Letters: Impressive project? Better think again

CALVERTON

Enough is enough with this town

I am so happy to hear Planning Board member Ed Densieski thinks the Costco deal is a pretty impressive project.

Foxwood Village homeowners have been dealing with the builder and the Town Board on this for at least five years. Does anyone know that there was a freshwater pond on that property that was filled in years ago, or that a group of owls lives there? And that hundreds of animals will be displaced to local homeowners’ property? Does everyone know there will only be a 29-foot barrier between Costco and Foxwood Village homeowners? This started out as a few hundred feet years ago. This will certainly hurt homeowners who want to sell their homes. There is no way the hundreds of trees to be knocked down can be replaced. If left standing, they would give some semblance of country, be homes for birds and block noise. A few new shrubs will never do that.

We may be a senior community, but we are not dumb. How many ugly, empty buildings will there be on Route 58 in the next year? And how many more companies will get a 10-year tax break? Have any of these things helped the Riverhead homeowners? What happened to the movie theater that was promised to us? How long has the battle over the animal shelter been going on; why can’t property at EPCAL be designated for that? Nothing will change in Riverhead until we have a supervisor and Town Council that does not have a reason to be pushing and backing the developers -— and who truly care about, and listen to, the people. God help Riverhead. When is the next election?

Lyn Tyler

WESTHAMPTON BEACH

Never, ever by phone

Recently it was brought to my attention that some area residents are being solicited by phone to give donations to “hospice” and in at least one incidence when asked, the caller was reluctant to reveal the name of the organization to receive the donation.

Please be aware, East End Hospice has never, does not now, nor has any plan to engage in soliciting donations via telephone.

Granted, donations to East End Hospice are welcome and necessary to support activities such as our highly acclaimed children’s bereavement programs and providing group and individual therapy sessions to children and parents all across the East End. The same holds true for Camp Good Grief, which in this, its 15th year is expected to be attended by over 100 children, and the very exciting new project to build an eight-bed, free-standing hospice inpatient residence.

Looking back over the past 21 years of serving the people of the East End, the community has steadfastly supported and encouraged us in our work. We look forward to providing care and comfort to those in need in the years ahead as East End Hospice continues to bring the extraordinary level of support families have become accustomed to and rightly deserve.

Priscilla Ruffin

president and CEO, East End Hospice

CALVERTON

Worse off? Hardly

Mitt Romney has repeatedly asserted that President Obama is in “over his head” and his policies have “made the economy worse” since he took office in 2009. When the president took office, we were losing 750,000 jobs per month, and in this latest month we added 115,000 new jobs. We have had positive jobs growth for the last 26 months, with recent months closer to 200,000 jobs added.

When President Obama took office, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was 7,949. On Friday it closed at 13,003, an improvement of 61 percent.

Can any supporter of Gov. Romney write in and explain how it is better to lose 3/4 of a million jobs per month than to have positive job growth, a difference of almost 1 million jobs per month? Does Romney, whose business expertise is supposed to be his strength, really believe this?

The defense that I have repeatedly heard attacking the president’s handling of the economy refers to a prediction made by one of his advisers, Christina Romer, in December 2008 prior to the president taking office. At that time Ms. Romer, who was about to become head of the president’s council of economic advisors, speculated that unemployment wouldn’t go above 8 percent if the Recovery Act was passed, but she was basing that prediction on fourth-quarter numbers from the Government Accounting Office that were later revised downward to show that the economy was much deeper in recession that December than had been previously reported. Contrary to the often-repeated claim, President Obama himself never said that unemployment would stay below 8 percent, though if the Recovery Act had given fewer tax breaks and instead included more investment in our crumbling infrastructure we might have been able to achieve that goal.

Jerry Silverstein

MATTITUCK

A close call

“She’s going down!” someone yelled.

One hot and sultry summer’s night in Fall River, Mass., we almost lost the famous HMS Bounty.

The photo of the legendary ship in last week’s Suffolk Times (also on riverheadnewsreview.com) brought back the memory of what happened in Fall River Cove when she was saved by just a few minutes from sinking. It was close.

Late at night, while the ship was tied up at a pier in the cove, she stared taking on water. The six of us on board were sound asleep. We hadn’t noticed that the main bilge pumps had shut down. It would have sunk if we hadn’t stumbled around in the pitch dark and found the emergency switches that kicked on the back-up pumps.

That, fortunately, saved the day.

Jack McGreevy