Community Center … piece by piece
To the editor:
After graduating from optometry college in 1972, my wife Angie and I moved back to Presque Isle with plans to establish our lives in the community in which I grew up.
We had little money in order to buy our first house, but we managed; we purchased a very inexpensive home on Third St. It was built in about 1868 when Andrew Johnson was president following the assassination of Pres. Lincoln and required lots and lots of repairs and renovations. That little money we had allowed us only to renovate project by project, piece by piece. Like Rome, it wasn’t done all in one fell swoop. Forty-three years later, somehow there remain a few undone projects, but it’s comfortable and quite livable.
Now that brings me to the point of my short, humble story above. The town fathers, aka city council, in all their unwise wisdom, have a crazy thought in their collective heads that “Rome should be built in a day”, as it were. Here we are beginning yet another summer (third one) without a swimming pool for the kids. Fact is that there appears to be funds available to start the pool. No good reason exists to construct a pool AND a new Community Center at the same time.
Just as we reconstructed our home on Third St. over the years, project by project, as the dollars became available, the city council could very well do the same; start the pool project and put off the Community Center project to a later year. How more reasonable can that be?
Our kids and parents thereof are waiting impatiently for a swimming pool they haven’t enjoyed for three years. Council members should get off their collective butts and get the people’s projects moving … piece by piece, if necessary.
Dick Graves
Presque Isle
