TIF board gets failing grades

I can’t believe the Tax Increment Financing board voted not to recommend that Rapoport Academy receive $222,500 to renovate a building on the old Paul Quinn College campus. The requested funds are to be used along with other funds the academy raised to renovate a building in a blighted area of town. That’s the exact purpose of tax increment financing.

How can people who are supposed to be devoted to the education of our children vote not to recommend these funds, especially in light of the fact that educational capabilities in Waco need significant improvement, particularly for problem and challenged children?

Those same students who are problems for educators in the Waco ISD thrive in the environment at Rapoport Academy, often becoming star students. Rapoport Academy continuously meets “recognized” status in elementary, middle and high school levels on the TAKS.

It just doesn’t add up that the needs of A.J. Moore High School — parking-lot paving and some landscaping, and some landscaping and sidewalks near the Wells Fargo building — are more important than renovation of a building in an extremely blighted area to educate our community’s children.

I have no involvement with any of the schools in this area, but I do recognize that education is the solution for most of the problems facing future adults in the coming years.

The Waco City Council has the final say on these projects. I recommend that all parents who care about education contact council members and let them know they want educational opportunities for children put ahead of the projects recommended by the Tax Increment Financing Zone 1 board.

Frank Beavers

China Spring

EDITOR’S NOTE: Beavers identifies himself as a retired aerospace engineer.

Government bungling

I’m amazed anyone would believe the government can run anything new. It cannot handle the old things that are in its charge.

Social Security — gone. Medicare — gone. Government certainly can’t run the Postal Service. And now proponents want to have national health care. Well, we already support national health care through Medicare and Medicaid.

It doesn’t matter if the person in the Oval Office is Democrat or Republican. All are failures. They want to take away the pension I’ve spent 36 years working toward, remove my pension insurance and finish off my 401(k), which has been badly beaten in the past and is getting it again.

No thanks, Mr. President, whoever you are. I just don’t think I can afford anymore of the wonderful things you want to do to me.

Bill Odom

Hewitt

Fearful prospects

The massive unrest in the streets of Iran seems also to have taken the mullahs by surprise. They have begun backpedaling a bit about the results of the recent election, calling for an “investigation” of fraud claims. However, the outcome would seem to be preordained: No dictator ever gives up power willingly.

I believe there must be another revolution in Iran to throw the mullahs out and establish a true republic or democracy. Whether this will actually happen is at best unclear, but it’s quite clear that the scale of the protest has made the mullahs fear such a revolution.

Scared dictators have a history of lashing out. This could get very ugly.

The mullahs are now in the business of maintaining their dictatorship by means of armed oppression. If they win, expect nuclear war in the Mideast as soon as they accumulate enough weapons-grade materials.

They would do this in part to deflect attention from their domestic activities. Hitler did the same thing starting World War II in Europe.

This could get very ugly.

Gary W. Johnson

McGregor

Rest of the Tull story

We all enjoyed the picture of the two teenage boys in the June 20 Trib. They were my cousins, Joe and Mickey Tull.

Joe is a retired Air Force colonel now living in Florida. Mickey, now dead, was a famous composer and conductor.

Bill F. Miller

Waco

EDITOR’S NOTE: You’ll be happy to learn that a member of the Trib editorial board has an album of Mickey Tull’s orchestral music, though the composer was known in professional circles as Fisher Tull. Upon Tull’s death in 1994, Gov. Ann Richards, a fellow high school graduate from Waco, gave permission for his burial in the Texas State Cemetery.