Readers react to Social Security, brown bats and climate change
Cost-of-living raise
This year — for the third time in seven years — Social Security denied cost-of-living raises for all recipients.
The formula Congress concocted is failing to keep up with the rising costs of food and utilities. What is going on that Social Security and Congress are letting us down?
Social Security should not be managed to cheat the recipients out of money they should get.
AARP had a report a few weeks ago explaining how Congress was shortchanging recipients.
Whom is Congress working for? Whom is Congress trying to please, and how are members of Congress up for re-election expecting us to vote?
William A. Ingram
Kansas City
Brown bats at risk
Lee’s Summit has decided to allow the construction of a hotel, restaurants, office space, multiple soccer fields and a grocery store at View High Drive and Interstate 470.
Near View High Drive there are caves that house a large colony of brown bats.
It will be destroyed. Brown bats are not on any protected list, so they can be eliminated — all for a restaurant, offices or apartment complex.
How many chain restaurants, hotels and grocery stores can our city support and at what cost to the environment?
According to the University of Missouri Extension, less than half of 1 percent of brown bats become rabid, and one brown bat can eat 600 mosquitoes an hour.
More Lee’s Summit citizens will light their toxic tiki torches and continue to pollute our environment.
With the recent mosquito-borne Zika virus, I am deeply disappointed in the choices the city I live in has made.
Rebecca Onken
Lee’s Summit
Climate change
I guess I misunderstood the liberal environmentalists in 1973. We were told that we would run out of fossil fuel by 1980.
That was not to say that we would run a little short or it might be hard to get as it was in President Jimmy Carter’s administration — but out. Done. No more to be had.
Our lives as we knew them would be over. We would all be freezing in the street.
My confusion? I thought they said we would run out of oil. I guess what they really meant was that we would run out of places to store all the oil.
My bad. I’ll pay more attention as I consider the so-called climate change.
That reminds me. What caused the glaciers to melt from the last glacier period that was a little more than 10,000 years ago?
Thick sheets of ice covered a lot of North America as well as other places.
Maybe the environmental students can simply check the records.
What? There are no records?
Well, then I guess we can try to sell it by guilt and raising taxes.
Larry Dickstein
Lone Jack
KC speed limits
I would like to talk about raising the speed limit.
I think the speed limits in certain parts of the Jackson County and Johnson County are way too low.
I think low speed limits make traffic much slower and can cause a lot of rush hour-like traffic congestion.
One street I want to raise the speed limit is Emanuel Cleaver Boulevard, where it is only 30 mph. That street could be at least 40 mph.
Another street is Ward Parkway. The speed limit on it is only 35 mph. It should be at least 40 mph or 45 mph.
Cops hiding trying to catch speeders are an additional concern.
When they do that, they hold up traffic just to catch one speeder when there are probably multiple speeders in that area.
Andrew Kelow
Kansas City
Nursing care
I entered a nursing home in Independence in June 2013 for rehabilitation after spinal surgery.
I was very apprehensive because I had worked in two nursing homes in 1978 and 1981 and visited my parents in nursing homes when they needed them.
I have never been more pleasantly surprised about the unselfish, caring people working here. They work for low wages but make you feel at home and comforted.
I have gotten great medical care as well.
You sometimes learn from the news media about abuse in nursing homes. That is not the case here.
I feel blessed that I have more than a home here.
It takes a village to raise a child and a village of wonderful people to care for you in your senior years.
Ron Townsend
Independence
This story was originally published March 5, 2016 at 9:00 AM with the headline "Readers react to Social Security, brown bats and climate change."