Letters to the Editor: April 22-28, 2021

Posted

The Editor:

I would like to commend you (and your newspaper) for having the wisdom and courage for taking a position in your “Letters to the Editor” section of your paper to encourage those among your readership who chose to contribute letters to the editor to confine their comments to matters of local interest and import. The broader media landscape provides more than enough opportunity for those who want to vent their anger and intolerance. Let our little The Northern Light newspaper provide a haven of peace and civility in a world that has given itself over to division and bigotry. In fact, it might be worth the effort to put away the hate speech in our daily dealings with all our neighbors, and let us instead focus on those values that we all share.

J. B. Miller

Birch Bay

 

The Editor:

Upcoming city council meeting – Monday, April 26 at 6 p.m.

This is the public hearing for the annexation of 4458 “H” Street, known as the Rooney Property.

Annexation is the first step in the process for development to a higher number of houses (18 +/-) than would be allowed if the property were to remain in the county.

The primary access to this site with up to 18 houses would be from Harborview Drive accessed from H Street through both Crest Drive and Terrace Avenue. 

The city has a requirement to advertise the public hearing in a generally distributed newspaper.

The city will be advertising this in the Bellingham Herald. I called the Herald and asked what their subscriber count was for zip code 98230. The lady was very helpful.

She looked up the information and then came back and said there are 16 weekly subscribers and two online subscribers.

I checked with The Northern Light and asked for their distribution numbers for weekly mailed out papers.

They mail out 9,233 papers once per week and place another 1,267 papers on stands for a total of 10,500 weekly copies. Hum, seems equal. So support local. Sounds ominous, like the “Star Chamber.”

Maybe the city council would want to look at this to see if maybe a correction should be made to this policy.

Public comments are encouraged.

Go to the city of Blaine website and to the section Your Government – City Council agenda and get the instructions for attending the city council meeting on Zoom. All input is important.

Make your voice heard.

Ray Pelletti

Blaine

 

The Editor:

On April 7, The Northern Light published an article with the headline “Bill starts effort for state universal healthcare.” This headline is extremely misleading, as the bill it discusses – SB5399 – does nothing to move Washington toward the goal of a publicly funded system of healthcare.

To its credit, the article did admit this in a roundabout way by stating, “It does not guarantee a single-payer system, but the commission would be tasked with finding a way to publicly fund and expand health services.”

Contrary to the claims made by its proponents, SB5399 does not in any meaningful way put our state on a path toward “a comprehensive plan for a publicly funded health care system.”

Instead, it avoids this altogether with the typical political charade of killing something the legislature does not want to do by placing it into a study commission comprised of legislators and “health care experts” (note the conspicuous absence of doctors, nurses, and patients) with the hope that time will kill it off. SB5399 does this nicely, deferring commission recommendations until November 2024, with implementation of “something” much further out.

What is particularly galling is that our legislature buried the one bill – SB5204 – that would have offered Washington publicly funded health care for every resident of our state within the next two years.

With SB5204, the woman in the article who filed for bankruptcy after three cancer treatments, would never have been compelled to do that because of a system that values profit over humanity.

Mark Proulx

Bellingham

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