To the editor: Covington and Newton County are blessed with having several employees on the payroll who are experts at fixing stuff that isn't broken. Although the list is endless. I will only take up enough of your time to name a few.

First is Pace Street. It has been just the way it is for more than 100 years. But it just isn't good enough anymore. We have to demolish the entire area and then rebuild it. Its primary purpose is that it is a street and a street is useful in that you are able to drive on it. So, it isn't broken but we are going to fix it anyway. The proposed median won't let you make turns into businesses located there without going to another street to turn around or make a U-turn in the middle of U.S. 278 to come back to go to the store. Boy is that a major improvement.

Washington Street is certainly another of those streets which wasn't broke before we paid millions to fix it already. So now that we have already fixed it, it isn't good enough. We have to fix it again.

Amazingly there are actually people on public dole here who are paid to come up with stuff to dazzle and mesmerize our public officials into such a state of confusion, characterized by a lack of intelligence or reasoning. That illustrates their inability to learn from previous mistakes.

Or as best phrased by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., "Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity."

Now we have a plan to put blinking lights in all the trees on the square. Yes! This one is just about as ridiculous as the first two but much less expensive. This idea lacks purpose in all sense of the word. Do you really believe we have people who are paid to come up with stuff like this?

Cutting to the chase here, all of these boneheaded projects should have been at the top of the list when the financial crisis reared its ugly head and then been cut from our tax budgets first and foremost.

Why are these projects so obviously cretin? There is only one reason you need to consider, again although there are many, and that is we have libraries here with no books. We have libraries here that are short staffed because we don't have the money to hire the people necessary to keep them at full tilt. We have libraries here only open when we can afford to open them rather than when the people need them. What exactly does this tell you about the priorities of our elected officials?

Our focus is on redoing Washington Street which cost millions to redo only a few years ago. We need to redo Pace Street because somebody who was educated beyond their intellect thinks we need to do so. And we have someone who thinks putting blinking lights in the trees on the square is another priority.

The commissioners and the city council can prioritize these plans instead of lighting a match to them and burning the paper they were written on and make your tax dollars vanish faster than a roadrunner, leaving us, Wile E. Coyotes, to languish in budget crisis and lack of necessary services for the good of all the people.

Samuel M. Hay III
Covington resident