Letters to the Editor

+ Free parking was key in moving here
Dear Editor:
Regarding your lead article “Merchants denounce Main Street project,” I would like to share a little true story of how my wife and I came to retire here and buy a home in Osprey.

Before I actually decided to retire, we took a two-week combination vacation and scouting tour in 2004, working from several resorts and looking at areas from Marco Island to Longboat Key. We were mulling over the various pros and cons of the places we visited while having after-lunch drinks on St. Armands Circle. We were both leaning heavily toward Sarasota for the obvious reasons: culture, availability of quality medical care, general beauty and beaches.

As we talked, I told my wife, “I have to go feed the parking meter!” But we quickly realized that there weren’t any even in a high-end area like St. Armands.  We had actually found a place that doesn’t nickel-and-dime the taxpayers and even lets them park on the streets for which they’ve paid! We marveled that we had crossed this nice causeway and there wasn’t a tollbooth at each end! That sealed the deal for us for Sarasota, because it appeared that local government was actually friendly to residents and visitors.

This may sound like a trivial thing, but I assure you it’s not. Having owned a house nine blocks from the White House, and living in and out of Washington, D.C., a large part of our adult lives, we learned that the only parts of the D.C. government that worked and worked ruthlessly were tax collection and parking enforcement.  When I left there I had to carry around a pocketful of quarters for the meters a whole 7.5 minutes per quarter. And when the meters didn’t work, which was often, you could count on a stiff fine or boot, even if you covered the meter with a bag saying it was broken. It was extremely oppressive to residents and impossible for visitors.

The reason for this letter is that I keep reading about all these city and downtown planners who have their eyes focused on some sort of nebulous, myopic  and unarticulated notions of progress, and who keep hurting merchants, etc., without any regard to a deeper strategy on the higher level of keeping Sarasota friendly to residents and visitors and, yes, businesses. I never read about any discussion of human-scale friendliness as a key value in these improvement discussions.

For our part, simply on principle, we will never pay for downtown parking we’ll just stay away, shop online, etc. The quaint, unplanned Sarasota we fell in love with is starting to slip away from us. And if anyone out there thinks that in the future there will be fewer meters/paid garage parking or that the amounts charged will over time go down or disappear (perhaps the same folks who think downtown parallel parking is a great idea) they should just look at what happened in Washington and other smaller cities.
Daniel J. Knauf
Osprey

+ Please re-think parallel parking
Dear Editor:
I’m not one to write letters with complaints. However, when I read about taking out sensible diagonal parking to put in parallel parking, I was in shock! What is the committee thinking? First, the annoying parking meters, which I refuse to use, then this insanity! Use some commonsense, please! 
Caroline V. Hodge
Sarasota

+ Scott rail rejection was obviously right
Dear Editor:
Rod Thomson’s article on the high-speed rail project was good. The long-term consequences far outweighed the immediate effects of approving that project.

We would have had federal funds to assist in the construction costs and temporary construction jobs. The result would have been a white elephant for the Florida taxpayers to subsidize for years. Those are not going to be years when we need more costly and ineffective good ideas.

From the minute I heard the proposal, I thought the same thoughts Thomson expressed in the article. One of the main reasons we are in the fiscal position in which we now find ourselves is the application of short-term thinking to long-term projects.
John Rich
Sarasota

+ Occupation points out income inequalities
Dear Editor:
It boggles the mind that the top 1% in the U.S. has more wealth than the bottom 90%. And the concentration of wealth in the hands of a select few is projected to continue.

Because extremely wealthy people do not need to spend more than a small fraction of their income, their wealth is bound to increase just from the effect of interest or investment return, especially when the growth from investment return (interest and dividends) is taxed hardly at all. Add to that the access to favorable regulation and legislation that the super rich enjoy, and one can easily see that we are headed toward a plutocracy, where just a few people have all the power and wealth and the rest are barely able to eke out a subsistence living.

We are far advanced in this direction already. This grim future could change if our legislators could stand up to the big money interests and do not give them unfair advantage. Unfortunately, it seems that many in Congress, especially Republicans, are more than willing to legislate ever more advantages for the very wealthy, including lower income and estate taxes and minimal regulation. 
Terrence Greenwood
Venice

+ Media’s double standard covering protestors
Dear Editor:
The front page of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune’s Nov. 18 edition certainly put a positive spin on the Occupy Wall Street protesters. The picture of the injured man with blood running down his face captured our sympathy along with statements that the demonstrators were, for the most part, peaceful.

Somehow the article forgot to mention the 1,300 arrests, someone defecating on a police car and on our U.S. flag and protestors carrying signs supporting socialism and communism. They also caused thousands of dollars in damage, started fires and left cities with the bill for the cleanup requiring millions needed for the cost of police.

Compare that to the way they reported on the Tea Party who left their areas clean, broke no laws and no one was arrested. Yet the press went out of their way to find negative things about them, when their only goal was to demand our government stop spending money recklessly, putting this country in trillions of dollars in debt. Why the double standard?

President Obama ran on a platform of uniting America and, instead, we now have a president who is dividing this country into different classes of people. The real reason Obama supports the protesters is because it makes it look like our economic problems were caused by Wall Street instead of him. 
Esther Rachwal
Sarasota