Our Readers’ Views, Jan. 27

Invest in future; extend school levy

Ridgefield School District’s proposed property tax levy is not a new tax but replaces an existing levy that expires this year. Public education funding in Washington state relies heavily on local taxes. In Ridgefield, the local levy funds roughly 24 percent of total education costs. Approving the proposed levy will simply continue this local funding.

Local levy funds currently pay for programs critical to student success. Examples include classroom computers, athletics, drama, CISPUS, para-educators, teacher training and basic needs such as maintenance, transportation, utilities and textbooks.

The Ridgefield School District provides a high-quality education at a relatively low cost. Ridgefield students’ scores on standardized tests regularly exceed state averages and rank high compared to other Clark County schools. And the district’s levy rate is expected to be significantly lower than the rate in Evergreen, Vancouver, Battle Ground, La Center, Camas and Washougal school districts. Ridgefield School District delivers small community schools with great results at a reasonable cost. Please join me in supporting the Ridgefield School District levy on Feb. 9.

Paul Lewis

RIDGEFIELD

Retirees should not pay for schools

Here we go again—time for school levies. The schools need more money.

My home has been devalued, as well as my families’ and friends’ homes. Isn’t it funny how many of our property taxes did not change? There’s something about that that has a definite foul odor. Over a third of my property tax is allocated to the schools, and that includes yours, too.

I pay, my son pays, my daughters pay and my grandson pays. Our family has three children in public schools, and yet the money we pay is not enough.

I am retired and have been paying taxes for more than 50 years. It would be nice to be able to look forward to a reprieve from school taxes before I die. This whole school system needs to be shaken up and restructured. It is not fair for retired people to support schools; we’ve already paid our dues long ago.

Anyone out there that feels the same as I do, put it in writing and make your feeling known, that enough is enough.

Lawrence Pace

VANCOUVER

Emphasize personal responsibility

Apparently, Gov. Chris Gregoire has never read the studies showing that any gains made by children from early childhood education programs vanish by the time they reach the fourth grade. Even if this were not the case, why should taking care of and teaching 3- and 4-year-old children be the responsibility of the government and not the parents?

Her mind-set of stripping away personal responsibility is further perpetuated in her ideas for college funding. The young people in our family all worked and got student loans in order to pay for college because we couldn’t afford to pay their tuition (but also weren’t poor enough to have it paid for by the government).

Because they were personally responsible for their debts, they took college very seriously and ended up with good jobs, their earnings being the source from which they pay off their student loans.

There’s a strong correlation between personal responsibility and motivation.

Dawn Klinski

VANCOUVER

Pursue cleaner energy sources

With the introduction of state Senate Bill SB 6573, Washington has a great opportunity to become the first state in the union to stop using coal as an energy source. The bill aims to eliminate tax breaks for the state’s biggest mercury polluter, TransAlta Coal, which operates the last coal-fired power plant in the state, near Centralia.

We Washingtonians should press our state legislators to pass this bill to lead the country in abandoning a poisonous habit and redirecting tax revenue toward developing cleaner alternatives that don’t necessitate destruction of landscapes, poisoning of our watersheds and ecological suicide.

Jack Bolton

SEATTLE

Congress consumed by greed

As a retired person, I received a letter from the Retirement Board indicating that, under federal law, when there is no inflation, there is no cost-of-living increase.

That means that retired people and middle class workers will not receive an increase in their pensions or paychecks in 2010.

The question to our politicians is: “If federal law prohibits payment of COLA (cost-of-living adjustment) when there is no inflation, how is it that members of Congress, who are federal employees, receive an annual COLA increase in their wages?”

The reason is that Congress passed a law that allowed them to receive the COLA annually and they have never rescinded it. Essentially, Congress has set themselves above a federal law, one that they passed, and now only applies to ordinary citizens.

When will the greed end?

Sheila G. Hudson

VANCOUVER

Help small businesses first

We seem to have decided, as a nation, that very large businesses are valuable to us. So valuable, in fact, we are willing to support them with our tax dollars when they are in trouble. There are plenty of examples of this, most recently in the bank bailout.

I suggest we change our minds. Let’s decide we value small and medium-sized businesses.

Let’s be willing to use our public money to help along our local businesses, which have proved to be far more responsive to the communities they operate in than large, multi-national corporations.

This will not only improve the service we receive as customers, it will keep the dollars here in our community.

Sean Coyle

VANCOUVER

Left-wingers’ strategy explained

It was bewildering to see a Republican get elected to former Senator Ted Kennedy’s seat in Massachusetts.

But I understand it better now that the left-wing pundits have explained what the people of Massachusetts were trying to say. By electing a Republican, they were expressing their anger toward George W. Bush and their exasperation that the government hasn’t lurched far enough to the left to make them happy.

By November, the public will probably be so angry the government isn’t left wing enough that they will throw dozens of incumbent Democrats out of Congress and return control of the House and Senate to the Republicans.

That will sure teach George W. Bush a lesson.

Lance B. Sjogren

VANCOUVER