pothole dodging that is part of daily life here is a symptom of a much larger problem. Is anyone guarding the bank?

Let’s see a real news story about what’s being done with the money in Spokane’s street fund. Carol Bergin Spokane

It’s all in the timing

Coeur d’Alene goofed! If they would have sent out their assessment notices like Spokane did they may not have had so many protests. In Spokane, our last day to appeal was June 27, and we received our notice on June 28. A.R. Johnson Spokane

Store cheating its customers

A South Hill grocery store was recently cited for violations by the Weights and Measures Department of the city of Spokane.

It seems the store is also guilty of false advertising and overpricing. They advertise an item as on sale (“big savings!”) but guess what? The computer hasn’t been changed from the original price to the sale price.

If you aren’t alert at the checkout or don’t check your prices when you get home, you aren’t aware you have been overcharged. Most shoppers don’t take the time to check prices and so pay the higher prices.

This has happened not once or twice but many times and seems to be a consistent pattern of overcharging - another example of corporations taking advantage of the little man. E.A. Malone Spokane

THE MEDIA

Springdale takes another bashing

Our community suffered a great loss early in the morning of July 1, when a fire destroyed the Town Hall and the Rural Resource Center. But that is not the only loss we as a community suffered.

The media, both television and newspaper, have printed or aired comments from two or three people who still insist on the “raucous politics” aspect, and one TV station even aired that the local industry of our town is alcohol related. Not true!

Our town and surrounding community is full of people who work hard and are family and community oriented, not drunks or into drugs, as you would have people believe.

As far as the community being divided over political issues, everyone has the right to voice their opinions. (What would the world be like if everyone thought alike?) After the news media rushed into our town and all the speculation, gossip and finger pointing, we as a community still don’t know what caused the fire and we are divided more than ever.

I don’t understand why the news media won’t talk to the people in the community, instead of the same ones over and over who put the town down and lump all the people who live here together as lawless, drunken dopers. It’s simply not true.

We are tired of all the bad publicity when so much good is happening. Why don’t we hear about the new basketball court being constructed at the park, mostly by community volunteers? Pat and Lonnie Anderson Springdale, Wash.

Cougar stories unsatisfactory

Again, The Spokesman-Review has managed to print only half the story. I found the articles on cougar-human conflict in the IN Life section (June 30) contained several misleading statements and were flawed by outright omissions.

In one article you quote the experts that “hunting them (cougars) appears to have little overall effect on their populations…” Yet in another article we read that “ending cougar extermination efforts” is one of the main reasons that “mountain lion population numbers are higher now in the 10 Western states than they were at the time of Columbus.”

Nowhere in any of the articles did you attempt to explain the correlation between increased human-cougar incidents and the reintroduction of wolves and grizzly bears into habitat once dominated by the big cats. Given last year’s record 72 human-cougar “incidents” in Pend Oreille, Ferry and Stevens counties, I find it unbelievable that your staff writers failed to ask the “experts” what impact the “managed growth” of grizzly bears in Northeast Washington and North Idaho is having on the cougar population.

Over in central Idaho it is obvious that cougars are being pushed out of the back country and into foothills areas by rapidly expanding imported wolf packs.

Predator management is a relatively new field and the rapidly increasing number of cougar-human conflicts is more evidence that these “experts” you cite are merely learning as they go. Steve Busch Spokane

GOVERNMENT AND POLITICS

Nethercutt does good job for farmers

The local news media have reported many untrue statements about Rep. George Nethercutt that come from Judy Olson and other Democrat sources.

Olson charges Nethercutt with inaction, or delaying action, on the 1995 farm bill and of not representing the farmers in his district in the formation of that bill. The facts are that Nethercutt only took office on Jan. 4, 1995. The first meeting of his Agricultural Advisory Committee was on Jan. 18, 1995.

The committee was formed of 50 people, including me. Almost all were farmers, including quite a few members of the Washington Association of Wheatgrowers, from all around the 5th District. The meetings were held in early 1995 and were open to all, even Democrats.

Nethercutt also hired Jack Silzel, an Oakesdale wheat grower and member of the Washington state Association of Wheatgrowers, to be his legislative assistant.

Contents of the 1995 farm bill that finally passed follow the recommendations Nethercutt’s Agricultural Advisory Committee arrived at.

Democrats also charge Nethercutt and the Republicans with trying to cut Medicare and some other programs. Republicans actually tried to increase those budgets more than enough to cover inflation and population increases but, in most cases, by a little less than the spend-happy bureaucrats wanted. These are cuts in the Democrats’ lingo, but they are economies required by economic reality.

Objections to Nethercutt’s service make about as much sense as does the silly idea of fighting violent crime by disarming only the law-abiding. Don Druffel Colton, Wash.

Social Security bungling continues

On June 29 I listened to a television program that seemed to be a rather strong bit of propaganda. It concerned the Social Security system, along with a persuasive soothsayer, Roger Peterson, who was the moderator.

The program went into the history of the program, including statements by Franklin D. Roosevelt and others who saw the need for such a program for aged people who needed financial independence.

There are a few things radically wrong with the presentation. They were right when they said that Baby Boomers facing retirement will face tremendous problems. And to face all this, they advocated taxes that will offset the needs of aged families.

They did not mention a few vital deficiencies in the program. They did not mention that our congressmen (including Tom Foley) have borrowed $439 billion from Social Security reserves, plus interest. Payment of this is on the wish list. The funds should have been segregated.

The administrator said that over 40 million people are now receiving payments. This includes drunks, dope addicts and immigrants.

They did not mention that our life expectancy has been increased by 14.1 percent since 1935. That is all just fine, but it does mean that a lot of us old jokers who should have died at 74 are now living to 88. What does this do to our cash reserves?

The system is flawed and should be corrected. In the meantime, the plan is no success. Carlton Gladder Spokane

They perform under the big dome

Does one really have to wonder about the voter apathy in today’s political mess? I think not.

We have witnessed the willful destruction of a truly wonderful nation by three consecutive generations of self-adoring, narcissistic public clowns who call themselves the Congress of the United States.

Indeed, even the sound-bite language of these types is telling, when “my party’s” thoughts are a “plan” and the “other party’s” thoughts are a “scheme.” Shame on this entire country. James E. Ady Veradale