Letters to the editor for Oct. 5

Olympia must address finance rumors

I prefer facts to rumors. So when I heard a rumor that the city of Olympia is in financial crisis, I submitted a formal request for information asking for the city’s current debt level (i.e., “debt obligation” as of September 2019).

Nanci Lien, the city’s finance director, refused to tell me. Instead, she referred to an out-of-date figure. Wow!

The rumors are bad enough. Now the staff are refusing to disclose public information, which makes me wonder if the rumors are understating the situation.

The city must come clean about their financial situation. And the staff must honor government transparency.

Empathy kills the most sea lions

There is a sad irony to the lethal removal program for sea lions that eat salmon at the Columbia River dams. It is the people who protest such killings that will increase sea lion mortality the most. Here’s why.

Opposition to killing the sea lions basically lies in the cruelty of it. You know, the killing of a highly intelligent mammal just because it’s doing what it does for a living, which is eat fish. So, to offset this cruelty, offending individuals are euthanized, meaning they are trapped and taken away to a facility where they are injected and die peacefully.

Now, while this may be a gentle form of death, it does nothing to deter other sea lions from eating salmon. Indeed, it should actually entice them to do so because almost every day the alpha male sea lion is taken away and doesn’t come back, so competition for the fish is reduced.

If you want to stop sea lions from eating salmon at dams, teach them this is a risky business by killing individuals in plain view of all the other sea lions. This way you would only have to kill a few for a year or two before the others would get the message and go hunt elsewhere. But with euthanasia, many hundreds will be killed every year in perpetuity because none of them will ever be taught to stop eating fish at the dams.

So, don’t blame bleeding hearts for the killings, just the number killed.