No Valley person or persons could do $150-an-hour job?

No Valley person or persons could do $150-an-hour job?
EDITOR:
I am getting sick and tired of reading how people from outside of our local area are hired for work at exorbitant wages. Contracts are awarded to firms in Texas to study our traffic, or make suggestions to improve local operations.
The latest slap in the face to our local workforce and taxpayers is the consultant hired to be a liaison in the construction of the center downtown -- $150 an hour, plus travel and lodging for a person who lives in Connecticut! About $35,000 would be a nice wage for someone who works in the Mahoning Valley. We could hire three local people for $50 per hour with no travel or lodging, or 10 people for $15 per hour. Is there NO ONE in this area qualified to do this work?
CARL FOOTE
Boardman
North Side commission isclear with its housing goals
EDITOR:
When we got married, my wife gave up a condominium in Canfield in exchange for an 85-year-old brick house on the North Side of Youngstown. We chose this location because the previous owners not only took good care of it, but did not alter the appearance, so that the integrity of the structure was preserved inside and out. This is the mission of the North Side Historic District Preservation Commission, of which I am a member.
Despite the fears revealed in a recent letter, the NSHDPC is not arrogantly dispensing permission to neighborhoods who want to paint the garage. It has no desire or ability to keep people from improving their homes and does not insist on the most historically correct methods when they are not practical or economically feasible. It does not stand in the way of badly needed demolition when a structure is not salvageable. The NSHDPC also is not a group of outsiders "telling us what we need to do." Each member is and must be a Youngstown resident, and six out of eight (including Norma Stefanik) live on the North Side.
Historic preservation is not just a nice thing to do; it is economically advantageous, as it attracts people of financial resources who don't like living in plastic. There is something about the weight of time that adds character to a neighborhood. Whenever we slap vinyl siding onto an early 20th century home, whenever we pave over a brick street, whenever we knock down a historic building that can still be renovated, we diminish one of the North Side's greatest assets.
BILL KOCH
Youngstown
Kerry's actions when he returned from war matter
EDITOR:
The more things change, the more they stay the same. How true, especially when talking about John Kerry.
John Kerry likes to boast of his time spent in Vietnam, but other Vietnam veterans have now exposed the truth of his unsavory Vietnam antics. But that's not the most troubling aspect of Kerry's past. The real problem lies in what he did upon his return from Vietnam.
Always the self-promoter, Kerry sought to propel himself into the political limelight using unabashed anti-Americanism as the vehicle to get there. It didn't matter that the lives of Americans and South Vietnamese were at stake. All that mattered -- and all that still matters -- was the political ascendancy of John Kerry.
John Kerry colluded with enemies of the United States to help orchestrate our loss in the Vietnam War. He openly admits gong to Paris in 1970 to meet with a delegation of the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong who used him as a pawn to undermine our war effort at home. ("Useful idiots" is how the Communists referred to the likes of John Kerry.) As a result of the actions of Kerry and others, like Jane Fonda, the United States lost the Vietnam War.
Now Kerry is engaged in the same kind of demoralizing activity with regard to Iraq and the whole war on terrorism. Not much has changed since his post-Vietnam days. The anti-American words and tactics are the same; only the time and place are different.
Like I said, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
JOSEPH K. WALTENBAUGH
New Castle, Pa.