City street crews

Dear Editor:

On the week of July 24, Claremont city street crews did extensive work on the curbs of Harrison Avenue. In order to complete their work they had to demolish sections of pavement and curbs, sometimes leaving holes, trenches and parkings laid bare. Then, they put up cones and left. The usual fare, or so I thought.

Soon another part of the crew came and put up forms for the concrete, which was, in a couple of hours, laid. In the process, the sprinklers in our lawn next to the curb were destroyed.

As I stood looking at the sprinkler mess and wondering how to get them in shape, a worker in a Claremont city pick-up truck pulled up and said, “Don’t worry, another crew will come today or early tomorrow and repair them.” “Really?” I thought. But, true to the man’s word, before they left, the sprinklers were repaired. Later that same day the cement was poured and the next day the asphalt was laid. Fast and well done.

Many thanks to the crew and their fine work as well as their consideration for Claremont’s citizens!

Jim Fiske

Claremont

Trump’s wall is funded

Dear Editor:

On July 26, on a straight partisan vote, House Republicans inserted a $1.6 billion expenditure into a defense appropriation. The $1.6 billion will initiate construction of Donald Trump’s great southern wall. Candidate Trump promised that Mexico would pay for his wall, but Mexico having declined, President Trump is quietly laying the cost on American taxpayers.

Taxpayers, wake up! These are your tax dollars. The initial $1.6 billion appropriation is only three percent of the estimated total cost of the planned wall. The remaining 97 percent will soon be on the national credit card. 

Ivan Light

Claremont

Registering to vote

Dear Editor:

Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Representative Robert Brady (D-PA) introduced the Automatic Voter Registration Act of 2017. The League is proud to support legislation that enhances access for eligible voters in our elections and works to modernize our electoral system.

This bill will improve the accuracy of voter records, cut down on costs and modernize outdated registration systems while supporting implementation in states across the country.

The League of Women Voters is a leader in voter registration efforts across the country. Expanding voter registration has been a principal goal of the League since its founding in the wake of the passage in 1920 of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote. We are proud to see Congress embracing new technology that expands access to the ballot while still taking the necessary safeguards to secure personal information.

The League fully supports this bill and urges all voters to contact their members of the US Senate and House of Representatives to support this important legislation.

Ellen Taylor

Vice President for Advocacy

LWV of the Claremont Area

We the People Rising

Dear Editor:

I dispute the use by Robin Hvidston of the self-description of her group as “We The People Rising.”

She misunderstands if she thinks her group somehow owns these words, which they use to set themselves apart from the rest of us, as if they falsely believe that only they understand the true meaning of what it means to be citizens of our country.

As reported in the COURIER issue of Friday, July 28, this group has “gained regional and national attention for their frequent, often-heated, protests,” which have gained them a place on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s list of “nativist extremist” organizations which former President George Bush referred to as “vigilantes.”

Ms. Hvidston falsely claims that “If people are here illegally and committing crimes, that is the issue,” as she ignores the fact that, as reported by the COURIER, “statistics indicate that immigrants, both documented and undocumented, commit less [emphasis added] crime than U.S. citizens.”

The event in which her group “forced a bus full of children who had escaped violence in South America out of town,” to be rerouted to San Diego, is frighteningly reminiscent of the refusal of our country among others to permit the notorious “Ship of Death” to land, resulting in the return of the passengers to Europe, where many died in the Nazi death camps.

She is disingenuous when she alleges, in serving as an apologist for blocking the busload of children, when she falsely claims doing so was “a humane program for those here illegally,” pronouncing with self-imagined expertise that “the facility was not set up to do this type of process.”

Ms. Hvidston clearly does not accept the basic principles of our democratic system of government.  Though once aligned with former Congressman Gary Miller, she evidently learned nothing from him which might have encouraged her to run for public office herself. Instead, she has chosen to appear at public meetings- though interestingly never in her own community of Upland – where as reported in the Courier she and her fellow agitators are said to “come usually to … disrupt, never to really get any real point across.”

Her methods are those of loud shouting, thrusting of various inflammatory protest signs, and other forms of intimidation, rather than reasonable discourse.

She is not of “We the People” as she presents herself.

Don Fisher

Claremont