Letters To The Editor

THE ENVIRONMENT

Haze darkens area skies

Early Christmas Day was the most warm, fair and beautiful of any Christmas in the past 50 years.

Then came the spray boys on a mission. At midday, a frenzied circus of planes madly crisscrossed the sky, spewing wide contrail plumes visible from Coeur d’Alene to Spokane to Sandpoint. Teams plowing in tandem made billowing tick-tack patterns which converged into a murky epicenter over Spokane. The blue sky rapidly became gray, and by sunset the lingering contrails had widened into an ugly, cirrus layer of man-made snot. Where is the EPA to analyze what chemical constituents the spray boys lay over our residential areas?

Contrails from commercial air traffic dissipate quickly. The Christmas day air show dispels the myth that all contrails are from commercial traffic. What kind of commercial - or even military traffic - would burst into an oddly intersecting, puke-spewing frenzy over Spokane between noon and 4 p.m. on Christmas day?

The weather belongs to everyone, not just to those who have had a contract to continually spray our skies for the last year. Someone, somewhere, has decreed that Inland Northwest skies must have a perpetual polymer haze, which often refracts weird, circular rainbows.

It is time for the citizens to start looking up. Time to ask why the Spokane area is such an obvious spray target. And it is most definitely time for our elected officials to give us answers. Angela Gravenstier Coeur d’Alene

Step up forest management

As a retired professional forester, this latest proposal to remove tens of millions of acres of our national forests from management is the last straw.

Our national forests need more intensive management, not less, as has been happening the past decade or more.

Management of our forests should be based on proven scientific data, not unfounded, emotional rhetoric as some groups advocate.

Additional funding should be provided to research and find scientifically based answers to some of our problems in the field of diseases and insects; where over the long term, losses are four to six times greater than wildfire losses.

I could go on for a considerable length of time concerning other problem areas in management of our forests, but I will not. John P. Bushfield Coeur d’Alene

OTHER TOPICS

Horror stories be gone!

Another Initiative 695 horror story! Please tell me how, with a surplus of $1.5 billion to $2 billion any agency in this overtaxed state is going to lose anything. It’s no surprise that Gov. Gary Locke’s administration, with the apparent agreement of Speaker Clyde Ballard, have adopted the “Let’s scare ‘em” tactics they have. They say police, fire, ambulance, city and state government services will go away. Now it’s air quality programs. The $12.3 million figure - a figure meant to scare you - would require 1.23 percent of the surplus to cover this loss.

I recall the pathetic whining of the head of Seattle’s bus drivers about the loss of jobs. I’m frequently over there. During rush hour, the buses are barely two-thirds full. The rest of the time, empty or nearly empty buses are common on Seattle’s freeways. The same is true here. Don’t cut clean air programs, or teachers. Cut excess bus service.

Take the billions of dollars this state spends on consultants for a multitude of programs, most of which never come into existence, and use that to pay for firemen, police and teachers.

The American Heritage Dictionary defines a surplus as “an amount or quantity in excess of what is needed.” Reducing taxes by the less than 5 percent of the general fund that the license tabs fees generated isn’t going to destroy Washington.

It’s time for this paper to return to reporting news instead of trying to scare people. Leave the Armageddon-like stories to the National Enquirer. John D. Sainz Spokane