Letters and Comments for July 10, 2009

Letters and Comments for July 10, 2009

Busy year for La Grande Lions

To the Editor:

After a year as president of the Lions Club, I am reporting our club’s activities over the 12 months. We worked at the Lions food booth at the Union County Fair, and will be there again this month, serving cold drinks and hot burgers and fries as one of our major fundraisers. Stop by and buy!

As fundraisers, we also sold Christmas wreaths, made by the La Grande High School band members with whom we shared our profits; and held our Buffalo Peak Golf Scramble and the Motorcycle Poker rally — which this year will be Sept. 12.

Our service projects included Coats for Kids; the Santa mall, where I reprised my role as the Wrappin’ Reindeer (for me that is the beginning of Christmas); our sight and hearing screening program at the city’s elementary schools; prepared food baskets; adopted a family for Christmas; gave a $1,000 scholarship to an EOU student from La Grande High School; and presented the area’s first-graders with their very own tiny American flags and a little bit of civics to go with it!

We gave funds to the Babe Ruth Tournament, the Chamber of Commerce, a camp for diabetics, Pioneer Field, People to People, Cove Boosters for football field lights, La Grande Parks Dept., La Grande Police Dept for a throwphone and two of my personal favorites — the Friday BackPack program and $1,000 to Elgin for bridge funding for their successful effort to fund their health clinic.

We also continued to improve Birnie Park and week by week funded those who needed eye exams, glasses or hearing aids. Finally, we donated to the fundraiser for the community fireworks show — and what a grand show that was!

If you are interested in joining us, we meet every Monday at noon at 10 Depot. Contact a Lion for more details.

Janie Burcart

La Grande

Potential local industry?

To the Editor:

Having grown up in New Jersey, garbage and its disposal has followed my biography. For years, New Jersey has taken huge amounts of garbage from New York City into its landfills and made a living off of it (though much less now than in decades past).

As a potential sustainable business model for rural Oregon I am wondering how much attention has been given to processing waste from neighboring states using cutting-edge technology like plasma arc gasification. Unlike a landfill, plasma arc waste disposal uses high temperatures to burn trash and to capture the energy released in order to continue operation and feed back into the electrical grid. The byproduct of gasification is slag, which I have seen suggested as a pavement or to repair roads.

Some of the early research in this field came out of Purdue University and similar projects have started in Florida and Georgia. La Grande could even make a case for being a potential building site for such an operation due to its proximity to neighboring states and the use of rail lines.

Hugh Kelly

La Grande