In regards to the article of the Highland Lake access being improved to allow trailered boats to fish and enjoy the lake, I say the residents of Falmouth and Windham should not be so selfish and stand down on your opposition.

You might own the property at the water’s edge, but you do not own the lake itself nor the current launch property.

The majority of the trailered boat users would be fisherman, not recreational boaters, since the lake is not large enough for most “Big Motor Boat” owners, as Julie Motherwell puts it.

The fact is that a canoe, kayak or light boat can pass milfoil from one lake to another just as easily as a trailered boat.

As a responsible and avid fisherman, I am sure that I speak for many others in saying we would love the opportunity to fish at Highland Lake and see what it has to offer.

We all pay a fishing license fee and boat/trailer registration and excise fees along with a lake and river protection sticker fee, known as the “Milfoil Sticker.”

How and why did the lake get put on the impaired waters list anyway? Hmm … Construction of camp roads and dwellings built on the water’s edge or adjacent lots perhaps? The same people who think they own the lake?

I say the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife should stand up for the people who pay their wages and give us a new place to fish with a motor-driven boat, and enjoy another piece of what makes Maine such a great place to live — and fish!

Maybe someone should try to put a ban on all those “big motor boats” tied up to the docks of the waterfront property and right of way owners at Highland Lake.

Fair is fair, right?

Harold Knudsen

Westbrook 

On Feb. 15, there was a meeting held in Falmouth concerning Highland Lake. It was about the state wanting to install a boat ramp to handle up to 18-foot crafts. We were told that unless this was allowed the state would no longer stock the lake with fish.

I have always been under the impression that blackmail was against the law. Why try to force this on the residents of Highland Lake? We need to tell the state where to go and how to get there.

Al Stults

Windham 

Social Security would be solvent if everybody paid 

President Obama’s payroll tax cut plan was supposed to create jobs. I would like to know how?

The rate that employees pay went from 6.2 percent to 4.2 percent, which really gave them a 20 percent raise, which gave them money to pay for the increased cost of groceries, gasoline and the ridiculous price of heating oil.

The rate of 6.2 percent stayed the same for employers, thus making no incentive to hire anyone. It made the Social Security trust fund come up 2 percent short.

Why are public sector union employees exempt from paying into the Social Security system? The system would be much more solvent if everyone paid in and our lawmakers would keep their hands off it.

Is it any wonder the state cannot meet its obligations now?

Programs like MaineCare and Medicare were established in good times when we had plenty of revenue coming in.

We are paying out so much in pension and health insurance benefits to union public sector workers it is draining the state dry.

How is it that public sector employees retire younger and reap pensions that are as much or more than lower income workers?

I didn’t vote on them and wasn’t asked my opinion.

Remember, a cost of living raise is just that, an increase in the cost of living.

Always Vote!!

Erwin McAllister

Fryeburg 

For the past three years, business news commentators, economic analysts, professors and the like, along with the Fed, the former Bush and current Obama administrations all stressed their concerns regarding inflation.

Their major concern seems to be about the dangers of how deflation, stagflation and hyperinflation of goods will effect the future economy negatively both here and abroad.

Yet they all seem to refuse to acknowledge the fact that for the past three decades we have been struggling with wage stagnation.

I grew up in Jersey City, N.J., and in the late 1970s I worked for Colonial North American Van Lines moving company in Hackensack, as a mover. At that time I earned around $8 to $11 an hour, depending on the type of moving job.

Today they pay about the same rate at Colonial, and so do the major moving companies here in Maine. If we look back in time at the cost of goods and services and compare them to today, we will find that they have increased from 400 percent to over 1,000 percent during this time, yet wages have grown between 5 percent to about 200 percent.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to compare one’s weekly expenses over the years to what one brings in every week to see that it buys less of one’s basic needs to survive.

The average car in 1980 cost about $4,500, and today it costs $18,000. That’s 400 percent.

Need I say more? I often wonder what it would take for the public to join in a concerted effort to force the hand of both the state and the business community, to not only acknowledge the disparity between wage growth and the true cost of living, but to do something to bring them into balance.

Gerard Escarfullery

Bryant Pond 

Warren Turner is owed an apology for news coverage 

In the 20-odd years that I have been practicing law in Yarmouth, Warren Turner has never been anything but kind and courteous and professional to me.

Although we are not personal friends, I know many lawyers in the area who are.

And I am sure that they would agree with me that the personal challenges that Warren now confronts merit our support, not a public spectacle.

The editorial decision to so prominently display Warren’s current problems brings this newspaper one step closer to being a tabloid.

Warren is not Elliot Spitzer. He is not John Edwards. Your editors owe Warren Turner an apology.

Peter S. Lee, Esq.

Yarmouth

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