Letters to the Editor

Ten years of cash flow for long term savings

And it's not amazing

Add available land to a school

We would not be a fool

Let's take advantage and buy

Before we let time fly

Remember Riverfield and the land in front

Let's not make the same mistake and bunt

Steve Sheppard

Fairfield

Bemusing

I was bemused to read (in the April 18th issue) of the "energized citizenry and elected officials" rallying to decry the efforts of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to reroute and increase air traffic over Fairfield County. Although several items mentioned in the article were amusing, particularly hilarious was the utterance by Congressman Shays that "We need the FAA to have an obligation for quality-of-life issues."

Really? Gee, I thought the FAA was primarily responsible for ensuring safe air travel! Let me disclose why I have a modest interest in the issue. I was a passenger on two flights into the LaGuardia airspace within recent times which each had to take sudden and dramatic evasive maneuvers to avoid a mid-air collision. I believe these experiences qualify me to express some thoughts.

I was also enthralled to read that several years ago Chris Shays appealed to then-Senator D'Amato (aka

"Senator Pothole") to correct some errant decisions of the FAA at that time. Apparently, because of an equipment breakdown at LaGuardia, the FAA had temporarily permitted aircraft to fly low over the 4th Congressional District, thereby increasing the air space separation between aircraft to presumably permit safer flight operations. What a terrible decision, even if done so temporarily! By having Senator D'Amato remind the FAA of his budgetary controls over them (hint: coercion), landing patterns were rapidly changed again and all was soon right in Fairfield County.

The revelation of Senator D'Amato's training and qualifications in air traffic control is great news! Having demonstrated his expertise in this matter, perhaps he can find more gainful employment by signing on with the FAA to help in the control towers.

As a person who flies into and out of area airports, I recognize things are getting crowded up in the skies. What I really want the FAA to do is devise the safest air routes and landing procedures for all area airports, thereby reducing (but never eliminating) the risk of mid-air aircraft collisions.

I am dismayed, but not surprised, by the grandiose posturing, expressions of concern, and vague statements being made by our many and enlightened area politicians. However, I seriously doubt judgments on revised air traffic patterns can or should be made which are largely based on the noise levels generated by politicians and aggrieved citizens, Senator D'Amato notwithstanding. I hope individuals with recognized expertise in air traffic management aviation safety and risk management would be allowed to provide expertise without it being rejected out-of-hand by others who "know" what the "right answers" are. Although this issue may always be contentious, I do believe we are all seeking the safest air routes and landing procedures for these airports which minimize air travel risks.

I hope readers of this letter will find this view reasonable as well as logical.

Perhaps once this most serious "quality of life" issue regarding air traffic in the region is resolved, our "energized citizenry and elected officials" can turn their attention and energies to more mundane topics, such as the war in Iraq, our massive federal deficit, global terrorism, the Social Security morass, national energy security, the deteriorating public education system and perhaps a few other equally trivial matters.

Finally, lest anyone view this letter as an example of the NIMBY (not in my backyard) phenomenon, I hereby invite the FAA to install a navigational beacon in my backyard to aid aircraft in their safe takeoff or landing at any area airport. My only request is that they take care not to collide with any of the GE corporate helicopters which currently seem to use my house as a navigational marker on their descent path for landing.

Robert Shaw

Fairfield

A Corn Flake in Everyone's Gas Tank

Now that the government has succeeded in putting corn flakes in everyone's gas tank, let's see what really happened.

When you take away the food (34 percent of the U.S. corn production) from the chickens, cows and pigs...and give it to the ethanol producers, along with a 51 cent per gallon subsidy, ($4.5 BILLION paid by U.S. taxpayers), here is what really happens.

First, you have to pick the corn and ship it to the newly built distilling plants to turn it into ethanol. That requires fuel to ship the corn.

The processing of corn to ethanol is called distilling. It requires more than 1 gallon of oil fuel and 1,700 gallons of water to end up with 1 gallon of ethanol. Then you have to ship the ethanol by truck, tanker or train since it is too corrosive to go into a pipeline. That uses more fuel.

To grow the corn, each acre required 130 pounds of nitrogen and 55 pounds of phosphorus for fertilizing, which has to be shipped to the farms and spread out, requiring more fuel.

Since there is an unlimited demand for corn, with a floor on the price, a guaranteed profit and no risk, farmers are shifting to grow corn instead of wheat, rice and other grains. With less wheat and rice, it leads to shortages and increases the costs of bread and cereals to consumers and feed to the ranchers and farmers, so the price of beef, pork, chicken, eggs, etc., had to go up. And as everyone knows, it did, leading to inflation and food shortages.

Since ethanol has less energy than gasoline, when you mix it in with the gasoline, you finally get it to the pump and get 30 percent FEWER miles per gallon from the fuel than you could have gotten if they just put the gallon of fuel in your car in the first place, instead of making ethanol.

We are now paying $4 a gallon for diluted gasoline that gives us fewer mpg, at the same time that the government is chiding the auto manufacturers to increase mpg.

In the end, we have succeeded in wasting billions of gallons of water, lowering fuel efficiency of cars, trucks, trains and planes, doubling the cost and creating shortages, of rice, wheat, eggs and meat, while lowering the mpg of our vehicles and creating all sorts of pollution with the extraneous energy utilization.

We would have been better off just eating the corn, drinking the water and using the original fuel in our cars. (If we just ate the corn, we could provide 2,000 calories of carbs EVERY DAY for 104 MILLION people. That is one-third of the U.S. population.)

Then we could rebate the $4.5 billion to all the Americans who paid taxes to pay for the gasoline they use and lower the cost of food as well.

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama still support ethanol subsidies. John McCain does not.

In 1912, Ludwig von Mises, an economist in Europe, wrote, "Socialists promise you the blessings of the Garden of Eden, but they plan to transform the world into a gigantic post office."

Jerry Simon

Stamford

No Standing Still

On the Jan. 25 front page of the Fairfield Citizen-News you had a very misleading headline. In bold letters you proclaimed "Residents to Flatto: Restore Department." At least in the opening sentence you did say that "Ten Fairfield residents have come forward to publicly request that First Selectman Ken Flatto reverse his decision to remove the Conservation Department from the Fairfield Metro Center project." I'd like to let you know that 10 negative complainers is far from all the residents of Fairfield. In fact it is usually these 10 who oppose any change or growth which is good for Fairfield. They don't seem to understand the well-accepted principle that if we don't grow for the better we will decline for the worse. There is no standing still.

A good example to show that these 10 do not represent the majority of Fairfield residents was the two high school question which was hotly debated a few years ago. One of these 10 was a leader of the small group opposed to restoring our second high school. It appeared that she and a few other negative thinkers were going to insist on having their way until the first selectman was able to hold a townwide opinion poll. 73 percent of Fairfield residents were in favor of the two high school solution. The negative thinkers lost this argument but as a consolation prize they insisted on having the new middle school on the same plot of ground as the second high school. What a bad idea, but the decent town planners thought they had to agree just to pacify the negative thinkers.

Most of the others in this "group of 10" have been involved for years in opposing good things for Fairfield. They usually use so-called conservation rules and inland-wetland rules to stop all progress. In addition they have the two Conservation Department employees offer ridiculous studies and statements to support their stop-progress agenda. Some examples:

They stopped the improvements at the Black Rock Congregational Church by claming it would eliminate a "vernal pool." A vernal pool is a depression in the ground which gathers water in the spring in which salamanders, fairy shrimp and mosquitoes breed. Oh, they claimed that it would be awful to eliminate a few salamanders and a lot of mosquitoes. Give us a break. They also had their two town Conservation employees testify that an enlarged parking lot would put too much water in a brook which drains the property. The church's professional engineer showed that a new method of draining the parking lot would actually help clean the brook of weeds and trash.

The open space extremists are responsible for convincing our state legislators to spend $80 million to buy watershed property from the Aquarion Water Company so it could be called "open space." The extremists didn't seem to know that watershed property was already under state rules not to be sold to developers. The state taxpayers will be paying heavily for years for this dumb action.

These environmental extremists used the power of publicity such as you provide in some of your front-page stories to stop decent and much-needed restaurants such as Appleby's to come into Fairfield. Appleby's wanted to open in a business area in downtown Fairfield where it could be used by many Fairfield residents and by college students and provide much-needed property tax.

The environmental extremists had the help of the state DEP to delay by two years the dredging of Southport Harbor. They used the excuse that a few wild flowers might be displaced.

Environmental extremists are responsible for a recent 15 percent increase in our electric rates. This was caused by environmental extremists joining with Attorney General Blumenthal and state Senator McKinney to oppose the building of new power lines into Fairfield County. Finally the federal government (FERC) had to step in and impose this higher rate as a punishment to all Fairfield County residents so that the state and town would allow the needed new power line to be built.

And now we see that the extremists are trying to further delay (if not stop) the new train station site. It's been five years that this project has been in planning and now months being delayed due to environmental extremism. Thank goodness that our first selectman had the courage to take steps to get the project moving. The project will provide much-needed parking for train travelers, will provide many new jobs and will eventually increase our business tax base to help hold down residential property taxes.

I must admit that I'm one of the positive-thinking silent majority. Unfortunately we allow the negative thinking few to fill the Letters To The Editors pages with their schemes to halt or delay all progress. Perhaps it's time to issue a call to the silent majority to send letters explaining how to do the "right things" and "things right." And let's not worry about which political party gets credit.

Richard Maher

Fairfield