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Dear Editor:
My good friend, Pat Reilly, discussed on this page, his reasoning for not spending $50,000 of the county's taxpayer's money to help underwrite our community's effort to stop the construction of the unneeded Cardinal Hickory Creek powerline.
Most anyone who has served on a board of directors, especially those that serve the public or non-profits, knows first-hand the difficulty of balancing limited funding with needed activities.
In the case of CHC, the ratepayers will be (legally) scammed for the next 40 years of abusive and punitive interest charges, along with repayment of the line itself. Already, the ratepayers have been burdened with repayment of other tentacles of the larger MISO ( MidContinent Independent System Operator) where questionable practices have indebted Wisconsin ratepayers with similar results, as our legislators and PSC have agreed without protest.
For those wishing to support the CHC line or comfortably remain absent in the effort to stop the economic ruin of property values from Middleton to Dubuque, who accept the visual blight that will affect our community for generations, and bring increased electrical monthly costs without increased value, I have a suggestion.
Start a non-profit charity that is wholly voluntary, sell some of your house yard, business, farm, or Shangri-la, to a loud, mean, untouchable, and unagreeable business entity. Live next to them for the next multi-generations of your family. Send your dollar offerings to the charity where the monies will be distributed to the people hurt by the CHC line. Those folks will have been left as road-kill by the project, even as they have suffered millions of dollars of property devaluation, their homes and business destroyed.
Any Takers?
That is why it is important to take a very modest amount of money from all of us and say to our grandchildren, "At least someone was willing to stand for what was right " and show them the picture of the man and the tank in Tiananmen Square. Tell them the cost of courage, and the pain for standing against wrong wherever it is found.
Alan Jewell
Dodgeville