To the editor:
I would like to comment on your story, “Columbus accepts grant for new police officer, vehicle. Governor’s Highway Safety grant pays almost $80K first year. The Columbus Police Department soon will be at full staff thanks to N.C. Governor’s Highway safety Program.”
The Columbus program sounds good. And it will be, particularly with the cooperation of the county and the surrounding cities as has been recently shown with their drug program.
So I am all for our local program. But wait a minute, why is it called the governor’s program? Is this her program? Or is she trying to buy my vote.
I checked with my friend Google. Sure enough the state does have an extensive program of passing out this kind of money, but where does the money come from? It turns out to come from the National Highway Safety Administration.
And where do they get their money? From you and me. So we pay our federal tax and send our money to Washington. They “administer it” and send it to our state, who administers it and sends it to our local government to use for us.
One study on this system shows that you get back about 10 cents on the the dollar, however, in these times, we do help the employment in Raleigh and Washington. Where is Tea Party when we need them?
The state and federal government have a roll here, but it should concentrate on research of need, best practice and equalization.
Let’s tell our elected officials that we would prefer to spend our whole dollar here, and not try to buy our votes with our money, with their claim of “look what I did to get your share of ‘free money.’”
An interesting Google find is “GOFREEGOVERNMENTMONEY.”
— Jack Black, Tryon