Callers comment on a planned grocery store in Alachua County, electric vehicles and more
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• It comes as no surprise that the company who was going to put a grocery store out on Hawthorne Road has backed out. Any business developer or investor who has dealt with the city of Gainesville knows of the endless restrictions and conditions the city constantly will present to clients small and large. The worst thing about it is that they have an attitude as if they are doing you a complete favor.
• To those people who are advocating for having us switch to electric cars, school buses, etc., I would suggest that first you direct your energies to getting GRU and UF — and all other utilities, for that matter — to stop using fossil fuels to produce electricity. That’s what’s happening here locally, so any electric vehicle charged locally is not clean because the electricity it is using was produced by burning fossil fuels and emitting pollutants into the air.
• Superintendent of Alachua County Public Schools, you can’t tell the board how you want to be evaluated. They’re your boss. Board members, y’all need to get rid of her.
• The Sun’s editors do a decent job of limiting outright lies in letters, calls and columns that appear on its editorial pages, but they aren’t perfect. One lie I’ve seen published too often is the assertion that Democrats made Trump-like fraud complaints in 2000. The truth is that election officials in a few Florida counties used flawed punch-card systems, most notably the awful butterfly ballot in Palm Beach County. Gore and Democrats pushed for careful recounts of the confusing ballots, but there were no fraud claims, no Proud Boys and no Cyber Ninjas that year.
• Gov. DeSantis is now preaching that testing of COVID-asymptomatic people is ridiculous and unnecessary, contrary to what the scientists say. He says that, “Whoever heard of testing someone before you’re sick?” Well, has he ever heard of mammograms for breast cancer? Of prostate exams and PSA blood tests to detect prostate cancer? Pap smears to detect cervical cancer? Prevention saves a lot of lives.
• Charlie Crist as a Democrat couldn’t even defeat Rick Scott. Now he’s trying to run against a much better organized and funded DeSantis. Democrats need to abandon that dead horse and pick a winner.
• For the person who said that he is grateful to Mr. DeSantis for no vaccines and no mask mandates, let me bring you up to date because your Mr. DeSantis politicizing COVID like his past president did, we are in the ship of people dying. Feel lucky if you have lost no one to COVID. We did in September. We loved him and miss our friend, neighbor and our dentist too, very much. Please get your vaccine so that your life can be spared.
• It’s become quite obvious that our Gov. DeSantis does not understand medicine, but now that he is touting monoclonal antibody therapy and ignoring touting vaccines, I guess he doesn’t understand money either because monoclonal antibodies cost on average $4,000 a dose. Vaccines are $24 a dose.
• Waaahh! I don’t like the president or former president and I’m sad because not everyone agrees with me! Ugh — get a real identity that doesn’t revolve around politics and you’d all be much happier people.
This article originally appeared on The Gainesville Sun: Sound Off for Jan. 16, 2022
