How can a self-entitled few own and ruin an entire neighborhood? I was told when I purchased my home that a small private airport was several miles away, and that I probably would never notice its existence. Actually, that has been the case until last year. This inconsequential neighbor has turned into an aeronautical school, obsessive lessons going over my head hundreds of times a day. Snoopy (yellow plane) and The Red Baron (red plane) nose dive, circle, and attempt landings from before sunrise to well beyond nightfall. The planes are relentless, the noise deafening, and the smell of aeronautical fuel repugnant!
I moved here to escape the smog and urban blight of New York. La Guardia began the same way as the Hamilton Airport. There used to be an amazing bird habitat there. Carbon emissions polluted the beautiful inlet and its seafood, what birds were not chopped into pieces succumbed to a poisonous toxic demise. Fortunately, La Guardia was sued by the local residents, and forced to compensate every homeowner it affected.
I consider myself a good steward of farmland. My fields yield twenty acres of hand cultivated native grass, timothy and weed-free rye hay. I know hay. I know horses. I know pollution on the horizon when I see, hear and smell it! What is in the air will be on the ground and in our water.
Let us not overlook our delicate ecosystem. The entire world is on red alert, and Hamilton turns the other cheek. Jobs, you say. I say not! Jobs would have been a consideration in rebuilding a railroad to better serve the middle class, and deliver agricultural supplies to growers, lowering farmers’ costs, and benefiting consumers in the end. Creating and supporting a recycling center could and would produce jobs, and aid the environment simultaneously. I would rather pay a tax to Ravalli County to pick up my trash and recycle it, than pay the Bitter Root Disposal who dumps it into the overstuffed earth, and raises my fee every time I blink. The commissioners of this valley are either suspect in their intention or just uneducated, unenlightened backward iconoclasts!
Once this precious fragile land has been compromised, it is done. Why do we live in this valley? Is this not the last best place?!
Ronnie Freeman
Corvallis