SPEAKUP! !?!

I COULDN’T agree more with the April 9 letter in the Sunday paper, “ART is the most dangerous waste of money.” I’m just happy I live in the North Valley and will never ever have to go near Central ever again! LS

HOW CAN APS consider building new schools when they cannot maintain current buildings? There is a pigeon problem at Mark Twain Elementary that should have been corrected months ago since it is a terrible health hazard by Special Education classrooms. And have they considered the teacher shortage? JAC

HAVE YOU ever wondered why, if the television is on during dinner time, most of the commercials are for products that cure indigestion, constipation, diarrhea and hemorrhoids? Now it looks like the only products to be advertised on the O’Reilly Factor will be for Viagra and Cialis. JD

SO THE CITY is spending $20,000 for a study to tell us what we already know: that four-way stops are less safe than traffic lights, especially in Downtown Albuquerque. Imagine if we instead gave $1,000 to 20 needy families, or $2,000 to 10 young promising artists or scholars, or put all $20,000 toward the money promised to Nob Hill businesses that A.R.T. has left struggling. RLB

MORE TAXES, higher utility fees and rates, more expensive groceries, less discretionary money for consumers to spend. How does this help the economy? LM

THE ROSWELL judge that sentenced an embezzler to restitution of $500 a month needs an elementary class in math. $325,000 restitution at $500 a month is 650 months or 50-plus years. Give her 3 months to come up with the $325,000 or jail (and) see how fast the money will show up. TED FOR MANY years the libs couldn’t get support for taxpayer funded day care so they now call it pre-K. Don’t fall for the lie, pre-K is nothing more than taxpayer-funded babysitting. Come on parents, teach your kids shapes and colors without government help. TM ALBUQUERQUE WOULD do well to prohibit large commercial trucks from the far left lane on the interstates going through the city. Almost all large cities in the United States do that for safety and traffic-flow reasons. DR

LET’S SEE, as a taxpayer I am letting the Albuquerque school system spend hundreds of thousands of my dollars to pay some lobbyist to wine and dine his former co-workers/pals in the Legislature to spend more of my taxpayer dollars. Is it any wonder that we are broke. Madness! LL

THOUGH IT’S unfortunate that UNM must eliminate its ski team, only onethird of the skiers are from the United States. Thus, the ski team is largely an expensive scholarship program for foreign students. In a time of severe budget constraints, UNM is justified in determining if such programs are worth the cost. BT