It seems there was a 9 year old girl in Brazil that was raped by her step-father. She became pregnant from this violent act as it turned out…. and with twins at that. There were caring adults around her that thought both being violently raped and then being required to carry babies to term was just too much for a 9 year old little girl. They counseled with the family and doctors and the little girl. The decision was made to terminate the pregnancy. This was done by medical professionals.
Now, the Roman Catholic Church has seen fit to excommunicate all those who supported such a decision except for the 9 year old little girl whom they decided was too young and could not be held to account for a decision to end being pregnant from rape. The Roman Church would have mandated this 9 year old give birth to the twins.
Whom do you think was right? This was not something that happened long ago. It was this week.
Saturday’s Kokomo Tribune, Kokomo IN, newspaper (2/14) carried two articles that jumped out at me: a page one story about road construction and a page A7 one about General Motors and Chrysler. Both were reminders we are in the midst of an economic crisis more severe and wide spread than most can remember.
Late Friday, Congress passed an unprecedented piece of legislation some claim is a stimulus package and others claim is nothing more than a reckless spending spree. What ever one’s opinion is of this legislation, it appears several millions of dollars will wind up in Kokomo and Howard County. If unwise decisions are made for use of this money, much of the progress the Mayor and others in local government have made to reduce costs – the asking of half of the folks in town to tote their garbage containers across the street to make pick up more efficient being one example – could be completely undone or wiped out.
Road construction decisions are one example of where decisions could go very wrong. One of the top priorities described in the Tribune article was for widening Dixon Road from Sycamore to Judson Road. Dixon is already 4-lanes from Sycamore north to Jefferson (a project just completed a couple of years ago) and three lanes from Jefferson to the Howard Community West Campus. North of there to Judson Road is nothing but farm land and one house. The two lanes along that stretch seem to work just fine. A second project is to extend Morgan Street to join Judson Road, then widen the road to the intersection of Dixon and Judson. There is almost nothing between where Morgan intersects Phillips west except Northwest Park. This means Kokomo planners want to spend millions on roads either to nowhere or to speed one more quickly past the park, a few homes, and some farmland.
More road construction will result in disruption of traffic. This would put several local businesses at risk. The Dixon construction fiasco of a couple of years ago already sent Williams Shoes to another part of town and put almost a dozen other businesses with all of their employees completely in the tank. It disrupted business for Wendy’s, Subway, Soupley’s, Key Bank, and everything north including Kroger’s, The Great Wall, Big K; not to mention everything south of the Sycamore and Dixon intersection including the Windmill Grille. Now Kokomo is proposing to do the same thing again to many of the same merchants, their employees, and their customers. Why more or wider streets are needed in this area is beyond me. In a nutshell, this looks a lot like “make-work” on a project that will have serious negative consequences for every private business along the way.
In case the city and county planners have not noticed, Kokomo’s growth has been mostly south. It is likely to continue both south and east, not north and west, especially given the planned By-pass around the By-pass.
Kokomo and Howard County do not have a good track record when it comes to road projects. The Alto road, the Sycamore Street (IN Hwy22), and the Dixon Road projects were prime examples of how not to carry out road projects. They all took months and months and months and months to complete. Scores of families and businesses were either inconvenienced, suffered loss of income or went out of business as a result of these poorly managed projects. Further, it is my belief every single project was awarded to contractors from outside of Kokomo and Howard County. It is unclear to me whether there was even one local job created for any of these.
Now we are in a time when Kokomo does not know if Chrysler and Delphi Corporations will even survive the nation’s economic crisis. The auto article about Chrysler and General Motors claims these corporations are really in “bankruptcy in disguise”. Our community has thousands of jobs at high risk. Yet, we are planning to build wider roads or roads to nowhere in ways that put economic hardship on local businesses and threaten the loss of jobs.
How many businesses will not be able to survive a traffic disruption a second time? Has there been any economic impact study on local merchants for past projects? If so, let’s examine the results. What were the true costs to this community? We need many answers before any commitments are made for more road projects. It could be that at present none of them make good economic sense, particularly if they damage local businesses in the process. Kokomo does not need to lose or put at risk even one more local job for one minute for questionable road “improvements”. The unwelcome fact is that Kokomo and Howard County are not growing. We may very well do quite the opposite…. and soon.
We are in a time of high stress in our community. We do not need to do anything to make it more difficult to stay in business. Small businesses all over Kokomo and their employees are the people who pay the wages and salaries of those in government. Adding more stress for even one business is just not the thing to do. Not now. It is already tough enough and may be getting much tougher before it is over. The “free” money may in reality cost too much.