TERRE HAUTE —

Why do some fight against new jobs?

Our local and our state tax revenues depend on folks being employed to be effective. These revenues are used for everything from emergency services to the quality of education that our children receive.

The more people that are unemployed, the less money the local government has to work with. And the more money those that do have jobs have to pay into the system to keep the system afloat. The system is taking on water fast.

Unemployment in this area and Indiana as a whole is at a staggering high. People who do have jobs struggle to put food on table and pay the bills. Those without a job often have to take a low paying part time one, if they can even find a job. Folks are really kind of scared on the employment outlook.

Then along comes a company like Data Management Services wanting to expand and add more paying jobs to the area. Or, a company wants to open a gravel pit up and provide paying jobs to the area. What is the response of folks every time someone wants to provide paying jobs and tax income to our area? Not in my backyard! You will ruin our property values! You will make the area ugly! Your sand will make our kids sick with cancer, one person even wrote. (What about the sand every county in Indiana puts on the roads when it is slick out to keep you from wrecking your vehicle?)

What is wrong with you people? Do you like higher taxes with fewer services? Higher crime rates, more abandoned homes and empty stores because people couldn’t pay their mortgages or buy things? How about more schools closed and less teachers as well as courses at the ones left open? Perhaps you would like fewer police and firemen?

When someone, a company or individual, comes into our community with good honest paying jobs, we should embrace them. Not try to run them off. Jobs are just too scarce out there. Folks are hurting.

And those of you folks who are fighting against these jobs? In this economy, you could be one of the ones wanting a job a week from now.

— Jonathan Sinclair

Terre Haute

Great things have begun in 12 Points

Spring is just around the corner, and 12 Points has plans for continuation of improvements within our National Historic District. Much has been done over the last two years thanks to help from the mayor’s office. This administration has done more to help the 12 Points Historic District during the last two years than most of the past administrations combined.

Promises were made to help improve the 12 Points District, and those promises were kept. How refreshing, a politician that says what he means, means what he says, then follows through with real action.

Permanent, visible improvements have occurred because of Mayor Bennett’s “Public Private Partnership” approach to improving local neighborhoods. Intercession by the mayor put in motion the plan to paint the street light poles within the Historic District. This idea was first proposed two years ago in the 12 Points Greater Northside Association’s “Immediate and Apparent” improvement plan, but became a reality because of work by the mayor’s office with Duke Energy.

New banners, paid for by the 12 Points Association, were placed on those poles by the city street department. New sidewalk benches and trash receptacles were also installed by the street department. The city parks department has done a fine job revamping and keeping the 12 Points Olympic Plaza clean and trimmed throughout the summer, plus kept the walks cleared of snow this winter.

Traffic poles, lights and control boxes around 12 Points Olympic Plaza were painted by the city, matching the rest of the poles in the Historic District. Curbs and pedestrian crosswalks were also painted around the Plaza. A series of “Welcome to 12 Points” signs, produced by the 12 Points Association, were also installed by the street department at entry points to the Historic District.

Unpaid, concerned volunteers have helped in this ongoing effort. Students from John Paul II school swept sidewalks, painted curbs and bagged trash this past fall. Countless other citizens come out early on a Saturday morning to participate in the biannual city cleanup in May and October. The mayor’s office, in cooperation with Republic, has provided dumpsters to 12 Points the last two years for disposal of large items. An alliance with Trees Inc. and Keep Terre Haute Beautiful provides supplies for these events. More examples of how the “Public Private Partnership” is working.

Improvements were made possible because of planning through an organized, concerned, involved local neighborhood group, coupled with cooperation and hard work by the mayor’s office. The “Public Private Partnership” approach has worked well in the 12 Points National Historic District. But it is also working in other organized neighborhoods, Ryves Neighborhood, Edgewood Grove, Farrington’s Grove and Collett Park, just to name a few.

Mayor Bennett’s continued support for the Terre Haute Neighborhood Partnership Association has been a big help. THNP was set up to assist any neighborhood get an organized structure, identify problems, and more importantly, find solutions. An organized neighborhood can better help the city find workable solutions for any problem, rather than individual citizens calling with complaints. Organization within a neighborhood also spawns a local think tank for inventing elegant solutions to difficult problems.

The THNP has the knowledge base and resources to assist neighborhoods organize and work with the city to find real solutions. The people living in the neighborhoods always have the right answers to their local concerns; they are the boots on the ground. Organization within the local community is the only real way to address local problems and spur on significant improvement activity.

In today’s economic climate more needs to be done with less. The city budget has been cut by several million dollars, with the situation not looking to improve for quite some time. This new situation calls for new thinking, new cooperation, input from every viewpoint and considerable elbow grease from everyone involved. To just say it is someone else’s responsibility, that someone else should pay, is no longer an option. Every budget, state, local and federal, has been cut; new ideas and local action have to be the watch words of the day.

Grassroots action by ordinary citizens, rather than top-down social planning, has always worked best in the American landscape. Ordinary citizens, working in an organized, orderly fashion can, and usually do, obtain extraordinary results.

The 12 Points National Historic District has seen tremendous improvements over the last two years, but this should become a citywide effort. Every neighborhood should be improving itself, increasing the quality of life for everyone living in that neighborhood. Doing this neighborhood by neighborhood is the best, most cost-effective way to make all of Terre Haute a better place to live and work.

As the temperatures rise, the days lengthen and the robins return, we begin work on plans formulated over the long winter. Keep an eye on 12 Points, great things have only begun to happen.

— Rich Curtis

12 Points Greater

Northside Association

Terre Haute

Control crows with dollars and sense

I would like to make my contribution to the crow discussion now under way. I propose that the best solution to the problem, which I will call the PETA solution, is to reduce the population by forcefully causing these animals to die. As most people know PETA is the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. At their headquarters shelter in Norfolk, Va., they were overwhelmed with animals and as a result reduced the dog and cat population by approximately 20,000 animals over a 10-year period. Now, they were successful in placing approximately 2,000 of the animals during this same period.

Indiana enacted legislation in 1911 allowing any county that wished to do so to pay a bounty of 10 cents for a crow head and 5 cents for a crow leg. By my figuring each crow was worth 20 cents in parts. In today’s dollars this would amount to well over $2 per crow. The counties that chose to pay the bounty soon ran out of money as there were quite a few crows. As a young kid growing up in Madison County I can attest that there were far fewer crows around than today. My buddy and I just plinked them off for target practice as the time and effort to turn the feet and heads in were more trouble than they were worth to us. On a good day we might get five crows, maybe I needed to practice my aim.

Regardless, it is obvious to almost any reasonable person that we have far too many crows for the food and space available. Maybe when the winter roosting population rises to 200,000 birds from the current 60,000 birds the folks that think this is unreasonable will come around to the obvious solution that PETA came to at their own shelter. I am sure that you will recall that back in 1986 or so Terre Haute was blessed with an invasion of blackbirds or crackles that chose to roost in the downtown area. I remember the furor that arose when a community in Kentucky elected to spray the birds with surfactant (soap) to reduce the oil in their feathers and cause the little buggers to freeze to death. My guess is that the birds figured this out and moved far enough south to stay warm all day and night as they seem to not be nearly as much of a problem today as they were then.

We might want to give this some additional thought regarding the crows, as I am told that they are very intelligent and who wouldn’t want to be in Florida instead of freezing in Indiana. If they don’t figure it out on their own then we must help them along and kill them off to such a level that the animals can live in reasonable harmony with the human population.

Finally, I would suggest that there are enough people looking for work that the city could pay $2 per crow and reduce the population by 30,000 birds at a cost of 60,000 dollars which is a whole lot less that the money that will be expended studying the issue. I would also make another guess that these very smart animals will leave for a friendlier environment.

— Raymond E. Broshar

Terre Haute

Americans need to think for selves

Recently, a meeting of CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference) took place in Washington, D.C. More than one person who was interviewed said they wanted this country to live by the ideals that our Founding Fathers established in the Constitution, states’ rights. Correct me if I’m wrong, but that issue was settled by the Civil War. For more than 220 years, what the Constitution says and what it means have been taken before the Supreme Court. Those questions are answered with finality.

So where do these folks get the notion that they are constitutional scholars. I doubt any of them have ever read a Supreme Court decision, much less any history of the court. They are, for want of a better word, constitutional fundamentalists. They are just like Christian or Islamic fundamentalists. They go to their source documents to justify what they already believe. Their beliefs are not thought out but what they are told to think. Talking heads like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck are getting filthy rich by putting fear in people’s minds.

Everyone knows the dog that is afraid, attacks. People are the same way. Dick Cheney feeds on people’s fear their that lives will be lost in a terrorist attack. We have to come to grips that there will be terrorist attacks. In Britain, during the Blitz, virtually every office had a poster that read, “Keep calm and carry on”. We can be diligent and vigilant but can’t possibly stop every attempt.

The second theme I heard was the way to prosperity was to get rid of federal agencies and lower taxes. In the crowd that gathered at CPAC were many older people. I don’t believe for a minute they want to end Social Security and Medicare. Those two programs when added to the military budget consume virtually all the taxes paid into the federal treasury. Do they really want to get rid of the Justice Department, or Agriculture, or The Department of Education? Within their membership are a whole host of separate interests and each one needs the federal government to protect them.

At some point we will figure out that our national deficit will have to be paid with tax dollars. It should be noted that under the Clinton Administration, taxes were raised, prosperity reigned and we had a surplus. Under the Bush Administration, taxes were lowered and we accumulated a $1.3 trillion deficit that culminated in a financial collapse. The very notion that taxes are the antithesis or prosperity is pure bunk. If that were true, the tax rate would be zero and we would all be millionaires.

Our country has a bushel of problems to face. I have always believed that God expects us to use the reason he gave us. Praying is the lazy man’s way of dealing with difficulties. We need to put our collective heads together and acting in a cooperative manner, get busy.

— Ray G. Simmons

Terre Haute

Stop fretting, start celebrating crows

Enough with the crows already. God put them here — before us I do believe — he will take them away. They are here for what? Eight to 12 weeks?

Make something positive from a bad situation (in some people’s lives not mine) and have a “crow festival” (tents advisable).

— Janet Gerrard

Terre Haute