Letters for Sunday, Feb. 22

New bike lanes won’t enhance safety

The city is planning more bike lanes. I saw a story on KXLY that said they just wanted to make the streets safe for everyone. Well, they have made the streets equally unsafe.

Belt for instance at the intersections of Wellesley and Garland are not safe for the cars turning onto Belt because the reflectors they installed have made the lanes too narrow. Even though this isn’t a STA bus route, school buses from three different schools use it and they can’t stay in their own lanes when turning. We have also been lucky this year because we only had one day with enough snow to require plowing, Belt didn’t get plowed at all, after a couple of days the street cleared but the bike lanes were not useable for almost a week, which doesn’t really matter because no one uses them. The kids going to and from school usually go on the other side of the street because the bike lanes are too narrow.

Before we waste more money on another 27 miles of these, maybe the city should finish paving and repairing the streets and putting in sidewalks in school areas. That would be safety for everyone.

Steven Butt

Spokane

Family separation will have lasting impact

Recently in Spokane, a 38-year-old mother, a legal permanent resident, was arrested and sent to the detention center in Tacoma. She was arrested in front of her 16-month-old daughter. The specific reason for the arrest has not been forthcoming from ICE.

Mothers separated from their children, children taken away from their family to detention centers, husbands and fathers detained and shipped quickly out of state without due process, workers whose wages are the only lifeline for their families afraid to go to work – these and other atrocities in the name of immigration enforcement are being perpetrated daily by a cadre of masked, heavily armed, under-trained government agents. We’ve all seen it.

Family separation is not the worst that has occurred lately with the aggressive tactics of ICE on display, but its effects will linger. All those children, all those relatives associated with those children, all those businesses, including farming, that depend on those workers will be affected for a generation.

The situation has become so dire that the United States has reached a state of affairs not unlike Stalinist Russia where people have resorted to carrying documents to prove their citizenship.

Immigration is not an easy job and securing the border is an important element of enforcement, but terrorizing immigrants away from the border is not helping the cause of immigration management.

Detention and deportation with subsequent family separation is not the only strategy that should be available. Punitive enforcement strategies for even minor issues should not be the norm.

Harvey McKelvey

Otis Orchards

Baumgartner appreciation

I share the position of many in our community who appreciate Congressman Baumgartner’s service to our district. On policy issues, he has done exactly as promised. We elected Rep. Baumgartner to help fix border security; he has supported the much-needed policies that have brought illegal crossings to almost zero, stemming the flow of drugs and unvetted immigrants. He has fought and voted for lower taxes to boost economic growth and allow more personal freedom. He has worked closely with our farmers and agriculture stakeholders to understand and work for their priorities, in particular, the many provisions for agriculture that he voted for in the Working Families Tax Cut Act. Additionally, he pushed for a return to basic common sense like rolling back the woke takeover of our universities, curtailing foreign influence and keeping boys out of girls sports.

It’s good for our district that Rep. Baumgartner was appointed to the U.S.-Canada Interparliamentary Group where his diplomatic skills and experience will help relations with our northern neighbors. He was elected to legislatively address the national debt crisis that America faces, and many of us appreciate his efforts and votes to start tackling Medicaid fraud so that safety nets are there for those who really need them. Also, his seat on the powerful Judiciary Committee gives him a role and insight into some of the critical issues in Washington, D.C.

Baumgartner is a skillful U.S. representative for our district, and we appreciate his willingness to serve!

Linda Casimir

Spokane

Cherry picking the data

I would like to offer some perspective on the metrics Ms. Berrigan found to confirm her positive bias toward our representative.

Fiscal responsibility? He voted to add $3 trillion to the deficit to benefit the ultra wealthy at the expense of his rural and vulnerable constituents. Limited government? He voted to give the largest budget of any law enforcement agency to a squad of masked, poorly trained, Constitution-ignoring thugs who have terrorized an American city and murdered two citizens, not to mention standing by as states’ rights are regularly violated by a power hungry federal executive. Foreign entanglements? Where is his action as he watches multiple acts of war and threats to carry out more without the required approval of Congress, the use of tariffs that harm American businesses as an ever changing bludgeon rather than a tool to truly grow domestic industry, and alienating key allies that have deterred war for 75 years?

And while not listed, lets talk law and order. I wonder how well real criminals have been doing while Mr. Baumgartner sits idle watching the DOJ stay busy serving the president instead of the people of the 5th and our fellow citizens.

Maybe a better number to look at is the Century Foundation’s democracy meter that shows a 28% drop for the U.S. Various analyses now describe our democracy as flawed, illiberal, autocratic or in rapid decline.

But if you happen to get a fundraising letter from Baumgartner, you’ll see him proudly proclaim that “Trump gets it.”

Michael Stanger

Spokane

Journalist arrests

The arrests of Don Lemon and Georgia Fort, journalists who covered a recent anti-ICE protest in a Minneapolis church, shows the Trump administration is not “de-escalating” its attacks, as it claims. In fact, it’s using a chilling new tactic – arresting journalists exercising their First Amendment rights.

Government attacks on journalists are extremely rare and are not looked on kindly by the courts. Last November, Marion County, Kansas, was forced to pay a $3 million settlement and issue an apology for an August 2023 police raid on the offices of the Marion County Record and the home of its publisher, Eric Meyer. His mother Joan Meyer died the day after the illegal, retaliatory raid.

I was working as an investigative reporter at The Spokesman-Review in the 1980s, attempting to discover the scope of Hanford’s secret radiation contamination of this region while making plutonium for nuclear bombs. Ronald Reagan was president. His administration initially resisted disclosure,but eventually complied with the law under the Freedom of Information Act.

I got some death threats from the Tri-Cities for my reporting, which told the story of the Hanford coverup, but the government didn’t raid the newspaper offices or my home – unlike in this administration, which considers itself above the law and recently raided the home of a Washington Post journalist.

All Americans should be concerned about a vindictive president undermining the free speech rights of all of us – from reporters doing their jobs to protesters on the streets bearing witness to these events.

Karen Dorn Steele

Spokane

Renaming Spokane sites

As long as we are honoring our past, I think it’s time to return to the original name, Spokan Falls.

This would be worth the trouble for two reasons. Mostly it would help brand the city for potential visitors. We do have one of the largest urban waterfall in the U.S. Also, there will be no more painful Spo-Kane pronunciations.

Gary D. Rhodes

Spokane