Letters to the editor for May 4
The destruction of downtown Olympia
When my wife and I moved to Olympia in 1959, we were amazed at the beauty of Christmas Island sparkling on Capitol Lake.
I was a recent hire of the Olympia Fire Department, so I would be spending a third of my life at State and Capitol Way.
As I became familiar with “downtown,” I was impressed with the vitality and beauty of the state capital. One could find state legislators and even the governor having breakfast or lunch at The Spar.
When the weather turned warm, one could find kids swimming, even water skiing, on Capitol Lake. The crowning of the Lakefair Queen on the shore of Capitol Lake drew huge crowds.
In the fall, hundreds of visitors lined the Fifth Avenue bridge to watch descendants of the salmon planted earlier, returning to Percival Cove to spawn.
Downtown businesses thrived. Life was good downtown. So what happened?
The main culprit, in my opinion, was the state of Washington’s Department of Enterprise Services (DES).
When Capitol Lake was formed to serve as a reflection pool, DES was committed to maintain the lake, flush it with salt water several times a year, and dredge as needed. They have ignored that responsibility, allowing unwanted marine growth to take over and the lake to fill with silt.
The Olympia City Council ignored the decimation of this beautiful draw to downtown. Now they are going to remove the dam and turn the lake into an ugly, foul-smelling mud flat.
Where are the citizens of Olympia? Why are they not screaming? It appears to me they have given up trying to return downtown to the beauty it used to be.
A final question: How many Olympia citizens now dare to go downtown anymore during the day, much less after dark?
Larry Glenn, Lacey
Register all citizens to vote
A short response to Mr. Shanewise’s idea to require that anyone 18 or older who receives any type of federal monetary assistance has to be registered to vote or they will lose 10% of whatever they qualify for.
The evil Republicans restricting voting for people of color is a left-wing talking point. I would agree with Mr. Shanewise’s plan with one caveat: Those who are receiving “any type of federal money” are U.S. citizens.
No one really wants to keep any American citizen from voting, but we do want those that do vote to be citizens as our Constitution requires. America should provide a birth certificate and ID free of charge to all Americans as well so every citizen can vote.
America needs to get back to following our nation’s Constitution and laws passed by our elected officials.
Dennis Zech, Olympia
Marijuana machinations
The state legislature recently passed a bill designating the word “marijuana” a “racist” word and requiring that all state laws use the term “cannabis” instead. Legislator Melanie Morgan, a Democrat, sponsored the bill and indicated that “marijuana” is a pejorative term and racist.
An excellent piece by Christopher Tremoglie in the Washington Examiner quotes Connor Kubeisy, communications and policy associate with Smart Approaches to Marijuana, as follows: “It’s worth noting that Mexico began its nationwide prohibition of marijuana 17 years before our federal government did, citing concerns about the drug’s ill effects. Many of the concerns held by Americans about marijuana were shared and preceded by similar concerns among Mexicans…. The word ‘cannabis’ refers to the genus of the plant, while marijuana and hemp are different species of it. U.S. law also views them differently. Cannabis plants above 0.3% THC are legally considered marijuana, while plants below that threshold are considered hemp. All marijuana is cannabis, but not all cannabis is marijuana.”
So, once again this state’s efforts to “follow the science,” and now history, fall far short of the truth, and the taxpayer dollar is being wasted on inaccurate changes to state laws and innumerable employee hours spent eliminating a non-existent racial slur and suppressing Hispanic history in the process.
Could we just direct Washington tax dollars to real issues which abound in this state?
Jann Coffman, Olympia