Letters to the Editor for Tuesday, February 21, 2012

City needs a new, humane shelter

There are a few useless things our tax dollars get used for, and one of them is Wildlife Management, specifically, the people who are paid to sit on the side of the road to kill deer that are only trying to cross it. Instead why couldn’t Lynchburg build a permanent solution like a tunnel or bridge diversion as other towns have done. I refuse to pay people to sit and kill innocent animals every day. How useless.

What I would like to support and give my tax dollars to is the new, no-kill animal shelter for the City of Lynchburg as proposed by the Lynchburg Humane Society. That would be a dream come true in an area like this.

As a community member and avid supporter of humane society, I think the long term benefits of a new facility are well worth the money. I know the budget for other useless things could be reallocated to saving lives rather than destroying them.

MEREDITH BUIST

Lynchburg

Call it what it is ... a tax

This weekend, I received notification with my Lynchburg City Utility billing that Lynchburg is starting a “storm water utility” fee.

I was impressed with the ingenuity in which they sold this new charge as a way to “more fairly distribute the cost of storm water management activities among all properties that create storm water runoff.”

Although it seems inefficiently cumbersome for city officials to have to calculate the amount of impervious surfaces for all properties in Lynchburg city it may in fact be a more fair way to access to cost of storm water management services as opposed to supporting these services based on taxes derived from “the value of the property and not the amount of storm water generated.”

I do wonder if we should all expect our property tax rates to be adjusted downward to account for this cost redistribution or if this is simply a thinly veiled way of increasing taxes via a new “utility.”  I’m guessing it’s just another new tax; let’s call it what it truly is.

RON SELZLER

Lynchburg

Bedford supervisors out of line

“Conspirator nonsense” and a “management issue” are the words Bedford County Supervisor John Sharp used in The News & Advance to describe those critical of the “resignation” of County Administrator Kathleen Guzi.

Neither Sharp nor any of his supervisor cohorts has provided any facts to support their claims, and they never will, because there are none. Not even Guzi was told why she was fired (she voluntarily resigned in exchange for a severance package).

The facts are that two supervisors had harbored personal grudges and added two more votes with last November’s election. (How could two new supervisors with no Board experience vote to remove Guzi, except also for personal reasons?) It’s clear that Sharp went along with the crowd.

There was no sit-down meeting with Guzi, no signal that she was a problem. Fact is that they conspired behind the back of Chairman Charles Neudorfer, who later decried the back-door conspiracy as the most unprofessional process he’d ever experienced, and pulled off a cowardly act of personal vengeance.

A probe of emails and phone records just might prove Sharp’s “conspirator” description as accurate, but of him and his political cronies.

As for the “management issue,” Bedford County has a huge one with this board.

BRODY FRANKLIN

Huddleston