 by Ken Lewis June 20, 2004
Let's use the recreation center as a school and sacrifice recreation! To justify this, 2 of the more adult-like activities will remain available like racquetball and a running track. Bottom line is kids who use the facility to recreate will not have the site to use as such. Add to this, the recent community direction of turning the old tennis courts into a fenced off bus storage, this was also a necessary trade off ; track and field that had money set aside for it and a completion date of spring 2004 is gone. And I recently read that 100 K set aside for an outdoor track was used for other things in the last couple of weeks. It appears to me the kids of this community are losing the negotiations battle. My question is who is their representative in all of this? If we are going to use recreation of our youth as a trade-off or pool of money for other things, it will never stop! If the Rec Center is used for an education building, the only right thing to do is, ear mark the savings to education by using it and make darn sure it provides a Track/Field and or anything solid that can be used by our kids. It is time for a steering committee for our recreating youth in this town! They are the ones losing year after year. They are the ones who are conceding their projects left and right in the name of what is important to adults. Just hire more Cops to keep the youth in check, why don t we. This is my view, and I believe
this is a community weakness of ours. If it is our direction
to turn Ketchikan into a retirement community or a place where
the kids can have the scraps leftover after the adults feed their
first love, man-o-man are we on the right track. Use it, but
pay the kids back somehow, that's all I am saying.
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