Editorial: "One's word of honor isn't worth what it used to be"

Oh, spare me. More glowering invocations of idealized cowboy culture from our resident wannabe, railing like a mustachioed melodramatist that this developer is acting, um, just like a developer. Puh-leeze!

We've been here before, of course.

You know what, Ben? A person's word has always mattered, and it's always mattered all over this country, not just the "West." You watch way too many cowboy movies on TV, it's time to grow up.

And your headline sucks.

A1: "Supervisors OK $248.9 million budget"

I can't really blame Paula Rhoden for trying to squeeze this information into the form her editor wants, it should have been designed better. We wind up trying to read a spreadsheet without the gridlines, with bits about the actual effects that matter to voters sprinkled among the wreckage. Ack.

Letter: "Cloke should check population trends"

Al West disputes Paul Cloke's figures in his June 27 ToT on doubling times vs 100-year water assurances. Even so, West agrees that 100-year assurances are so much BS. So why argue? Perhaps it's his attachment to a false equivalency between developers and 'environmentalists.'

Talk of the Town: "Forest project violates environmental policy"

I feel like I just walked into the middle of a meeting. Robert Grossman, a retired DoE environmental engineer who apparently ought to know, says that the Forest Service hasn't done due diligence on the environmental impact of the proposed cement plant in Drake. I can see how this would be a knotty problem considering how hard up the local construction industry is for cement. He ends with the reasonable statement, "This proposed project either should conform to regulations or officials should stop it." My question is: which officials? Nowhere in the piece do we get a sense of what can be done about this or who would do it if the Forest Service sticks to its decisions. Who do we call, Bob?