Letters for Tuesday, April 21

Neighbors support East Valley bond

As board members for a neighboring school district, we were encouraged in February, when a majority of East Valley School District voters supported a bond issue for critical improvements. We urge them to do so again on April 28 and encourage more of the community to help make it a supermajority.

While nearly everything else in a democracy is decided by majority vote, state law says school districts must have 60% to approve a school bond. East Valley deserves that support.

We understand it’s a difficult time to ask, given the rising cost of living. However, East Valley’s aging middle and high schools need constant maintenance and repairs that are a drain on district resources. More delays in replacing the buildings will result in increased costs in the future, as construction continues to get more expensive.

West Valley voters approved a bond in 2004, to rebuild the district’s high school. In the years since, we’ve had lower maintenance costs, and seen increased community use of the facility, as well as community pride. We’re confident East Valley voters will see similar positive results, if they take that same step on April 28.

Adam Mortensen and Dan Hansen

Spokane

Baumgartner’s a sellout

Congressman Michael Baumgartner recently stated his support for President Donald Trump’s additional $1.5 trillion in military funding, despite the fact that it would add already to the $39 trillion national debt. Despite admitting the need to bring the federal budget into balance, Baumgartner stated that dealing with this huge catastrophe-in-the-making would be the duty of a future president who campaigns on a platform of fiscal responsibility. In other words, let’s just kick the can further down the road now, and hope the problem goes away. After all, “tomorrow is another day,” to quote Scarlett O’Hara.

Baumgartner’s comment is not just irresponsible. It’s more evidence of a lack of true leadership, and it imposes huge burdens on future generations, particularly Gen Z, who are struggling to get traction in buying a home, raising children and rising prices, not to mention growing inflation. Spokane families have to balance their budgets, bringing growing expenses in line with their incomes, but Trump’s federal government apparently does not! America’s deficit amounts to $115,000 for every man, woman and child (interest growing at $2.8 billion a day). The deficit is the largest in the world, larger than that of the EU and China combined.

Democrats deserve blame for this, as well, with Joe Biden’s giveaways, debt forgiveness and bloated government. Yet, it’s Trump and Baumgartner (who are on the hook now) shamelessly sacrificing our economic future and way of life as an excuse to fund an ill-begotten war of choice. The 5th Congressional District doesn’t deserve this.

Kyle Usrey

Spokane

Breach the dams

Recently, a letter to the editor was published on the lower Snake River dam’s turbines, claiming that a new generation of turbines is delivering fish survival rates of about 98% during passage through the dams. The writer seemed to think that meant the fish were safe.

All species of salmon and steelhead in the lower Snake are threatened, endangered, or extinct. New turbines do nothing for the problems of heat causing toxic algae blooms in slack-water above the dams, or length of time for downward migrating young smolts to get to the sea, while avoiding predation from gulls and cormorants. A free-flowing river flushes the smolts down the river in a faster and more natural process than an expensive, taxpayer funded engineered and high maintenance, government/corporate scheme to “save” salmon through an unhealthy, slow, and hot river.

A dammed lower Snake River will never be safe for salmon. What every reputable scientific agency, NOAA, NMFS, tribal and state fisheries managers have found is that the dams and their cumulative impacts are the main cause of decline in salmon. The alternatives of hatcheries and spill are not sufficient on their own. If we are to save the salmon, save the southern resident orcas that need them to survive, we must follow the science. The Biden administration funded salmon recovery through the Columbia River Basin Agreement, the current administration withdrew. Breach the dams.

Ernie Robeson

Spokane