City needs recreation center

Dear editor,

If a community has a shared conscience, it is most revealed in the government agencies we create to serve us. in allowing those agencies to collect our taxes, we ask them to examine carefully our combined (and occasionally individual) needs and to spend those resources thoughtfully in an attempt to address those needs.

A recreation facility that might combine many of the offices and functions of the city's parks and recreation department with meeting rooms and athletic spaces for segments of the community that are largely overlooked -- seniors, low income, developmentally challenged, youth outside of school sports programs -- is the very definition of a universal need to which we could hope the conscience of government would respond.

A recreation district was established in western Elmore County for precisely that purpose -- to build a recreational facility for the broadest possible use of the community, given the resources the tax dollars would allow.

The two newly elected directors of the recreation board have determined the pursuit of that recreation facility (though it was about to break ground) was not a worthwhile project and cancelled its construction at a penalty cost to the taxpayers of $148,000 as well as abandoning hundreds of thousands of dollars spent to prepare for the construction.

The project is not completely lost, as the plans are still in place. However, the two directors (while neglecting to fill the third director position for five months) have set out on a course to freely distribute 15 years (and millions of dollars) of collected taxes to virtually any organization that can argue that it is "recreational" -- regardless of whether it largely serves the needs of a specific club or even if that organization is already receiving tax dollars from some other government agency.

The present directors have offered no plans for a general recreation facility -- outside of an interest in a new skateboard park, which hardly suits that definition -- and seem to have little of the public conscience that is driven to respond to that community need.

Your presence at their regular meetings (5:30 p.m. the third Wednesday of the month at 245 East 6th South St.) might awaken that conscience.

-- Jim and Karen Bird,

Mountain Home