Letters for Aug. 10, 2023
WSDOT, city continue to fail on Wellesley interchange
The people of East Spokane have suffered long enough. In the summer of 2019, Wellesley Avenue was closed between Market and Freya streets. The closure was supposed to last three years. Now it is the summer of 2023 and it has been four years, yet the road is still closed.
Now the Washington State Department of Transportation is preparing to close Upriver Drive at Green Street. With this closure, anytime there is a train on the BNSF track running north through Hillyard, the only access to the rest of Spokane from east of Market Street will be via Francis or Argonne avenues. In addition to the 4-mile increased detour for residents, this poses a serious safety issue as fire, police and rescue units will also be forced to take this absurdly long detour.
WSDOT has been putting a great deal of effort into working on the North Spokane Corridor south of the Wellesley interchange, and is working on the north side of the river (hence the looming closure of Upriver Drive), yet it is still dragging its feet on the Wellesley interchange.
It is high time the city put pressure on WSDOT to complete the Wellesley interchange, which is already a year behind schedule. The residents of East Spokane are citizens, too. Let’s see the mayor and the City Council put in some effort on behalf of the citizens east of Market Street.
Tom Morgan
Spokane
McMorris Rodgers shows hypocrisy
I’d like to address the hypocrisy of our representative, Cathy McMorris Rodgers. In her recent newsletter, she discusses how “an unprecedented number of unaccompanied children crossing the southern border” have been lost within the U.S., possibly victims of human trafficking. In the past, she has slammed immigrants, which include children, and voted to prevent them from entering the United States. She wants to send these people back to their countries to face starvation, abuse and death. But now she cares about these children?
In the past, she has refused to pass gun legislation, which practically guarantees that more children will be slaughtered in school. She obviously doesn’t care about these children.
Is this just a talking point for McMorris Rodgers, who is coming up for re-election? Is she using the platform of helping children to make herself look good and take voters attention away from the ineptitude of the GOP in the House of Representatives? Let’s not forget that she was going to vote to overturn a free and fair election, until she got scared that she might actually sustain harm during the insurrection. Why would a little harm cause a person to change her vote on such an important issue, if she truly believed that there were problems with election integrity and that Trump won the election?
Carrie Cardenas
Spokane
Worst future is letting salmon, steelhead die
As various interests, who profit by letting salmon and steelhead go extinct, gear up for their planned Aug. 17 Northwest Fish Symposium in Lewiston, it’s worth noting that these same interests have been busy discrediting and opposing the renewable energy technologies that can and should replace the small amount (4%) of regional hydropower production that would be lost were the four lower Snake River dams be breached.
Save those who reject renewable energy on cultural or ideological grounds (“woke” technology?), opposition to breaching the dams and saving our salmon comes from people who apparently can’t be bothered to wait for the huge inflow of U.S. taxpayer-funded relief, compensation and transition bucks that will be forthcoming from their favorite bogeyman, the federal government.
Perhaps their eventual take is the real point of all this theater and posturing and hand-wringing about dams being irreplaceable, and our way of life in the Inland Northwest since time immemorial, and their mothballing being nothing short of apocalyptic. I’d argue instead that letting salmon, steelhead and other river life die out completely as our rivers continue to heat up, stagnate and lose their remaining oxygen is a good deal more apocalyptic than that.
Chris Norden
Moscow, Idaho