Sunday Opinion: Thumbs up to the Tupper Resort and long life, thumbs down to nuke power

Morning, folks.  Here’s the morning editorial recon for the North Country region.

Adirondack Daily Enterprise publisher Cathering Moore was in the audience last week for the Big Tupper resort hearings.

Over the weekend, she published a commentary urging the state to permit the project and asking the environmental groups to bow out.

By fighting to kill the ACR project, you will be killing their community, killing their economy, but mainly killing their hope for the future. If you feel, in all good conscience, that you can do this and it feels good in your gut, then there is a bigger problem.

The Watertown Daily Times is noting that Americans are living longer than ever.  Kind of surprising, right, when all we hear day in and day out is gloom-and-doom stories about our country and world?

One wrinkle though, as the newspaper notes, is that some of us have it much better than others.

There are disparities, too: white males live an average of 75.7 years; black males, 70.9 years.

[Ralph Sacco, president of the American Heart Association] said: “The continuing differences between blacks and whites also highlight the need to more effectively prevent cardiovascular diseases and stroke among African- Americans.”

The Plattsburgh Press-Republican has led the region’s reporting on deep school cuts, pointing to school district woes across the North Country.

This morning, the newspaper is urging voters to play an active role by getting involved early, before the May  budget votes.

Many school superintendents have already told the Press-Republican that painful decisions will be made, including layoffs and program eliminations or changes.

If that is what you want to see happen, or if you are dead set against those cuts, you need to let your school board know now. It does no good to just try to vote the budget down in May because you aren’t happy with the decisions made. There are a number of options for expressing your opinions.

Ken Tingley at the Glens Falls Post Star has a fascinating take on the nuclear power crisis in Japan.  The main problem with the nuclear industry isn’t technical, he concludes, but a matter of capitalism and the profit-motive being a poor fit.

The nuclear industry is littered with shortcuts and corruption dating back to the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl disasters, the hysterical cousins that are the con in any nuclear power debate.

The shortcomings in nuclear power are not so much in the technology, but in the man-made greed of the business model.

So there’s a snapshot of what people are writing and thinking about across the region.  As always, your comment welcome.

Tags: adirondack club and resort, economy, environment, infrastructure