Letters: Meadowbrook redevelopment, Keystone pipeline, Kansas’ troubles

Hazy redevelopment

Residents of Prairie Village are headed for another heated debate over plans to redevelop Meadowbrook Country Club. Representatives from Johnson County and Prairie Village embarrassed themselves in a staged presentation by developers with their political largess.

Before receiving any public comment, County Commissioner Ed Eilert and appointed Mayor Laura Wassmer spoke of their unabashed support for the proposal from Van Trust to create a park and develop the site into high density apartments and commercial.

Here’s what they didn’t tell anyone at the public meeting:

1) Van Trust is selling the park area to Johnson County for several times its original purchase price of only a few years ago.

2) The park land is mostly unusable for development purposes because it is in the floodplain or under high voltage utility easements.

3) The park land is cut up and not contiguous.

4) Property being sold to the county includes an old, dilapidated and asbestos laden building.

5) No mention of what Van Trust is obligated to pay for decades long unpaid sewer assessments.

Let your city and county officials know you want the real facts, not the smokescreen being given by Van Trust.

Martha Houts

Prairie Village

Oil hobgoblins

Has anyone ever stopped and thought, “What is this all about?” This Keystone XL pipeline thing has been going on for the past six years.

The president has done everything in his power to delay the building of the pipeline. The environmentalists have told us if this pipeline is built the rise in temperatures will without a doubt cause global warming to get worse.

The 1,179-mile Keystone XL pipeline would add just 1.94 percent to the already 2.5 million miles of pipelines operating in the United States. What’s most absurd about the controversy is that a nearly identical pipeline went into operation in January 2015 carrying Canadian tar sands oil from Alberta, Canada, to Freeport, Texas.

No one noticed. There were no demonstrations, no impassioned speeches by opposing politicians, nothing. It shows how totally political the Keystone pipeline controversy is. H.L. Mencken once wrote, the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed and hence clamorous to be led to safety by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

John Lovelace

Olathe

Trouble in Kansas

Every day, I see news in which Kansas House and Senate members and the governor and secretary of state have done terrible things that endanger education, voting rights and vital state services. Kansas government and citizens are under siege by the most wrongheaded, hateful, shortsighted bunch of elected officials I’ve ever seen. The awful anti-government, anti-education, anti-human attacks come so fast, it’s hard for people to understand what’s going on, let alone on rally opposition.

Derek Schmidt, attorney general, says they are justified in doing the things they do because the voters chose to put them in office. In my opinion, most Kansas voters check the “R” boxes because they always have done it in the past, without understanding what they’re voting for.

The bottom line: Kansas GOP officials are doing whatever it takes to please wealthy campaign donors. The notion of humane officials acting in the best interests of the least well-heeled is completely dead. It’s all about the money, humanity be damned.

Today I feel very discouraged. I don’t think there is a turnaround for this train to destruction. It will have to crash and hurt a lot of people before voters turn these cruel, wrongheaded people out and restore government of, by and for the people, not for money.

Liz Craig

Mission

Aches at the dentist

Many of us complain about the high cost of groceries and gas. Anyone with the misfortune of having to see a dentist lately has experienced a similar “sticker shock” at the skyrocketing increase in dental prices.

General dentistry seems to have gone the direction of family medicine — specialization such as endodontics, periodontics, orthodontics and oral surgery. Some dentists have their own fancy buildings, and almost all dental offices have many examining rooms with an equal number of technicians.

A typical procedure involves about 65 percent dental technician with a supervisory visit by the dentist himself. Considering the amount of newspaper and TV advertising, dentistry must be a lucrative business.

A recent study shows dentists as the highest average pay in the country. Most dentists have separate billing offices that require the patient pay a fixed price for a particular treatment with payment up front. While a vast majority of patients have no dental insurance, this payment is usually 100 percent out of pocket.

An alternative to today’s dental treatment is the University of Missouri-Kansas City dental school. Although the costs to the patient are much more reasonable, the time necessary and frequency of visits are the trade-off. If you are referred to a specialist, you are then quoted a much higher cost.

Dentistry today is much more painful than a toothache.

Steve Katz

Leawood

This story was originally published March 10, 2015 at 5:38 PM with the headline "Letters: Meadowbrook redevelopment, Keystone pipeline, Kansas’ troubles."