Letters To The Editor

Spokane matters

City needs redeveloped downtown

To the people opposing the River Park Square redevelopment, look no farther than downtown Tacoma for a lesson to be learned. This is an emergency. For there is no time to waste to ensure a vital, retail-oriented downtown Spokane.

Have the naysayers considered what they have cost themselves and other taxpayers by filing lawsuits, delaying projects and not supporting their elected representatives every time progress is suggested? I’ve been in Spokane since 1975 and we still don’t have a north-south freeway, for example.

As for healthy downtowns, look at Phoenix. It had a deserted urban core. Malls ruled. Then they finally got their act together - retail, hotel, government, convention and sporting venues in what had been a driedup shell. If timely action had been taken through the years, millions of dollars could have been saved.

We have that opportunity now. But if it is allowed to pass, the heart will be cut out of Spokane and that will cost us more in the future.

River Park Square can be the keystone of the new Arena, the library, Crescent Court and even the Spokane Transit Authority depot. Without the keystone, the other parts of the arch collapse.

We elected the City Council. Let the members follow their unanimous decision: parking for River Park Square. Richard C. Fontaine Spokane

Just get along with drivers here

R.M. Kirkpatrick’s (“Drivers here just don’t get it, Letters, Feb. 8) “I would rather drive a motor home in Los Angeles than in Spokane” rhetoric is old and boring. He needs to deal with it or go.

I’m tired of all the whining about Spokane traffic when there are a whole lot more serious topics to concern ourselves with, like the poor souls on the street who have no cars - and no reason to whine about such petty things.

Learn to drive where you live and get over it already. Cindy Peterson Spokane

Roskelley shouldn’t get paid vacation

County Commissioner John Roskelley receiving his salary while mountain climbing is what (former city councilman) Chris Anderson was criticized for - double dipping. Marion Bond Spokane

BUSINESS AND LABOR

WWP reliable? Now I’ll tell one

Re: “More WWP clients to shop around,” News, Feb. 11).

Here we go again. The story quotes Washington Water Power Co. energy services manager Roger Curtis, “We hope customers will choose WWP based on our reliable, low cost energy (let’s compare that with Grant County Public Utilities District) and exceptional customer service” (let’s look back at Nov. 19, 20, 21, etc., and examine WWP’s exceptional customer service).

Then, we must remember the previous outage and conjure up, in our minds, WWP’s exceptional customer service. Remember its expedience and diligence to reconnect everybody, with the promise to reflect the outage on our bills? I don’t remember a flicker, let alone a reflection, on my bill. It came across about as bright as the night of Nov. 19.

I guess WWP comes in like the Chinese proverb, “A liar, even when telling the truth, is never believed.” Dick Ripley Spokane

We’re beset by manmade monster

The world is becoming a very strange place. From North Carolina comes the story of a bloodless, fleshless creature demanding it’s First Amendment right to continue to promote a substance that has sickened and killed millions of human beings.

This alien being is not from a faraway galaxy. It’s an earthling-created monster that stretches its tentacles into every nook and cranny of the globe and affects the lives of billions. We call it the corporation. In the case in North Carolina, the corporation peddling tobacco is demanding a right once only afforded to living, breathing citizens.

To create a decent human, two people must put in considerable thought and commitment, wait nine months and spend the next 18 years dedicated to that investment.

When a corporation is created, a lawyer is hired, papers are filled out and, almost instantly, an immortal entity is created with the power to pollute, bribe governments, push dangerous products and destroy entire cultures. It is endowed with more rights than its human creators.

Not being human, corporations don’t have morals or altruistic goals. Decisions antithetical to community goals or environmental health are made without misgivings. In fact, corporate executives praise non-emotionality as the basis for objective, profit-driven decisions.

Tobacco corporations are just the more outrageous examples of this ingenious device created for obtaining profit without responsibility.

It’s time to remind corporate creatures who gave them their artificial life - and who can take that life away. Russ Moritz Sandpoint

System hard on the partially disabled

It appears that our current Washington state Department of Labor and Industries disability program serves neither the taxpayer nor the injured.

The way the system is designed to work, a person must be either totally disabled or it is assumed the person is able-bodied and capable of full-time work - regardless of what that work might be.

Most injured people in this web are partially disabled. Many have talents that can be put to use to bring in some financial help to a struggling family caught in hurtful circumstances. While some people do take advantage of the system, most truly need help.

If a person is injured, yet can find some kind of parttime work that they can physically tolerate, but they are forced to sit at home doing nothing, what good is that to anyone?

Why can’t L&I be revamped to allow those with partial disabilities to work as they are able, and be covered when they are unable? Social Security allows for this, why can’t the Washington state L&I?

Our Legislature should look into this. Changes are needed. Linda J. Reed Spokane

ABORTION

Adoption is the answer

Re: L.L. Stone’s letter of Feb. 2 (“Put your beliefs on the line”):

If all of us who oppose abortion were truly bombing clinics, many doctor’s offices, buildings and a major Spokane hospital would have been obliterated years ago. It’s also obvious that Stone supports abortion because having a child is too expensive. Never try to tell me that a human life has a price tag.

I’m sure that about 95 percent of our mothers, when discovering that they were pregnant with us, cried out of fear and disappointment. Your mother had a choice, and she chose you. Your right to life is the same as every other human conceived on this planet. No one is more deserving than any other. How dare we snuff out life when we ourselves were blessed to receive it.

I agree with Stone’s solution. Those who desperately want children and cannot physically bear them should sign up at abortion clinics. I promise you that those infertile and childless people would line up and be willing to pay for the pregnant woman’s health care and raise the child when it’s born.

Adoption is the answer to abortion.

I’ve given birth to three children. I know the stress and strain, both financial and physical, of bearing a child. But I would rather, if I were single, take nine months out of my life to give life to a child, with the financial and emotional support of the adoptive parents, than to abort that child and live forever knowing that I will have to answer to my God as to why I killed an innocent child.

Please support adoption. Micha’el Alegria Spokane

Study conclusion seems questionable

The New York Times, in reporting the results of a psychological study of women who have had abortions, (News, Feb. 12) clearly shows that the Times has an agenda.

The Times reported that this study shows that abortion does not trigger lasting emotional trauma in young women who are psychologically healthy before they become pregnant, period. The Times doesn’t say 50 percent or 80 percent are not affected. It simply says that it doesn’t exist, period, except in those cases where women are likely to have been feeling bad about their lives before terminating their pregnancy.

How convenient. Who determines if these women were likely to have felt bad about their live before their abortion? Are they saying that it doesn’t matter, anyway, with these women?

These researchers claim their findings challenge the validity of laws mandating that women seeking abortion be given information on mental health risks. Sounds like the researchers have an agenda themselves.

This whole thing smells fishy to me. Dick McInerney Spokane

LAW AND JUSTICE

Justice, yes, but so messily achieved

Most of the U.S. has by now heard the jury’s verdict regarding the civil liability suit against O.J. Simpson. Most of the United States also has formed an opinion by now as to Simpson’s guilt or innocence.

I followed the inept first trial (the criminal phase) and wasn’t too surprised at the verdict of not guilty. Not allowing vital evidence to be submitted and a judge and prosecution team more concerned about how they postured for the media was garbage.

Yes, I felt that Simpson, the famous running back that I grew up watching in the NFL, was guilty. But the prosecution did not prove beyond reasonable doubt that he was guilty. Therefore, he was found not guilty.

Being found not guilty did not prove that Simpson was innocent. But, according to our wonderful laws, that’s it - case closed. You can’t be retried for the same crime. I accepted that.

But then there’s the ability to retry someone for the same crime. This time, we’ll call it a civil case. The penalty isn’t incarceration. It’s money.

The lawyers for the Goldman and Brown families did their job well (they should have been the prosecutors in the first trial). The jury, for the most part, did its job well. It’s unanimous, 12-0. Simpson did cause what he was found not guilty of in the first trial.

I don’t blame the Goldmans or the Browns. If I were in their shoes, I’d seek at least the same vengeance, perhaps more.

The only problem I have is that the system allowed this case to be tried twice. Ken Whiting Post Falls

THE ENVIRONMENT

Study damage logging roads cause

Again, the timber industry is being asked to show some responsibility for its actions and, once again, it seeks to avoid it. The most current example is the response industry is giving to the Clinton administration’s proposal that these corporations start to pay for their logging roads in our national forests.

In the Feb. 7 article (“Budget asks loggers to pay for roads,” News) industry spokesman Mike Tracy sidesteps the issue of fiscal responsibility by stating that these roads are also used for recreation and hunting.

These citizens are not asking the government for more roads. As a matter of fact, they would probably benefit from fewer roads. This was recognized 21 years ago when Sen. Dale Bumpers stated, “Unfortunately, the building of permanent roads in many areas has created new problems by encouraging uncontrolled access to remote, lightly patrolled forest areas with an attendant increase in litter, vandalism, fire danger and an increased encroachment on the solitude which these areas once offered the hunter, the fisherman, the hiker and the naturalist.”

Roads have many negative impacts on our national forests. They fragment wildlife habitat and populations which may cause genetic deterioration from inbreeding. They facilitate the invasion of weeds, pests and pathogens. They alter watersheds resulting in increased peak runoff and storm discharge which may cause flooding downstream.

There are over 370,000 miles of roads in the national forests - eight times the length of the federal interstate highway system. It is long past time for a careful examination of their fiscal and environmental costs. Hal Rowe Native Forest Network, Inland Northwest, Spokane

Road charges will cost taxpayers, too

The Spokesman-Review’s Feb. 7 article by Eric Torbenson about loggers paying for the roads needed to remove timber from Forest Service sales fails to adequately address how that would affect bids for Forest Service timber sales.

It is a well-known fact that for each restriction placed on logging, the bid prices go down. Some restrictions were needed but those are already in place. Insisting on more and more is blatant greed by the preservation groups.

This is, in fact, a clear manifestation of the desire by these groups to eliminate all resource extraction on all public lands. I wonder who they think they are fooling. It could only be each other. The public at large is pretty wise to them by now.

President Clinton’s statement that causing loggers to pay for the roads would save $55 million is very shortsighted. In fact, it will cost the public much more than that in lost revenue. This will certainly be made up in other taxes.

And where should we think the money is going to come from to fight the inevitable forest fires? The Forest Service is hurting for money to fight fires as it is, and is unable to find the funds to plant trees in the areas where large fires have destroyed millions of acres of forest.

It is important to remember that many of these roads are used for hunting, fishing, recreation and just driving around in our forests. This is not something that only loggers should pay for. Gary M. Garrison Kettle Falls, Wash.

Story pointed up Corp’s ineptitude

Many thanks to staff writers Julie Titone and Susan Drumheller for their piece on the cottonwood trees being cut along the St. Joe River. It was very well written, a model of balanced points of view, yet it also demonstrated again the arbitrariness of the Army Corps of Engineers’ actions.

For decades the environmental quality of life in the American West has suffered at the hands of the Corps. Let biologists and hydrologists, not military engineers, decide how best to manage water courses. It is evident that the right hand of the corps knows not what the left hand is doing. Fish, trees, eagles and people all pay the consequences.

Titone’s articles on environmental matters are greatly appreciated. Paul Lindholdt Spokane

Logger’s deed surprising, reassuring

Is there more than a little irony in a logger chaining himself to a tree to save habitat for eagles, riparian woodlands and his view? (Feb. 11 Spokesman-Review)

Who would have thought - loggers in defense of the environment - but it’s happened. Sometimes you can’t put a price on the little treasures in life.

You tell me there’s no hope for change and I give you St. Maries, Idaho. Robert Oeinck Spokane

Hooked on oil and paying for it

Climate change is real. Fossil fuel consumption releases carbon dioxide, a classic greenhouse gas. The atmosphere is retaining more energy. Wild weather and lots of broken records are already here, but we ain’t seen nothing yet.

We have set it up and now we will have to try riding out disaster.

We could be using alternative fuels were it not for the power of Big Oil. The United States was the only industrialized nation not to sign the pact for reducing carbon dioxide emissions. How will we explain this to our kids when weather becomes one of our biggest killers? Maybe there will be few of them to ask questions.

Big Oil is also the major player in keeping hemp from the people. Food, fuel, oil, paper, fiber, medicine - countless natural hemp products would cut into profits of Big Oil’s pharmaceutical, petrochemical, synthetic fiber and motor fuel empire.

Marijuana is Big Oil’s strongest ally. With the political influence oil interests have purchased, they can perpetuate the myth that any relaxation of marijuana laws would mean the end of civilization. It’s going to cost them more and more, but they’ve got enough money to keep cramming the “marijuana is deadly, the root cause of all evil” spiel down the throat of anyone who will listen.

If some of this seems farfetched, observe the fight over medical marijuana. Mary Toulouse Spokane