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Hernando Today

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

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The Tampa Tribune

Published: July 16, 2008

Updated:

Spending Disease

I knew some gasket had to blow. I just knew it. Our wild county government simply can't stop spending.

They've tried. They've tinkered here and there - cutting a few people, cutting a few programs. When even the publicized threats to cut the emotional things didn't reopen our wallets, they needed to look for something else. They needed a "fix" for their spending addiction.

Now it comes in the form of a $49 million courthouse binge. We knew from last year's budget hearing that the current (and hopefully temporary) county commissioners were deaf, but this shows that our county truly has a spending disease.

I can see it now. At the SA (Spenders Anonymous) meeting attended by all the other commissioners around Florida, each of our commissioners walks up in turn to the podium - "I am a Spender..." You can't think this up as fiction. How sad that it is real. I wish I were dreaming. Someone please wake up the commissioners. Hello! We have a budget crisis. You work for us. It's our money you're talking about! And where do you think you're going to get the time to concentrate on this (and get it right) when all your time is supposed to be spent thinking about cutting the budget.

The last time the county decided to get into bed with a private company to build something, we ended up at the short end of the stick and are now paying huge fees for it. I'm talking about one of our biggest budget components - the county jail. Likewise, the last time the county built something in downtown Brooksville they came up with that oversized, bland, white elephant that mocks the adjacent stately courthouse and ruins the quaint feeling of downtown.

Now the county is considering making both mistakes again and combining it with a third - building an extension to the white elephant using a private partnership at a time when we can't afford it, and they're basing their rationale on the contrived and erroneous facts about projected population growth in Hernando County. The truth is that if they were to bring this up next year, all the population predictions of yesteryear would be irrefutably 10 years farther down the line, leaving no basis for building in the near term at all.

I thought we were supposed to be thinking outside the box. How about this idea instead: We don't prosecute and incarcerate as many as 1 in 100 of us? Statistics would have us believe that the U.S. leads the world with bad guys. We have 20 percent more incarcerations than poster bad-boy Russia, and 500 of other first-world countries such as Canada, Japan, most of Europe, China and Australia - which ironically started off as a prison itself. Is this really an amoral, unethical, dangerous society we live in - the worst by far in the world? Do we really need to drag this many of us into court?

Or is this just another case of the government gone wild? Is this just the judicial version of buying an extra hundred brand-new vehicles for nobody to use like the county did recently? That government grows itself - that it somehow feels righteous to grow - not from the people or for the people, but independent of the people?

I think so.

If for some reason the courts simply can't take it easier on us by prosecuting, say 10 percent fewer of us - that we really, really have been that bad in our behavior - then perhaps they can simply rent space (there's plenty available - and even nearby the jail which would save money just in transportation costs alone) or, even more simply, better use second-shift workers rather than blowing our $49 million all at once.

Jim Mastro

Brooksville

Fireworks Prohibited

By Church's Insurance

I read with interest your recent article on the July 4 fireworks display at St. Anne's Church inRidge Manor. I was pastor of St. Anne's from July 1, 2003, to June 30, 2007. During that period of time, the Knights of Columbus had approached me with a request to have fireworks on the Fourth of July. I had informed them that I would not allow that because of the issue of safety and, in addition, it is prohibited by the insurance carrier for the Diocese of St. Petersburg, which owns St. Anne's.

It upsets me that the Knights of Columbus, knowing full well the reasons why a fireworks display was not permissible in the past, would take advantage of the new pastor's apparent unfamiliarity with both the county laws and the insurance company's prohibition of such an activity!

Father Ron Marecki

St. Thomas the Apostle

Homosassa

Stand Up To Fanatics

According to our current laws, we are allowed to protect ourselves, our families and our properties against aggressors. Step foot inside my house, threaten me and my wife with bodily harm if we do not surrender our possessions or our lives, and I have the right to use any means at my disposal to defend myself, including the use of deadly force if I believe my life is in danger. I'm entitled to defend my home.

How is this different from defending our home from the Islamic radicals who would invade us, threaten to destroy us and our way of life, and subjugate us to their narrow interpretations of the ancient law of sharia?

Our borders are similar to the walls of our homes. Our air lanes and highways are similar to our streets and driveways. We can protect those avenues from invasion by robbers and vandals, and there is no reason why we cannot institute similar protections from the criminals and terrorists who threaten our homeland. They deserve no leniency; no cover; no protection under the very laws they are determined to destroy.

I have no problems with the many in our community who gratefully and gracefully live as full partners in our society, contributing their time, talents and finances to the benefit of this small part of the world in which we peacefully co-exist. None of them have demanded that my wife wear a headscarf or that I stop what I'm doing five times a day, get out my prayer rug and bow toward Mecca.

I have a major problem with those who believe that all who do not live according to their narrow and bigoted interpretation of seventh century religious philosophy must either be converted or put to death. With these we cannot co-exist; to these we must say, loudly and clearly, no!

You will not take over my country, you will not force me to accept Islam, you will not hide behind our freedoms and our laws to escape the punishment you deserve.

And let the fanatics, with whom one cannot reason, not be misled by what seems to them to be weakness. Our insistence that all deserve a fair hearing, no matter how heinous the crime or how evident the guilt, is not a sign of weakness or decadence. It is a demonstration of our strength as a democratic society committed to the rule of law, not the law of the jungle where the only decision is to kill or be killed. Only the truly strong can afford to be gentle.

Gail B. Leatherwood

Spring Hill

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