State must support mental health

Given the recent tragedy — involving one mental patient, six deaths and two injuries in our own county — I think again of infrastructure. When the bridge collapsed in Minneapolis, it was because the tax base in Minnesota had been so eroded by low taxes in support of “small government,” there was no money to refurbish it.

I lived in Seattle when the Reagan government cut support for mental health to the point that institutions like Western State Hospital in Sedro-Woolley were closed. Suddenly, the streets of Capitol Hill were overpopulated with halfway-house folks who had nowhere else to go. Our Skagit County mental health is so overburdened and so underfunded, that this kind of tragedy is inevitable.

Are we deaf and blind to the need to support what makes a country function? Wise government is essential!

Christine Wardenburg-Skinner
Edison


Democrats protect Main Street

What do George Bush, John McCain and Barbara Bailey have in common? The list is long, but in light of the recent meltdown of the financial markets, two of the most troubling commonalities are that all three support privatizing Social Security, and all three support allowing the health care industry to essentially regulate itself.

Their answer to every problem seems to be privatization and deregulation. We now know what the cost is of allowing an industry to self-regulate with little or no governmental oversight, and if we permit them to get away with it again, we will deserve our worldwide reputation of being ignorant, gullible voters.

Protect your Social Security from the wild swings of the stock market, and act to ensure that our health care is not turned over to the fat cats on Wall Street by voting Democratic up and down the ballot. Democrats protect Main Street not Wall Street.

Nels Kelstrom
Clinton


Mom’s Rossi vote is nonsensical

There was a letter Sept. 25 from a young woman urging folks to vote for Rossi in order to lower taxes. She stated that she has four children and life is a financial struggle, which she blames on Gov. Gregoire rather than the massive, greedy deregulation and a failed president.

I can understand her concern for her family’s future. What surprised me was the lack of some simple math. The last I heard, it costs about $7,500 per year to educate a child in the state of Washington. Four children times $7,500 comes to $30,000 per year. Twelve years at $30,000 comes to $360,000 cost to the taxpayers if all four children graduate from high school. Unless the young woman owns an incredible amount of property, childless people and people with smaller families will have to pay much of the education bill for her children.

Should we pay her education bill? Yes! It is the cost of civilization. If we don’t pony up, but take the GOP (once were Republicans, remember?) view that we should not pay for anything we don’t personally use, we will end up with more and more folks who can’t (or won’t) tally simple figures.

I wish the young woman well, but I fear her vote for Rossi is akin to throwing her four babies out with the bath water.

Lee Mann
Sedro-Woolley


Economics not McCain’s strength

During the recent near meltdown of America’s financial markets, John McCain led the finger-pointing and found a convenient scapegoat in the SEC chairman. He also blamed campaign contributions from financial executives, specifically those that Obama received, but he neglected to note that his campaign had received 10 times that amount. But if McCain really wanted to finger a likely perpetrator, he needed to look no further than his own campaign staff.

The Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 curbed speculation by banks, separated commercial banking and investment banking, and established the FDIC, which guaranteed a bank’s deposits if federal standards were met. The loosening of those regulations began with Jimmy Carter, but they unraveled under Ronald “Government isn’t the answer; it’s the problem” Reagan. The savings-and-loan crash of the ’80s soon followed.

So the federal government created the Resolution Trust Corporation, which took over the assets of failing S&Ls;, eventually costing taxpayers $125 billion. McCain unwisely defended one operator, Charles Keating, who was later convicted of fraud, and McCain received a reprimand from the Senate.

Though Texas led the nation in S&L failures, ’90s Banking Committee Chairman Phil Gramm, R-Texas, further deregulated the system and enabled the Enron scandal. (Gramm’s wife, Wendy, was chairing the audit committee of Enron as it imploded.)

Admitting economics wasn’t his strong suit, McCain recruited Gramm as his campaign’s economics guru. Though Gramm had to leave the campaign after describing Americans as “whiners,” he left his ideological imprint on McCain, who intoned the mantra that “America’s economy is basically sound” even as the nation’s financial underpinnings crumbled.

Once again, taxpayers are on the hook, this time for “hundreds of billions” in bad contracts and financial “wallpaper,” while the failed firms’ top executives float away on their platinum parachutes.

John McCain needs an economics “crash” course.

Michael Marlin
Mount Vernon


County cuts senior center’s staff

The county is fixing things that are not broken again. The powers that be have seen fit to cripple our little Concrete Senior Center that serves eastern Skagit County by reducing the staff to just one person!

The center has an adequate kitchen, and Helen did a wonderful job in meal preparation for us, but on Sept. 1 this all changed. Helen is gone, the meals will be prepared in Burlington and trucked all the way up to the Concrete Senior Center for distribution. Why go to all this expense when we were doing so well? This doesn’t appear to be cost effective or energy efficient. It also smacks of future plans to close down our center.

It would be great to see a few of our tax dollars return to this community, and keep the doors open to our senior center.

Evalyn R. Georinger
Concrete


PUD ownership best for Skagit

I am voting yes on PUD Proposition 1. I worked for 32 years as an engineer for PSE in Skagit County — as a project manager, major projects engineer, system engineer, and construction crew coordinator and scheduler. I think the citizens of Skagit County would be better off with a locally owned public electric utility.

The rates we pay in Skagit County are subsidizing high construction costs elsewhere, such as in King, Pierce and Thurston counties, as well as the big corporate offices in Bellevue. Contractors and developers in Skagit County pay much more than needed to provide new service to a site; I believe a PUD could do it for a lot less. Skagit PUD could hire experienced management and engineering staff that would protect us from unnecessary construction costs and higher rates. This is not a good time to put financial faith in large corporations.

PSE warns us about more “government control,” but people in Skagit County would have more control with a PUD than we have with PSE — through elected commissioners and speaking out at open meetings. We could even form a citizens’ advisory committee to the PUD. We have no control now.

I have watched PSE’s customer service deteriorate since the early 1990s. During storm-related outages, we are currently at the mercy of PSE’s operation center in Redmond, where their communication center is not adequate to handle the numbers of crews necessary to do repairs in a timely manner. A Skagit PUD could more easily repair a less-complicated system, and local repair persons could respond and operate more quickly and efficiently.

A lot of PSE employees would agree with me, but the ones who still work there won’t say so. Please vote yes on PUD Proposition 1.

Bob Kutzer
Burlington


Editorial missed Martin’s point

Your editorial about a ring dike for Burlington completely missed the point. Instead of arguing for such an investment, Public Works Director Chal Martin showed that current hydrology makes a ring dike unaffordable and impractical.

His purpose was to show the Skagit County Comprehensive Flood Hazard Management Plan Advisory Committee (whew!) that Skagit River hydrology is out to lunch. He argued that it should insist on accurate, scientifically proven numbers before recommending flood-control measures.

Skagit River hydrology (amount of water) begins at the Dalles measuring station near Concrete. This is operated by the United States Geological Survey (USGS), which says that a 100-year flood is 278,000 cubic feet per second (CFS). The Corps of Engineers uses that number in its hydraulic analyses (where it goes). Mr. Martin proved that the flow number should be 241,800 CFS. That difference affects the base flood elevations we will build to in the lower valley, as well as flood insurance costs.

It has been impossible to get the federal bureaucracy to examine the hydrology. New studies and empirical evidence are submitted to the USGS office in Tacoma. Their findings are sent to headquarters in Reston, Va., which “outsources” them to Michael Baker Jr., a consulting firm in Arlington, Va. That firm is paid to be risk averse, so they do not approve anything that differs from the factually challenged Steward Report of 1922.

Instead of criticizing Mr. Martin, the editorial board should insist that the feds take an honest look at the new information he has provided. We deserve to know the truth about the threat facing us.

Dan O’Donnell
La Conner