We were relieved Tuesday that the West Wendover City Council avoided throwing good money after bad when it upheld the kibosh on the Wendover Gas buy out.
One thing that has us still scratching our head is why was the bad money spent in the first place?
The reasons Roy Briggs gave for not wanting to go forward made a lot of sense: the city should not undertake a massive spending project with so many unknowns and little expertise.
They also made sense last summer when given by then Mayor Donnie Andersen when he vetoed the project and when Mr. Briggs helped over ride.
While David Serafini’s critique of the feasibility study was enlightening and thoughtful. It was a nuts and bolts criticism.
The numbers did not add up or at least were massaged.
Briggs’ reason was philosophical and while we welcome a convert to common sense we wish he had converted before the city spent $24,000.
Now that the deal is off, the $24,000 must be considered either a mistake or wasted money.
Yes we know that someone will try to justify the waste insisting that the city had to have done its due diligence.
Try wasting $24,000 in the real world and see how far that excuse will go.
The city of West Wendover doesn’t have $24,000 to waste. No small business does and no large business would tolerate it.
So who is to blame?
City Manager Chris Melville for one. Not for being frivolous with the people’s money but rather for not reading the signs from the Peppermill that this project was too big to swallow.
After working hand in glove with the casino for well over a decade Melville should have picked up on the mood coming from the bosses of his councilmen and that mood was grumpy.
But Briggs’ and his partners in crime Johnny Gorum and Emily Carter bear the brunt of the blame.
Carter for pushing this idiocy through while she bought her gas from someone else and Gorum who appears to have embraced socialism as an economic model.
Profit is evidently a bad thing for our erstwhile councilman. We wonder how his employer would think about that?
Cut backs in postal service have come and more will probably be coming to rural Nevada.
A lot of the problems of our postal service can be blamed on technology. Who sends birthday cards these days except middle aged mothers to adult children. In 20 years those children won’t at least not on a regular basis.
But while technology may doom the postal service it didn’t have to.
Instead of being mail only the US Postal Service could have become the center for communication back in the 1980’s. Just as European postal services were the first to offer international phone service, fax machines and telex the American could have followed suit or even have lead the way.
The US Postal Service might have even set up computer rooms for customers to try that new fangled internet.
It didn’t and instead sold commemorative stamps.
We imagine it will muddle through but as it cuts back it will become less and less important.
When he was running for president back in 2004, ridicule was heaped on Joe Biden for suggesting that Iraq be partitioned so that Kurdish, Sunni Arab and Shiite Arab would have states of their own.
Ten years after the start of the Iraq war that seems to be happening all by itself.
In fact the canonization is spreading beyond Iraq into almost every country of the Arab world.
Far from a monolithic Arab nation which speaks in one language with one voice cracks if not rifts are forming from Morocco to Bahrain as well they should.
France and Britain drew the maps of the modern middle east after World War I to better manage their interests.
They are being redrawn today in blood.
“too big” not “to big”