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Intermodal yard will be a poor deal for the region

What a condescending, rude message from The Roanoke Times editorial staff to the citizens of Montgomery County ("Elliston is right for intermodal yard," April 9). How dare you ask Montgomery County to suck it up and take one for the team? What team are you referring to?

Evident from the first meetings with Norfolk Southern and the Department of Rail and Public Transportation, requirements for an intermodal port were written for the Elliston site. To be forced by the railroad and our governor to accept this mandate is incredibly disturbing.

As truth of actual public costs are revealed, the New River and Roanoke valleys will find the enormous increase in truck traffic, environmental damage and decrease in quality of life to be a poor trade-off for the purported economic impact on the region.

Eastern Montgomery County citizens live in one of the most beautiful regions of Virginia. Conservation easements for many farms through Elliston and Shawsville may become the only preservation of the valley.

The governor requested landowners to preserve 400,000 acres during his term. It's shameful that their properties will soon be surrounded by the intermodal port and the spin-off businesses. This will not be the golden egg sent to boost Virginia's economy.

A costly investment in consumerism

The April 9 news story "Cost of intermodal rail yard is increasing by the day" reveals that the administrators of our commonwealth have committed to paying at the very least an estimated $50 million in corporate welfare to aid the transportation of goods that are feeding our unsustainable and ultimately deathly consumerism.

Quite a price for another nail in our collective coffin.

This is not what I voted for. Election Day might be the only day that it is not cheaper to stay home.

Sell the country folk on having a rail yard

Please enlighten those poor, unsophisticated country people of Elliston who are unable to grasp the benefits of economic development ("Elliston is right for intermodal yard," April 9 editorial). They buy parcels of land, attempting to co-exist with nature, keeping the ideas and activities of the modern world at bay. Have they failed to understand why the Greek notion of humanity existing in opposition to nature has continued through modernity?

Commerce is necessary to the survival of any community. Citizens of Elliston, embrace the many benefits that the intermodal facility will bring to your community. No longer will you have to drive outside of your community to work. The therapeutic commute along U.S. 460, through the rolling farm fields of green grass resting against the larger Blue Ridge Mountains, occasionally catching the dancing glimmers of sun atop the rustling water of the Roanoke River, will not be necessary.

Rather, you will be able to drive five minutes to the intermodal facility or a place of new business that will follow its arrival. In this way, you can all participate in humanity's progression from simple agrarianism to sophisticated modernism.

According to the World Health Organization, depression will rank second as the top cause of disability by the year 2020.

Littering should draw a fine

The work of the Clean Valley Day volunteers is most admirable ("Volunteer army sweeps valley," April 6 news story).

In public discourse, we can agree or disagree, but I think most would agree that in Southwest Virginia, we are fortunate to live in a beautiful part of the United States. It is a pity to see it marred by litter.

In the Clearbrook Community, the Civic League has asked Roanoke County on several occasions to remove litter along U.S. 220 South. It is well known that the police in this area are aggressive in monitoring the speed limit. Should they also be enforcing the anti-litter law?

Unfortunately, those who litter are not going to change their behavior until served a ticket with a $250 fine for littering. The 126 tons of litter removed in 2006 reinforces that there is an issue that cries to be addressed.

Make the shuttle a low-emission trip

If Roanoke's new "trolley" shuttle service (announced to begin at summer's end) could adopt a hybrid model or other new-technology, energy-efficient and low-emission shuttle, it could pay off nicely in several ways.

Besides reduced environmental impact, such a choice could bring our locality recognition for being abreast of technology as well as committed to being ecologically responsible. (And the system might even save in operation costs.)

Of course, the shuttle service is already framed as a measure that will reduce the number of auto trips between the busy medical campus and downtown, so it should not be hard to show off. Let's maximize the opportunity.

Obama's weakness is his wife

As a lifelong Democrat, I think Sen. Barack Obama should know that if he gets the nomination, the Republicans are not so much concerned that his minister says G-- d--- America, but that his wife has not been proud to be an American for 40 years and she recently became proud.

Do we want a first lady in the White House who has not been proud to be an American for 40 years of her life?

I can't believe she made such a statement. How do you explain that? She hasn't. She can't. The problem is silent now, but it will appear, big time, in the future. We don't need this.

Did she sit in church with her children and husband while their chosen minister damned Americans? This was their minister for 20 years.

Hillary has her Bill and Obama has his Princeton-educated wife. Good luck to both of them. Thank God for the wife that I have had for 47 years.

Politicians create our problems

I am tired of politicians claiming they can fix our problems -- things like health care, high gas prices and climbing food prices.

They claim everybody needs health care insurance. We didn't until the feds decided we needed a law, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, that says nobody can be denied treatment regardless of ability to pay. Add Medicare and Medicaid and see why health care costs have soared.

Gas prices depend on supply and demand. We don't drill for oil in this country now; we import the majority of what we use. We can't drill off Florida's coast but China is doing it right now. Forty percent of our oil comes from Mexico and South America. Hugo Chavez is threatening to start selling to China instead of the U.S. Why give power to foreign dictators?

Our higher food prices are directly connected to bio-fuels, mainly corn prices. The feds are subsidizing corn prices, so farmers are planting less to keep prices up. It seems the Senate is mainly responsible for most of these problems and, heaven help us, one member of this destructive body is going to be our next president.