Letters To The Editor

IDAHO VIEWPOINTS

Seems Judy needs remedial reading class

Re: “Funds for foes,” (March 5).

I was amazed that Mayor Steve Judy is so happy with the EPA that he is going to allow the agency to give him money to “explain” its contamination studies in the Coeur d’Alene River Basin. If Judy has problems reading and understanding reports, maybe we should have elected someone else. It makes me uneasy to know we have a mayor so inadequate for the job. Edward P. Phillips Coeur d’Alene

Dedicated taxes should stay that way

Re: the letters from Mildred R. Smith and Norman Schroder, March 5.

When a tax is implemented for a given purpose (gas tax for streets, sales tax for improvement of schools, etc.), it must be earmarked for that purpose alone. None of such money should ever go into a general fund. If it goes into the general fund, our politicians (city, county or state) will use it for whatever they deem necessary and not for the intended purpose. Our tax money represents power to politicians and their special interests supporters.

Regarding our local politicians and their response to letters from their constituents. We have written four or five letters to our senators and have never received acknowledgment they were even received, much less a reply. Evidently, they are not interested in our input.

Try to send e-mail to Rep. Helen Chenoweth. She has no e-mail address that I can find. For further proof, look at the citizens’ vote to impose term limits, which was passed and is now being considered for repeal. I told the politicians what I wanted with my vote. They obviously aren’t interested. Edward H. Zierlein Coeur d’Alene

Republicans make wealth pay off again

Let me see if I have this straight. Idaho’s Republican representatives in Washington, D.C., supported and passed the capital gains tax cut, whereby 90 percent of the tax cut went to the wealthiest 1 percent in our state.

Now, Idaho’s Republican representatives in Boise support raising either the state sales tax or local property tax to keep deteriorating school buildings from collapsing on top of our students. This will result in the middle class paying 90 percent of the tax increase. It makes sense to me - if my income happens to be a couple of hundred grand a year. Paul N. Valanoff Moscow, Idaho

LAW AND JUSTICE

Death penalty for youths and others

The death penalty for 12-year-olds? Yes, but it should only be imposed if the 12-year-old kills two or more humans of any age with malice aforethought. And of course, the manufacturer of whatever the 12-year-old used to kill with should be subject to a corporation-breaking fine. Better yet, impose the death penalty on the manufacturer and attempt to rehab the kid. After all, if adults are not responsible for choosing to smoke and get cancer or get drunk and kill someone, is it fair to put a 12-year-old to death for using a gun, a knife or a baseball bat to kill someone?

Retain the two-thirds majority for school bond passage? Absolutely! It’s the only way taxpayers have to let the school boards know that they’re sick of more taxpayer dollars being spent on more school officials, more school administrators, their bloated staffs, their seemingly unlimited perks and their sky’s-the-limit compensation packages.

Require a license to operate boats if one is over 16 and/or be accompanied by an adult if under 16? Hey, this idea oughta be good for a few dozen civil service jobs with lots of high-paid administrators and enforcers. How about requiring licenses for skate boarders, snow boarders and boogie boarders? I bet they could come up with a jillion and one fun things to license, and add a few thousand more people to city, county, state and federal payrolls to sell, record and enforce all the license stuff. A. Newt Preston Coeur d’Alene

Death penalty for murder? Sure

Re: George Rekow’s Feb. 28 letter.

When I was a kid, I threw a few choice boulders on a man’s roof from an upper road. I was run down, paddled, dragged home and paddled again after my mother heard what I had done. Nowadays, they would have been arrested and have to face a big legal mess. It’s sad that parents have been robbed of all their authority.

When I was in the first grade (I’m 64 now), I ran through the sprinkler. My teacher said, “You do that again and I’ll paddle your little rear end.” I did, and she did, with a big old yardstick.

I had nothing but respect all my school years. When you look a kid in the eyes now, you get back an I-dare-you look. The 12-year-old was lost a long time before he was born. But murder, I’d pull the switch.

Marilyn Montgomery (Letters, Feb. 28), have you ever had a pair of fighting cats wake you up in the middle of the night? I’ll pull the switch on that one, too. Curtis R. Rodgers Clark Fork

FIELD BURNING

It’s not just matter of a few days

To Stan Riggers (Your Turn, March 3) and all grass burning farmers:

What you don’t seem to realize is that it’s not just “three or four days in September” that the rest of us are affected by your burning. The air is dirty and brown the entire burning season. This always seems to happen during the most beautiful late-summer and fall weather and it affects the quality of life for all of us.

On the days when the wind is capricious and blows dense smoke directly northward, people have to stay inside to avoid it, or just put up with burning lungs and stinging eyes because they have to work outside. Even when the house is closed up, it smells like smoke for days. The animals suffer, the people suffer, we are all profoundly affected.

I am a farmer, too. I sell produce and cut flowers to make my living. I do not have to grow bluegrass to pay my bills. There must be other cover crops you can grow to improve your soil. I suggest you start studying sustainable agriculture to see how you can modify your practices.

When grass growing and field burning started, there were few people living here to be affected. But now, the reality is that there are 100,000 in Kootenai County and lots more in Spokane.

If I do something to adversely affect one person, I feel bad. How can you, in good conscience, do something that adversely affects so many people? Susan B. Faville Mountain View Farm, Coeur d’Alene

THE ENVIRONMENT

Logging, desecrating, not the way

Panhandle Forest Supervisor Dave Wright’s “input” may be “sensible,” according to D.F. Oliveria’s Feb. 20 editorial, but it has no ecological value and even less aesthetic accountability. The quality of life that sensible people enjoy, and which draws many others to this region, is directly related to the quality of the environment.

Of course, Oliveria views forests from a purely materialistic-economic standpoint. Yes, enough trees, 30,000 truckloads, could be cut to “build a town the size of Coeur d’Alene.” But at what cost?

It doesn’t matter how many or what kind of trees will be replanted, the Forest Service and timber industry cannot log without permanently disfiguring the mountains and the very beauty that makes Idaho what it is. The beetles, microbes, plants and animals comprising this forest ecosystem have managed it from time immemorial. In the process, they have left no ugly scars to intrude upon the beauty of the land. Logging will not “ensure healthier forests for future generations,” as Oliveria claims. A forest, like a work of art, can’t be desecrated and made healthy (ugly would be the correct word).

Drive I-90 between Kellogg and Mullan to see the disappointing aesthetic effects of logging to communities in this area. Logging will destroy the priceless beauty of this region as it has so many others, and degrade the human spirit as much as the land itself. People of conscience and sensibility will lament this insidious act for generations to come. With Bobbi Dalton (Feb. 21), let’s “fight these corporate bullies.” Frederick K. Bardelli Osburn, Idaho

Corporations shouldn’t be in charge

Since the Forest Service became a logging organization in the mid-1940s, our national forests have been under considerable assault. The Forest Service has bulldozed 440,000 miles of logging roads on our public land, causing widespread habitat and watershed destruction (for a comparison, this amounts to 10 times the mileage of our interstate highway system). Logging has greatly exceeded sustainable rates and the character of our national forests has changed.

It should come as no surprise then that the focus of the Forest Service plan to manage the current bark beetle outbreak in the Colville and Idaho Panhandle national forests is that of building roads and logging. Not just a little but a lot. They propose to log 25,000 acres, clearcutting one-fifth of that, and to build or rebuild 183 miles of road. To accomplish this plan, the Forest Service has applied to exceed the legal 40-acre clearcut limit and to sell the timber before the end of environmental review.

The agency has stated its main intention is to make money for watershed restoration. But going by past history, only the timber corporations will profit. With taxpayer-funded logging roads, the Forest Servive lost $88 million in 1997, according to the GAO. Let me guess who’s really writing policy for our forests.

Our national forests need to be managed by solid, unbiased scientific review, not hurried, log-and-sell policies. We need our forests managed for us. Lola K. Frederick Spokane

Forests we need, forest roads we don’t

Under the headline, “Closing national forests would waste valuable resources,” there was an article blasting the Forest Service for closing logging roads. Shouldn’t the headline have read, “Closing national forests would protect valuable resources”?

We have more than enough logging roads. Consider that there are more than 350,000 miles of roads in our national forests, as opposed to 50,000 miles in our entire interstate highway system. Road building and logging went wild after World War II and should be reined in. If it takes a 15-foot berm to close one road, that’s what we should create.

And criticizing the Forest Service chief for banning mining in a 100-mile stretch of the Rocky Mountains? The fact is, Idaho alone has hundreds of abandoned mines that threaten public health and the environment, and will have to be cleaned up at taxpayer expense because of archaic mining laws.

Those laws are still on the books because Sen. Larry Craig killed an attempt to repeal them, thus protecting his large donations from the mining industry. His excuse that he was protecting jobs in Idaho isn’t credible since only one-half of 1 percent of Idahoans are employed in mining. Besides, wouldn’t cleaning up mines create more jobs?

National forests are just that - national, not county or state. They are supported by federal money. Therefore, the New York Times has just as much say in how they are run as the people in Idaho. Corinne F. Hunter Moscow, Idaho

Plan will only help timber companies

Has Larry Allen taken leave of his sanity? He states on Feb. 28 (Street Level commentary) that nothing can stop the Douglas fir bark beetle and that events over the past century have caused the problem. Then he goes on to praise the Forest Service for taking quick action to solve the beetle problem.

If it took 100 years to create this problem, it will take longer than two months to solve it. What’s the rush? Why not explore all the options available and fix the problem right the first time?

Allen goes on to state it would be wrong to oppose the sale of 25,000 acres of timber on monetary considerations. The facts are that from 1992 to 1996, Idaho Panhandle national forests lost over $50 million on timber sales. In 1997, they lost $1,200 on every acre they logged .That is a lot of taxpayer money and we should be very concerned, if not downright opposed to this use of our tax dollars.

As Allen stated, this plan will not get rid of the beetle, and it took 100 years to create this problem. The Forest Service should back off, explore all the options and do what is best for the forest and the taxpayers. When you stand back and look at this proposal as it now stands, it certainly looks like corporate welfare for the Idaho logging industry at taxpayer expense. David J. Kuttner Spokane

Why couldn’t Navy deal with tanker?

With the potential damage that the grounded New Carissa was capable of inflicting on our coastline, why wasn’t the Navy brought in to solve the problem? I’m sure enough time has been available to mobilize the needed resources. Granted, the Navy’s prime mission is not salvage, but events such as this should allow flexibility in how their skill and experience is utilized. Vernon J. Nelson Spokane

OTHER TOPICS

Give landscape architecture its due

Would it be possible for The Spokesman-Review to properly refer to the “consulting firm” Walker-Macy when reporting about the current downtown planning process going on in Coeur d’Alene? Walker-Macy is a landscape architecture firm, and the generic term used by Spokesman reporters to describe the firm does an injustice to the profession of landscape architecture.

Landscape architecture was first used to describe the work of Frederick Law Olmsted in 1863. It is Olmsted and his partner, Calvert Vaux, who in 1857 designed New York’s Central Park.

Landscape architecture, like architecture and engineering, is a profession that requires extensive college training (usually five years), a two- to four-year apprenticeship and the passage of an exhaustive threeday examination administered by the state. The resulting licensure allows one to practice landscape architecture. Landscape architects are professionals who, through their stewardship of the land, design, protect, repair and restore landscapes.

Idaho is blessed with an academic program in landscape architecture in Moscow. The program is involved in many outreach programs to students and small communities in Idaho. Coeur d’Alene citizens are fortunate to have hired a landscape architecture firm rather than just another “consultant.” Dennis R. Voigt landscape architecture student, University of Idaho, Moscow

Immunizations - way to go

Re: “State Senate endorses governor’s plan for childhood immunizations, (Handle, March 5). Excellent proposal. Each child who gets immunized is a huge step toward the health of every child. Since not all parents are being responsible toward this issue, someone does need to step in to help encourage their participation. Valerie B. Rongey Chattaroy

There’s a better way to prevent harm

Staff cartoonist Milt Priggee really stooped low Feb. 25th with the drawing of the little girl with the gun to her head.

Rather than wallow in emotional rhetoric, like Priggee and others pitching ineffective gun control, “for the children,” I’m taking action proven to reduce the tragedies Priggee and his pals seem to thrive on. I’m helping educate people about safe use and storage of firearms. I’m teaching children what to do if they come across a gun. And I’m supporting the work of the National Rifle Association Foundation, a charitable foundation totally separate from NRA politics.

The foundation supports such worthy activities as Scouting, 4-H programs, habitat preservation and conservation projects. Here in Washington, the foundation has granted funds to provide gun safety education materials to any teacher or school in the state, absolutely free. (Astonishingly, Spokane School District 81 says it doesn’t have time to show a 15-minute video and hand out coloring books to our children.)

Soon, thanks to a foundation grant, we will have our own Eddie Eagle costume to help us reach more kids.

Please join me and hundreds of other responsible citizens as we take effective action by raising money for the NRA Foundation at the seventh Annual Spokane Friends of NRA Banquet and Auction, March 13. Tickets are available at sporting and gun stores, or call 838-0713. Jeff Knox Spokane