Letters to the editor

Give residents a voice on tree plan

One of the gateways to our community has now been visually ruined with the corridor of newly V-shaped trees in the right-of-way. Winter Park Road now presents an ugly row of V-shaped trees. There is no justification for such excessiveness for a community gateway. What is the future for the city of trees if the city now refuses to maintain the trees they planted 50 years ago! Many residents cannot afford to have their right-of-way trees trimmed so the health declines and major branches come down presenting constant danger. Residents and taxpayers should have a voice in this new long-term tree plan that will take six months before we are told what the plan is. 


—Nancy Shutts

Winter Park

Tree canopy gives way to budding camera canopy

Unfortunately, it appears that the Winter Park tree canopy is giving way to the Winter Park City Commission’s government surveillance camera canopy, secretly started on Park Avenue earlier this year without public notice or meeting, following the mayor’s re-election, as he wastes no time forcing his radical agenda on residents. In time, nearly all of Winter Park’s trees may be removed so that the government, under the direction of the Winter Park City Commission, can closely monitor the movements, associations and activities of all law-abiding Winter Park residents, and keep a permanent video file on the city’s women, children, men, minorities and other individuals. Trees and cameras do not coexist well in the extremist surveillance society being implemented by the mayor and commissioners. In a recent related Winter Park Maitland Observer article on the topic (“Winter Park installs surveillance cameras“ published April 5), Mayor Ken Bradley declared his allegiance to the cameras, proclaiming that they are the future.

—Paul Vonder Heide

Winter Park

Tax hikes rooted in greed

Jeff Jontz notes in his May 3 letter to the editor (“Tax hikes rooted in envy”) that “the rich” are paying 50 percent of the taxes in the U.S. and that the call for them to pay higher taxes is “rooted in envy”.

First of all “the rich” (the top 10 percent) got 48 percent of all 2010 U.S. income according to a study by Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez of the Paris School of Economics printed recently in The New York Times. So it doesn’t appear to me that the rich, with 48 percent of all income, are especially burdened by paying 50 percent of all the taxes.

Secondly, do Republicans like Mr. Jontz have any idea why the other 90 percent pay all the rest of our taxes, with probably half of our citizens paying nothing? Answer: They don’t make enough money.

As everyone knows, a “working man” who pays about 5.5 percent in Social Security and Medicare is taxed mostly at the higher standard federal tax table levels. The rich are taxed at lower rates on capital gains and dividends, and nothing on SS or Medicare over $106,000. That’s why working people, although comprising 90 percent of all income recipients, still don’t make enough money to pay enough taxes to amount to more than 50 percent of the U.S. tax total.

I would say that the defining word to describe the resistance by the rich to raising the taxes they pay is rooted not in envy but in greed.

—William K Paton

Maitland

Stopping outrageous GSA spending

Despite Senate Democrat Leader Harry Reid’s public criticism, I announced hearings on the lavish Las Vegas General Services Administration conference and other GSA waste. Leader Reid said I needed to “get a life.” Ignoring his remarks, I went forward with a full-scale investigation relating to this agency’s culture of wasteful spending. This one conference was just the tip of the iceberg as evidenced by my previous work to fight GSA’s mismanagement of federal buildings.

Because of our hearing’s high visibility, more whistleblowers came forward and the Committee uncovered dozens of outrageous GSA junkets — some as recently as this March — at luxury resorts in Palm Springs, Napa Valley, Hawaii, Guam and the South Pacific. The Committee also learned that senior administration officials were briefed on the systemic abuse of taxpayer dollars in May 2011 and yet failed to put an end to the lavish travel or discipline those responsible. As a result of the public attention and congressional hearings, the junkets have stopped and numerous employees are finally being held accountable. One senior GSA executive involved remains on the government’s payroll, and I am working to get such offenders immediately taken off the federal dole.

I began my efforts to clean up GSA waste several years ago and released a report in October 2010 entitled, “Sitting On Our Assets: The Federal Government’s Misuse of Taxpayer-Owned Assets.” That investigative report detailed billions of taxpayer losses from thousands of empty or underutilized federal properties.

One of the first hearings I held as Chairman of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee was a few blocks from the White House in a landmark building, which had been losing $6 million a year for the last 15 years. Just this year we forced action to have the private sector redevelop the valuable-but-underutilized property and turn it into a revenue producer for the taxpayer. I also conducted hearings in other empty federal buildings to call attention to GSA waste and push legislation through the House of Representatives to force the sale, redevelopment and improved efficiency of thousands of similar properties across the country.

My efforts continue to reform and dismantle the culture of waste at GSA, hold officials accountable for their actions, and stop the federal government from sitting on its assets. I will not be deterred from my goal of saving billions of hard-earned taxpayer dollars.

—U.S. Rep. John L. Mica

District 7