Reader offers ideas to help kids, seniors

Is it really a mystery in the Soldotna and Kenai area why there are problems in the community? Kids here have the movies, local school sport programs (what’s left of them), and if their parents have it like that, or there is a summer job taken, they ride ATVs. Usually, there are a couple of accidents a year that are fatal, and these are some of the things our children are left to do with their time:

1) City buy Vera’s Variety — through local donations, or whatever it takes — remove some of the landscaping, (which cuts down on upkeep), and build a skateboard park right on to the police department! Nampa, Idaho, did just that. Why couldn’t we learn by examples of other successful cities? They have very little crime and vandalism at their facility. Our skateboard park is outside, in a surely vulnerable spot for vandalism, and always a topic of controversy.

2) There needs to be a bus system. Not these outfits that charge you to go a ways and give ’em all you’ve got, practically. That’s OK for the high-muck-a-muck, and well off. We have seniors that have little and no money. We have kids whose parents both work, so they can’t get a ride if they want to take extra-curricular sports, etc.

Shame on us for not seeing the elderly through their “golden years” and our children through their “whippersnapper” age. How many of us would benefit from a dependable transit bus that went around “the loop” from Soldotna to Kenai and back? I know of many. Not having to wait and wonder if your ride was going to come for sure or not would be really nice. We’d probably have enough revenue in a year or two to buy another bus, even if we bought one at first.

These are two costly ideas that will be beneficial to the city’s crime rate in the long run — anyway you look at it. It says in the Bible that even “an honest man will steal for food,” and we know what happens to unused, unchanneled kids’ energy.

It also says that our young men (will) stumble and fall. Hopefully, our city will consider the repercussions of oppression and poverty and positively produce a rash of rewarding results.

Heidi Poeschel

Soldotna