Commissioners reject thousands for Public Health while soliciting millions for Airport Expansion.
Let’s see… the Commissioners reject a few thousand federal dollars designated for family planning services for 400 people (mostly poor) while shamelessly seeking millions (estimated $15-$20 million depending on land
costs – Engineer’s estimate 2008 FAA Environmental Assessment) of Federal/County dollars to expand our airport into a jetport servicing owners (maybe a dozen?) of $30-$50 million dollar aircraft.
I suspect that many readers are thinking that the above is written by a liberal but not so. Providing family health (e.g. birth control) to poor teenagers is probably one of the rare social programs that really is an “investment”. (I know the term “government investment” is mostly a non
sequiter purposefully misused by liberals to dupe voters into supporting their various “votes for handouts” schemes.)
As for the airport, going begging to the Feds for millions of tax dollars (onerous use – taxes on airline passenger ticket sales) to fund a runway expansion that has no hope of ever recouping this massive investment is hardly the pinnacle of rational, conservative thinking. If the Commissioners have a list of corporations dying to import the thousands of jobs required to justify this investment (and requiring a single season, high altitude airport), county citizens deserve to know their identities before approving such a massive use of their dollars and valley environmental assets.
Unfortunately, these two decisions re-enforce the distorted, caricatures of conservatives perpetuated daily by the monolithic liberal media. They (some of the Commissioners) are not representative of the hundreds of rational, conservative small business men and women and shareholders that I encountered during my 30 years in industry.
Chuck DeWitt
Hamilton