Comments about Page 1-Feb 10, 2009 issue

Looking at the most recent release of the misnamed
Iron County Reporter, I decided there's quite a
bit of content on page 1 that deserves comment.
The issue is Feb 10, 2010.

At the top left of the page is an article headlined
"Stambaugh Township Board OKs salary recommendations."
Sure enough, the board approved a 4% raise for
themselves for the upcoming year if those attending
the annual meeting set for March 3.

This is being done in the face of no senior citizen
in the US achieving any cost of living increase
for Social Security because, according to the
federal government, the US has not experienced a
cost of living increase.

Disgusting, isn't it?

Next comes the EDC's pet project to build a Disk
Golf course adjoining the RV park in Iron River.
Bruce Benkley, a physician assistant at NorthStar
has been appointed the chairman of the committee.
While I disagree that this should be a government
project in the first place and have written about
this issue before, how did the decision to name
Mr. Benkley the chairman come about? Why wasn't
there some public significant discussion about
the position in the first place?

We note that the photo of the group that attended
the meeting about Disk Golf consisted of 5 people,
one of which was Julie Melchiori, our county
Economic Developer, and another was Robert
Rafferty, the Iron County Mine Inspector who was
there because there are some mine shafts in the
immediate vicinity of the proposed course. While
Mrs. Melchiori's estimate of the materials cost
for the course is in the range of $15,000, we
have to wonder what the cost of protecting the
public from mine shafts in the area will run,
and who will pay for that!

We note that with 5 people attending the meeting,
two of them county officials, leaves the total
interest in this project some three individuals.
Considering a county population of 12,800 or
so individuals, the public interest level in
this project is 0.0023%. Even if we say that only
10% of those interested attended the meeting, we
would have am interest level of 0.023% of the
entire population of Iron County, say 30 people.

Is that sufficient reason for the county to expend
the funds and effort to build this facility?

Next is the discussion about the Habitat project
meeting invitation. The newspaper was first
available on Tuesday, February 9th, and the
meeting that's offered for as the public
informational meeting was scheduled for this
evening at 6 PM in Crystal Falls. Two days
notice for an informational meeting is, in
a word, inadequate!

But my real question is, why is any organization
interested in building new houses for the poor in
a community where there are so many vacant,
easily repairable, homes in the county? For
the cost of building one new home we could be
repairing 5, with five poor families reaping the
benefit and future eyesores being brought back
onto the tax rolls, a win win all the way around?

Someone needs to take a deeper look at why a new
home is going to be built in Iron County for
this purpose. If something seems too good to
be true, it usually is, and it would be good to
know in advance whose pockets are going to be
filled by this project. Even if high school
students in a construction trades program were
going to be involved, it seems that it would be
of greatest benefit to rehab several houses
instead of building one from scratch.

Finally, the Iron County Medical Facility is at
the beginning of expansion projects to increase
the number of beds available. We wonder is this
is going to become another construction project
like the NorthStar Hospital expansion that
employed very few people from Michigan, let
alone from Iron County. I am one of those who
believes we live and work in an economic
region that includes parts of Northern Wisconsin,
but it was clear that all the subcontractors
came from a goodly distance away in Wisconsin
because of the convenience of their having a
place in the general contractor's rolodex.

We certainly hope that this project will
represent a turning point in larger construction
projects by making a point of employing as many
local contractors as possible.

Please bear in mind that this entire article
discusses issues arising out of articles only
on the first page of the local weekly "newspaper."
In Iron County we have lots of issues, with no one
bothering to challenge how things are being run
locally. That needs to change. We really need
people to shake things up a bit.

Bill Vajk