Readers comment on high electricity rates, a lack of affordable housing and more
Offer solutions
Our city and citizens are facing many problems. We are getting ready for another election, for city commissioner, and then for mayor and more commissioners later next year. The candidates should tell us their solutions to high electricity rates and lack of affordable housing.
The Sun has recently published a number of articles on both. Gainesville Regional Utilities management is doing a good job, but rates are not going to come down as long as the utility continues to transfer funds to the city management. GRU and city should also get ready for a rise in solar power use. What will they do when more and more people start using solar power?
As far as affordable housing is concerned, according to Kim Tanzer, retired professor of architecture at the University of Florida and former dean of the University of Virginia School of Architecture, the city’s affordable housing policies are, to say the least, inadequate. Before we vote, let the candidates answer some of these questions.
Empty promises should not suffice. Let them tell us, how would they do it?
Saeed R. Khan, Gainesville
Historic corner
The Episcopal church destroyed at Northwest 43rd Avenue and 23rd Street was created by giving the land to the Episcopal church to be the first integrated church in Alachua County. This was appropriate as being next to a historic graveyard for freed slaves. When the CVS was built across the street the reason it got approval (according to The Sun ) was the church had to agree not to sell its corner to Walgreens or a large store.
Today, the solemn sanctified burial of people goes on with dignity. Wicked is the city mayor's call to violate the spirit of that agreement, the feelings of their living ancestors and the spirits of the dead whose ancestral memory would be violated.
There are no parks anywhere in this area. A local civil rights hero should have a park built for children to play and local trees planted to give privacy to the solemn, sanctified burials. Only wickedness prevails when the living do not respect the exhortations of the local neighbors to not violate this historic corner.
Tom Lane, Gainesville
Skip marriage licenses
Government intrusion into the sanctity of marriage has affected the Marxist goal to destroy the family, thus the nation. God created marriage, not government. The three-stranded cord mentioned in the Bible, Ecclesiastes 4:9-12, should be husband, wife and God; not husband, wife and government.
Marriage licenses substitute humanism and its government in place of God. To imply no-fault arrogantly implies no sin, thus mocking God. The divorce industry is a billion-dollar industry and no-fault combined with the war on men encourages divorce with financial incentives for the wife.
In better times, marriage was for life, which was better for the family and especially the children. Children reared without fathers in the home are not receiving the spiritual discipline necessary to mature to responsible adults, as our prison populations reveal.
The Florida Legislature is in clear violation with the Constitution, and illegally prohibits the right to a jury trial, a right protected in Amendment VII, of our Bill of Rights. Judges instead act as dictators, and erode the family wealth feeding a hungry industry that profits on the misery and destruction of families.
Skip the license, find a church and make Jesus the third cord.
Lloyd W. Bailey Jr., Gainesville
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This article originally appeared on The Gainesville Sun: Letters to the editor for Dec. 18, 2021
