I recently read about upgrades to subsidized apartments in Bradford, Vt. Between the cost of the place and the planned renovations, each apartment is going to have $254,000 worth of taxpayer money in them. On top of that, the taxpayers will pay a good part of the rent for tenants.
A couple years ago in Windsor, taxpayers paid $316,000 per apartment to rebuild 58 subsidized units. And now the taxpayers pay a good part of the rent there.
The median value of a home in Vermont is $209,000. How can anybody justify the kind of taxpayer money being spent on subsidized housing units? When are the taxpayers ever going to get a break? Or are we going to keep throwing money away at this rate until the country is bankrupt?
Larry BrodeurClaremont
Property taxes in Haverhill are out of sight. The HTA (Haverhill Taxpayers Association) is going to be working to place responsible limits on spending by the town and the Haverhill Cooperative School District.
However, the third component of our tax rate is the county portion. The county budget is up over 7 percent this year. The only way to control the county budget is to elect county commissioners who will not simply rubber-stamp every request.
We have a candidate who is running from the Upper Valley who will work for us, the taxpayers. The choice is very clear. His name is Randy Subjeck, of Piermont. He is a fiscal conservative who shares our belief that taxes are too high. He will act as a watchdog over frivolous and excessive spending. Please give him your vote in the Sept. 13 Republican primary if you want to see lower taxes.
If you are not a registered voter, go to the town clerk’s office and become one. It is a five-minute procedure — very easy. If you do not vote for people who are trying to hold the tax rate down, do not complain when you get your bill.
Ron WilloughbyFor the Haverhill Taxpayers AssociationNorth Haverhill
An Aug. 18 Valley News headline read: “Trump Shakes Up Campaign Staff.” This is the third or fourth “shake-up” without any improvement in his previous poll numbers. This is because the primary reason for the drop in poll numbers is not the inefficiency of his campaign staff, but the uncontrolled mouth of the candidate. The solution could possibly be as simple as a piece of strategically placed duct tape.
Sikhar Banerjee New London
Say what you will about Donald Trump, the odds in favor of his inadvertently stumbling to a wise course of action are still vastly better than those of Hillary Clinton inadvertently stumbling to an honest one. And speaking of honesty, Bernie Sanders’ recent purchase of a third home (Lake Champlain waterfront, over half a million dollars) underscores both the gullibility of his supporters and how appropriate are his initials. You have to admire his chutzpah, although I’d admire it more if he had announced the purchase during his campaign instead of after it.
The popularity of any one of these clowns, much less all three of them, strikes me as cause for extreme pessimism about our future.
Anthony Stimson Lebanon
Referring to a SundayValley News article of Aug. 14, “Wind Power Blows In to Rhode Island,” the Block Island Wind Farm likely will be operational in late 2016. It is located 3.8 miles east of Block Island. It has five wind turbines, each with a capacity of 6 megawatts. Each turbine is about 589 feet tall. Total cost of the project is about $290 million. The service life is about 25 years.
The annual wind energy production would be about 105,000 megawatt hours. If the major costs of 25-year financing, return on investment and operation and maintenance are ignored, then the cost of energy production would be about 11.4 cents per kilowatt hour. If these costs were not ignored, the energy cost would be about 20 cents. That would be about the price charged to utilities under a long-term power purchase agreement. This energy would be variable and intermittent, i.e., no wind, no energy. Other generators, likely gas-fired, would be required to serve electricity demand on a year-round basis.
There is a much better alternative. That same quantity of energy could be bought from Hydro-Quebec at a cost to utilities of about 7 cents. That energy would have much less CO2 emissions than wind energy, and would be a steady, year-round supply, wind or no wind. A 1,000-megawatt transmission line, costing about $2 billion, could supply to Massachusetts about 6,500,000 megawatt hours, at least 60 times as much as the wind turbine system.
Willem PostWoodstock