Letters To The Editor

Schools and education District 81 levy keeps current rates

On March 14, the voters of Spokane will have the opportunity to approve a three-year maintenance and operations levy for Spokane School District 81. The levy provides about 16 percent of District 81’s operating budget, with the state and federal government providing the remaining funding.

Tax rates for residents will remain the same the first year of the levy and then descend the final two years of the levy.

Spokane taxpayers are very lucky. We have wonderful public schools led by a dedicated board of directors and by Dr. Gary Livingston and his fine staff. They make sure an excellent education is provided for all our children. Let’s make sure the tradition of support for public education continues in our community. Please vote yes for kids on March 14. Terry M. Cox Spokane

Vote on March 14 to pass levy

Do we want the kids of our community to have to suffer due to cuts in school funding? Do we want our young people to have larger classes and fewer extracurricular activities? I didn’t think so.

On March 14, residents in District 81 will vote to continue the current levy. Everyone needs to get out and vote so the levy will pass and the students of our community can continue to have success in education. This levy does not include any remodeling of schools or any extra funding like that. This levy is what allows the day-to-day operations at our schools to occur.

Without this money, the District 81 students will suffer greatly and the quality of education they receive will likely diminish. The levy is for the kids and there would be no reason not to get out and vote for its passage.

As a current student, I realize the importance of the levy money to the district’s success. Even though I won’t be around next year, I know the levy should be passed for all the other students like me who want and need all the opportunities we have been provided. Scott A. Wolf Spokane

Washington state

Voice support for helping care givers

With the rapid increase in the older population and with the growing number of younger people living with disabilities, care giving is becoming a larger community and family issue. Nearly one in four households in the United States - 22.4 million - are involved in care giving.

While some care givers provide mainly transportation assistance, half are helping with at least one personal care task, such as bathing or meal preparation. Eighty percent of care givers provide unpaid assistance seven days a week.

Care giving affects businesses as well. Metropolitan Life Insurance found that employers in the U.S. incur a cost of more than $11 billion annually due to care giving issues faced by their employees. Society needs to help families continue their important care giving in a way that sustains a family and reduces the impact on the workplace. A relatively small investment of public funds now to support families in their often heroic efforts to provide unpaid care to disabled family members can produce huge savings.

In 1989, the Legislature appropriated funds to provide respite care. Respite gives care givers a needed break from the continuous daily care giver chores. Unfortunately, demand for this service greatly exceeds the annual allocation, and additional funding is essential.

Our Legislature should take one more step to assist unpaid care givers by establishing a comprehensive family care giver program. House Bill 2454 would create a comprehensive family care giver support program. Please ask your legislators to support this bill and appropriate the requested funding. Edmund Lewis, chairman PMC, Aging and Long Term Care of Eastern Washington, Spokane

Primaries system needs work

Recently, one of your letter contributors pointed out that registering as an independent effectively nullified your primary vote, for only the votes of registered party members would be tallied for purposes of nomination to appear on a major party’s ballot.

This letter was a genuine public service and was presented clearly and without rancor. Behind the scenes, however, something more than mere vote tallies seems involved. The legislators who supported this law, Democrats and Republicans alike, united to eviscerate independent voter influence on selection of major party nominees. Apparently, both of these parties wish to monopolize the nomination process despite their obviously superficial support of primary elections. This is detestable and hypocritical in the extreme.

An amendment to the current primary voting system is certainly in order Don Barnes Spokane

Bad lawmaking yields bad result

Washington’s health care system needs reform, as former Spokane legislator Denny Dellwo points out in his Feb. 7 guest column. But the problems are far deeper than just throwing money into the high-risk pool and pointing a finger at insurance companies for dropping out of the individual insurance market.

Dellwo was the House of Representatives architect of the disastrous 1993 big-government-can-solve-everything health insurance legislation. Sadly, if he and his colleagues would have listened to employers and insurance experts then, many of the problems that he finally has recognized could have been averted.

Employers told Dellwo in 1993 that his proposal was a recipe for disaster. Unfortunately, he ignored our advice and now it is one of the primary reasons there is no individual insurance market in Washington.

Today, people hop-scotch on and off coverage when they need it. The math is simple: If it costs an insurance company $7,000 for maternity coverage and a couple can get in and out by paying only $1,500 in premiums, insurance companies have two choices: raise rates to the insured or drop out of the market. Unfortunately, they have done both.

Hopefully, our legislators will benefit from their mistaken attempt at a government-run system - and open up the market for health care choices for all of us.

When we’re free to choose, everyone benefits. Edmund O. Schweitzer, president Schweitzer Engineering Labs, Pullman

Do modify under-18 drivers’ licensing

The graduated license proposed for new drivers under age 18 is an excellent plan and should be adopted.

Juveniles released with an automobile continue to be an unnecessary risk to themselves and the public. I have had the opportunity recently to be a passenger in a car driven by a newly licensed 16-year-old driver. It has been necessary for my intervention multiple times. These interventions were for the driver’s failure to see red lights at night, not seeing stop signs in daytime, speeding and following too close, especially on the freeway. None of these errors was the result of showing off but simple inexperience.

As a pilot and a rider of street bikes, I realize the consequences of making a simple error. They can have deadly results.

Obviously, teen drivers do not like the graduated license proposal. But since when did teens like anything adults had to say? The idea is to save lives and reduce injury. It is a very small price to pay. Mark Lloyd Spokane

Business and labor

Impasse not workers’ choice

Wayne Lythgoe’s Feb. 25 letter regarding Kaiser Steelworkers was unnecessary and unfair. His memory must be short because the union did offer to return to work, under the old contract, in January 1999. The Steelworkers were emphatically told no, so the end result was a lockout, no longer a strike. Do you actually think we like to live this way? We are protecting the rights of all current and future union workers by standing up and saying no to nothing but corporate greed.

Do you think the families of the striking Steelworkers like to see their family member carry such a burden as not being able to adequately provide for them? I think not.

I know many families whose lives have been turned inside out and upside down because of the lockout - mine included. An unemployment check would go a long way to help restore some normalcy to our lives.

In truth, what really would make our lives normal again would be to have Kaiser realize that the best work force it has is the one whose members are out on the picket line. It is not the scabs on the inside. We want to return to work and not have to rely on unemployment - the sooner the better. Cindy K. Owens Spokane

Over the line

Aquifer too valuable to risk

I am only 17 years old but I am smart enough to know how incredibly lucky we are to live near the aquifer. If the rest of Spokane people are smart, they would agree that no amount of money should be able to jeopardize such a valuable resource! Please, Spokane, let’s use our brains! Crystal M. Marshall Spokane

More than NIMBY attitude at work

In his thoughtful, provocative Feb. 20 column, “Depot debate fuel for democracy,” Ken Sands’ characterization of “emotionally driven not-in-my-back-yard opponents” of the Burlington Northern Santa Fe fuel depot at Hauser is a bit off the mark.

Although early opposition to the depot may have been NIMBY centered, it quickly grew to a much broader, well-organized base, including residents of Coeur d’Alene and Spokane, the Washington Department of Ecology and Panhandle Health District. Contrary to what Sands suggests, the mission and message was not “anywhere but here” for the depot, but “not over the aquifer.”

Intense, extensive research revealed BNSF’s arrogant treatment of other communities where its maintenance and fueling facilities were located. Staff writer Zaz Hollander’s excellent reporting in “Ecology disputes BNSF claim” (Feb. 20) clearly demonstrates BNSF is as sneaky as ever and can’t be trusted.

Sands raises a vital question. Is this outpouring of opposition to BNSF a sign of an awakened, aroused community determined to hold its government accountable or merely a brief emergence from the fog of ignorance and apathy that shrouds the lives of the majority?

Many Friends of the Aquifer have learned a lesson everyone must understand if they have any sense of what responsible citizenship means: political decisions have powerful, far-reaching consequences. They should be based on serious, critical thinking, not vapid response to demagoguery so prevalent in Idaho. Otherwise, we get only what fools deserve. Buell Hollister Post Falls

The environment

USFS better source than hearsay

Regarding letters about the Douglas fir beetle project on the Idaho Panhandle National Forest.

Some say there is no epidemic because the Forest Service hasn’t cut as many trees as planned. Others say the Forest Service marked for cutting green trees not attacked by beetles. One person says they’re taking a “broad brush” approach to harvesting timber, disregarding unique landscape features.

Here are some key facts:

The amount of harvest is not a reflection of the size of the beetle infestation. The Forest Service did not plan activities in every beetle-infested area because its objectives were more than just salvaging dead trees.

The Forest Service stated clearly in its impact statement that boundaries of areas to be harvested were drawn to include trees that could become infested. This gave the agency the flexibility to accomplish work in areas the beetles might expand into. In some areas, the beetle infestation did expand as predicted. In other areas it did not.

USFS said from the start that green trees would be harvested in select stands to open the canopy and promote desired species. Harvest guidelines provide detailed instructions designed to protect specific resources in each stand of trees. There are no broad-brush approaches.

To know what is really happening with this project, stop going by generalizations written in the newspapers and talk to the Forest Service employees who care about what happens on the ground. Then form your own opinions about the Douglas fir beetle project. Judy A. York Sandpoint

We can risk a cyanide disaster, too

The recent mining disaster, which has “killed tons of fish and contaminated several rivers, including the Danube, Europe’s longest,” has been described as the “biggest accident in the history of Hungary.”

Battle Mountain Gold Mining Co. proposes to do this same type of heavy metals, open-pit cyanide-leach gold mine in Okanogan County. The proposed mine that BMG has spent 10 years trying to get approval for has in the same process written off some $80 million in taxes. Furthermore, the state Pollution Control Hearings Board has recently rejected BMG’s permits for water rights and water quality. Should a proposed mine receive approval after being told no several times over the course of a 10-year period?

BMG plans to blast off the top of Buckhorn Mountain and dig 450 feet into the aquifer. They would excavate the ore body, crush it to a powder and mix it with cyanide to leach out the microscopic gold flakes. The approximately 10 million tons of tailings mining waste would be dumped into a canyon over Marias Creek and held by an earthen dam. (Wasn’t it a “contained” tailings dam overflow that caused the disaster in Europe?)

This mine’s lasting legacy would also leave a 100-acre toxic pit lake to overflow into nearby watersheds.

Our state would be better off if Gov. Gary Locke would follow Montana’s lead by banning all cyanide-leach mines. Chase C. Davis Spokane

Thinning operations have helped

The current bark beetle epidemic, initiated by the 1996 ice storm windthrow, has been made worse by Douglas fir and Ponderosa pine stands that already were moisture-stressed by overstocking.

With the exclusion of periodic fires, and selective timber harvests, these stands have become overstocked with a higher-than-natural component of poor-vigor trees which succumb to attacks from insects and root rot. This leads to abnormal fuel accumulations and the risk of high-intensity fires that escape control.

Periodic timber harvests to thin and remove inferior trees in overstocked stands is ecologically and economically sound. You can see for yourself a classic example by viewing the commercially thinned timber on the west face of Canfield Butte. Simply drive 15th Street and look east between Shattuck Lane and Dalton Avenue. This U.S. Forest Service timber harvest was completed in 1992.

The incidence of bark beetle mortality in the thinned stand is significantly less than in the unthinned timber to the north. Yes, there was some windthrow in this stand after the ice storm but it was promptly salvaged thanks to the existing road access.

The bark beetle mortality in the unthinned stand to the north is epidemic and currently being salvaged by helicopter.

Environmental groups that have continually delayed or stopped Forest Service timber sales to thin and salvage overstocked forest stands have contributed to the forest health problem, instead of the solution. Mark Weadick Coeur d’Alene

Looking back

Thanks for the memories

Having family ties back to the 1890s in Spokane, I really enjoy viewing the historical pictures. You printed one about Scotty’s Station in your Feb. 5 edition. Our family had a lake cabin, known as “Bootsie’s cabin” at Loon Lake. Every summer weekend, we drove through Clayton, singing a song about “Bootsie’s cabin on the hillside at Loon Lake, Washington ..” This is how my folks kept their sanity with a carload of excited youngsters.

On Sundays, we would all pile into the car and go to church in Clayton. My sister often forgot her hat and had to wear a napkin over her head, much to her dismay.

Coincidentally, my father always needed gasoline after church. We would stop and see Scotty. He would lift the hood, check the oil and wash the windows. I loved his accent. Dad would hand him the credit card and with the receipt came suckers for the kids. It was the kind with rope handles. What a treat! We never got those in Spokane.

Just a part in history I will never forget. Thanks for bringing back memories. Steve Roberts Spokane