Sunday Opinion: Big Tupper, free speech, and a teachers strike
Morning, everyone. Here’s our weekly look at the weekend’s opinion pages. We’ll start off with the looming public hearing for the Adirondack Club & Resort project in Tupper Lake.
In a nuanced bit of thinking-out-loud, the Adirondack Daily Enterprise supports the project.
But the newspaper also asks everyone to take a deep breath and focus as calmly as possible on the decisions that need to be made, without all the heated rhetoric.
Both sides’ readiness to fight comes from passion for what they deeply believe in. We respect that and hope others do, too. Having everyone get through this decision without hating each other will help keep this fight from dragging on for generations.
The Watertown Daily Times, meanwhile, lauds the Supreme Court for its free speech decision last week, allowing the toxic Westboro Baptist Church to continue its protests at the funerals of American service-members.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts wrote in his majority opinion on Westboro: “Speech is powerful. It can stir people to action, move them to tears of both joy and sorrow, and — as it did here — inflict great pain.
“On the facts before us, we cannot react to that pain by punishing the speakers. As a nation we have chosen a different course — to protect even hurtful speech on public issues to ensure that we do not stifle public debate.”
The Glens Falls Post Star dings the US Census Bureau for lavish spending on office space during the recent national population tally, including some questionable decisions in Queensbury.
When offered some decent office space at other locations in the area for $10 to $15 per square foot, the bureau turned its nose up at them. Instead, the Census Bureau – a division of the U.S. Department of Commerce – decided to pay more than $62 per square foot for a 16-month lease, which included reimbursing the building owner for extensive renovations that the bureau deemed necessary – all paid for exclusively by Mr. and Mrs. Taxpayer.
In South Burlington, meanwhile, teachers are on the verge of a walk-out, and the Burlington Free Press says the school district and the union still have some talking and explaining to do.
Neither side has done an adequate job of explaining their positions or the key issue involved — a certain kind of pay increase for teachers known as “steps” when no contract is in effect.
So there it is. I don’t see any broad themes this week, but maybe you see some threads that I’m missing? As always, your comments welcome.
