Water board politics; religion and discrimination; living in Mayberry; no shame in aging

Water board politics

The hypocrisy of Marty Leonard and Jim Lane is simply stunning.

During their re-election campaign for the board of the Tarrant Regional Water District, they’ve been bewailing the notion that their challengers have accepted campaign money from a single Dallas businessman. Oh, the horror!

Now, with the release of their campaign finance reports, we come to learn that these champions of local control have accepted wads of cash from not one, not two, not three, not four, not five … but six Dallas businessmen.

So is out-of-town money good or bad?

Perhaps, in the spirit of their campaign rhetoric, they’ll return this mountain of Dallas money.

We calculate the likelihood of that ever happening to be on a par with the big ditch ever actually being dug.

— Adrian J. Murray, Fort Worth

Let’s see if I have this straight.

A Dallas businessman is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to elect his candidates to our water board because he’s so concerned about deer leases and other so-called abuses, rather than the pipeline coming through his own land.

And the challenger in the District 4 City Council race accepted more than $64,000 from the police and fire professional associations.

But that has nothing to do with him protecting their already overly generous pensions if he wins.

Yeah — right!

I may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I know bull hockey when I hear it.

That’s why I am voting for Jim Lane and Marty Leonard for the Tarrant Regional Water Board and for Danny Scarth for District 4 City Council.

— Oliver Lukach, Fort Worth

Religion, discrimination

Richard Hollerman’s Sunday letter (“Religious conscience and the First Amendment”) gave me much pause.

I sincerely hope he doesn’t have a job in the U.S. workplace because he obviously believes discrimination should be legal.

The time is coming when good people will again “sit in at lunch counters” and stop asking to be served and demand it be so, as was done in the 1960s.

Looking back, almost every American believes the civil rights movement took our country forward.

People who tout their religion as a reason to discriminate need to get another religious experience.

Please.

— Robert Cappa, Bedford

Living in Mayberry?

The Grapevine Courier makes me feel a bit like I still live in a little town like Mayberry of the old Andy Griffith Show.

This week I read about Duco, the new Southlake K-9 police dog.

I wondered if Southlake now has one or more Barney Fife-type elements within its local government who want to feel like they have “big-city” police capabilities, but no real need.

The other answer could be that a narcotics-tracking and apprehension dog really is needed, because the big city has finally come to Southlake.

I would prefer the former, because that would mean paradise may have a few more years before it’s completely lost.

— Woodruff Banks, Grapevine

This story was originally published April 16, 2015 at 5:48 PM with the headline "Water board politics; religion and discrimination; living in Mayberry; no shame in aging."