Letters to the Editor
Great Use for County Home
I am writing because I think a great use of the Geauga County Home would be a treatment center where women and their children can live while the mother recovers from drug addiction.
The Village in Miami, Fla., is a model for this type of treatment. Information can be found on the National Institutes of Health website.
The county needs to heed the call of experts around the nation who have expressed outrage and cited the consequences of separating children and their families. The grief of being separated hurts the children and the parent trying to kick addiction.
We have all contributed to creating a world that people want to escape from by using drugs, legal or illegal. It is right that we show compassion and ensure that real justice be served in giving people a chance to recover from their addictions.
Since we are a rural county, travel is often a stumbling block for people. The space could be limited to Lake/Geauga residents, since we share a recovery office.
Robin Neff
Chardon
Missing from the Article
My hats off to the Geauga County Maple Leaf and author John Karlovec for a really nice article on the efforts of some Geauga Park District folks and other collaborating organizations in trying to keep the endangered spotted turtles from “winking out;” that is, becoming one more addition to the sad list of extinct species.
All over Geauga County populations of these turtles have been disappearing at an alarming rate. When I first moved to Parkman about 40 years ago, I would commonly find individuals, especially in the spring when females were out roaming around looking for a place to lay their eggs. One actually walked right by me one day when I was in the backyard working on my vegetable garden — but no more. It’s been over 20 year since I’ve seen one. The last one was an individual that was run over by a car on Old State Road.
This brings me to the point of what was missing from the article, likely because the park district co-directors Oros and Grendell did not wish it disclosed. Former Park Commissioner Jeff Orndorf, who was both appointed and fired by Judge Grendell, was a past volunteer with GPD and had/has a serious interest in natural history. He mentioned at a park commissioners meeting that he had been long aware of the troubled situation with spotted turtles and had inquired about ways to prevent the last turtles in the park from being run over by cars on a park roadway near their critical habitat. There may be only perhaps eight individuals left down from 12-14 three years ago.
Commissioner Orndorf proposed a solution that involved pathways under a critical section of a park drive that would have cost only a minute fraction of the nearly $250,000 that the park district has budgeted for yearly advertising.
For some reason, shortly after that meeting, Mr. Orndorf was fired as commissioner and the solution that could have prevented or reduced additional turtle deaths was never implemented — mysteriously missing from the budget.
Questions to Director Oros and the park commissioners on this issue were left unanswered.
Perhaps Co-Directors Oros/Grendell felt the funds would be better spent on additional expensive television adds on the Fox network to bring hoards of out-of-county folks and traffic to our parks. More heavy auto traffic on park roadways means more squashed turtles.
But then, maybe the highest priority is television ads with the good judge and his wife walking off into the sunset or wherever. What a great idea? The good judge gets publicity benefiting his next election, the taxpayers pick up the cost of the television adds and another species goes extinct.
Am I cynical? You bet!
John Augustine
Parkman Township
