Let pilot programs go forward before judging plans
To the editor:
Regarding your editorial of Aug. 24 on garbage pickup and recycling:
I am a member of the Southern Nevada Recycling Advisory Committee. We resent your inference that we were acting secretively by having to "look both ways to make sure the coast is clear," as if we were conspiring with Republic Services to defraud the public.
You delude your readers with such nonsense. We were volunteers and the meetings were open to the public; indeed, several of the meetings were covered by your newspaper.
The committee was asked to present viable recycling options, so we gathered facts independently from many outside sources to reach our conclusions. What we proposed is being done in hundreds of communities across the country and with great success in many cases. With these proposals, we intended to increase the quantity and quality of our recycling efforts by making it more convenient and encouraging participation.
These are pilot programs (you conveniently forget that) and volunteers will provide the baseline information we need to make rational decisions about our recycling programs -- even if that means not changing a thing. Why not let the test processes go forward to evaluate the costs/benefits and then engage in sensible debate?
What useful purpose is served by your continued demagoguery of the committee and the garbage franchisee? The focus should be on recycling.
But I guess it sells more newspapers when you inflame the emotions of your readers rather than jog their minds.
Rob Dorinson
LAS VEGAS
Got gas?
To the editor:
After reading about a potential shortage of natural gas here ("Regulators seek short-term solution for natural-gas crunch," Aug. 25), I wondered if this wasn't a nightmare brought to us by the Public Utilities Commission and Southwest Gas.
For the past several years, with the approval of the various cites and Clark County, Southwest Gas has given the street lighting in most new developments to the developers -- i.e., they furnished the poles and fixtures for the many communities that will burn natural gas for street lighting.
These communities then would be locked into a contract that their homeowners associations would have to honor for five years. Trying to get out from under these contracts is next to impossible.
Most if not all of these fixtures burn gas 24 hours a day, every day. There have got to be at least 20,000 of these lights within the valley (not counting the rest of the state). If Southwest Gas was forced by the PUC to stop this horrendous waste of energy we could save a significant amount of natural gas per year.
As a resident of a homeowners association community in Las Vegas, I find it appalling that city and county continue to approve this practice.
Robert Fullmer
LAS VEGAS
Big shoes
To the editor:
Jim Day's Tuesday political cartoon regarding U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' shoe size casts aspersions as to his competency. The firing of U.S. attorneys is apparently OK only under Democratic administrations.
The constant scrutiny of Mr. Gonzales by the Democratic Congress was strictly a "Get Bush" strategy. He was the most vulnerable, and they made it impossible for him to perform his job as attorney general.
Why he didn't tell them to "take this job and shove it" sooner only reflects his desire to perform his job honorably in fulfillment of the trust placed upon him by President Bush.
Robert Salas
LAS VEGAS
Health merger
To the editor:
On the surface, Monday's decision by the insurance commissioner to approve Sierra Health's buyout by UnitedHealth implies protections for current Sierra customers. No premium increases, no degrading of claims handling, etc.
Perceptively, though, our governor has weighed in that the constraints don't go far enough.
It all depends on what Sierra customers are being considered. Sierra's Medicare Advantage Plan, Senior Dimensions, is an HMO-type managed-care, limited-panel program serving tens of thousands of Southern Nevada citizens who don't pay premiums. They don't process claims through the company. So generally the only condition applying to them is presumably that services will not be cut back.
UnitedHealth owns Senior Dimensions' only area competitor, Secure Horizons. Many more citizens have chosen Senior Dimensions, believing its services and cost packages are better, including co-payments and prescription drug costs.
If the merger occurs, would one expect UnitedHealth to be in competition with itself? Or would they logically want to adjust the Senior Dimensions benefit package to better emulate that of Secure Horizons, based on their own perception of what is good business within our market?
Even Sierra makes changes to its program at various times, changing the drug formulary, dropping some services, adding others, altering co-payments. How will the insurance department differentiate sound changes from those imposed by the new owners to ultimately homogenize the differences between the two current competing plans?
Gov. Jim Gibbons suggests the protections do not go far enough, and urges Nevada's attorney general and the U.S. Department of Justice to intercede. In other words, monopolistic situations are rarely good for the consumer.
Let us hope they do intercede, until all member groups within the merged company are fully protected.
RICHARD CONNER
LAS VEGAS
Tax hike
To the editor:
In your editorial of Aug. 27 you were quick to give the Bush tax cuts credit for creating the economic expansion that has helped shrink the federal budget deficit. You seem to have conveniently forgotten that before the Bush tax cuts there was no federal budget deficit.
Those tax cuts saddled us with more than a $1 trillion in debt. Getting rid of them will be the best and fastest way to eliminate the deficit and start us down the long road toward repayment of our monstrous national debt.
JOHN FARRISH
NORTH LAS VEGAS
Still unsafe
To the editor:
I concur with George Le May on reprocessing spent nuclear fuel (Tuesday letter to the editor). His letter is misleading, however.
Reprocessing nuclear fuel involves the separation of plutonium and uranium by dissolving the spent fuel in nitric acid. But this process also creates high-level radioactive waste from the leftover products. The uranium is then available for reuse, while the plutonium needs more processing to be used for nuclear power. It needs to be blended with uranium and fabricated into fuel for use at a nuclear power plant.
This end product is a fuel even more radioactive than spent uranium fuel. It is more dangerous to reprocess because of the excessive amounts of plutonium, which incurs the risk of unexpected nuclear chain reactions. Therefore, because this fuel has these properties, it must cool for longer periods before it can go into a repository.
Until more research is done on spent nuclear fuel reprocessing, current techniques only concentrate high-level waste that is more dangerous and harder to dispose of.
Therefore, the only option we currently have for spent nuclear fuel is to store it in a repository.
ADAM DANISE
HENDERSON
