Star-Gazette from Elmira, New York • 4

Editorial board Janet R. Krause, president and publisher David W. Kubissa, executive editor Wayne R. Boucher, Opinion page editor Opinion Editor Wayne R. Boucher, 734-5151, Ext.

282 Star-GazetteSunday, January 1 5, 1 989 4A EDITORIAL Paragon, Elmira drifting farther apart I 7 look for another place to operate. These are harsh words targeted for a cable company whose name means a model of perfection and excellence. Paragon prides itself on maintaining good customer relations, but the state's words question whether that pride reaches to the senior management of the company. When the state rejects the contract extension Feb. 1, it does not put the city and Paragon on an equal footing.

Instead, the city gains the upper hand. City officials could do two things talk to other cable companies and see what else is available, and start negotiating again with Paragon, this time with a clean slate, in attempting to reach an agreement. The city has until next year to decide what direction its cable future will take through the year 2000. Given the growth of the cable industry, it is a decision that probably won't be taken lightly. That includes not tossing aside Paragon based on the previous 13 months.

Paragon may come back with a viable offer now that its position in Chemung County is in jeapordy. City officials have been trying for a year to move forward with Paragon. As of Feb. 1, the city may begin' to move ahead, but whether it is with Paragon remains to be decided. that if the contract vote was postponed, he would have it back for a vote by Feb.

1. He had no idea then how big a matter this actually was. He could not keep his Feb. 1 promise. Negotiations would still have taken up much of last year, perhaps, with no resolution being reached.

The state still might have believed Paragon had no intention of meeting state standards. One crucial difference would have existed, though, that could have tremendously helped the situation. Paragon would not have had a signed contract to hold over the city's head during the negotiations! But, the cable company had the advantage, and chose not to lessen it by ripping up the contract and starting fresh with the new administration. Because of that, Paragon is looking at the very real possibility of the city finding another cable company. That decision will be made primarily by the city, but city officials should also include input from other Chemung County municipalities.

As goes Elmira with its cable, so goes the rest of the county. The state cable commission will also have a hand in that decision. The state and Paragon are at much the same odds over the Jamestown agreement and the state said if Paragon refuses to follow state guidelines, it can The problems between the city of Elmira and Paragon Cable Co. have gone from negotiating of a new contract to a possible parting of the ways. The problems have, in effect, gone beyond the city and local Paragon officials.

A meeting between the state cable commission and senior Paragon management ended abruptly last week when the state decided Par agon was not interested in dealing fairly with Elmira. After the federal government deregulated the cable industry removing most of the controls that municipalities had on cable companies state cable commissions took over the role as watchdog for the municipalities. No contract agreement between a municipality and a cable company is binding until the state commission approves it. The state sets minimum standards so a cable customer in Elmira, Jamestown or Rome has the same cable possibilities so that are not limited to the whims of a particular cable company. The cable commission said from the beginning what its standards were concerning Elmira's contract.

Senior Paragon officials told the state a week ago it would not agree. to meet those standards. From its bizarre beginning Dec. 21, 1987, to the cable commission's expected veto Feb. 1, this issue has evolved beyond PAT LOUISE what the original problems started out as.

Somewhere in that evolution the relationship between Paragon and the city went sour. Much of Paragon's problems stem from trying to work out a deal between city administrations. Adding to the frustration is that the two administrations are of different parties. Despite that, it would be wrong to interpret this as a political ploy by the Democrats to outdo what the previous Republican administration did. Too many legitimate questions exist to cloud this up with political charges.

Yes, four Republicans voted in December 1987 in what could be termed a questionable manner by supporting a 10-year contract extension with Paragon, while admitting they knew little about the particulars in the contract. And yes, the Democrats did not support the vote. Then-Councilman James Hare, 10 days away from becoming mayor, promised Mow we grade President Reagan President Reagan said his goodbye to the nation last week, and this week he says his goodbye to the world as he turns over eight years in the presidency to George Bush. Reagan spoke proudly of his accomplishments in his televised farewell last week, calling his tenure a "Great Rediscovery" of values and common sense. On the opposite page, some of your neighbors in the Twin Tiers graded the president's two-term performance.

Most gave him B's and one gave him an A. Here are our grades for the many courses that Ronald Reagan took: ECONOMY: plus for cutting taxes, raising income and improving an economy that included filling 19 million jobs. His mark is dented by the continued loss of manufacturing jobs, mostly to foreign competition, and by the struggle our farm community still faces. BUDGET: plus. The president cannot be blamed entirely for the $150-billion deficit facing this nation but his tax cut policies did lower revenue available to run this country.

However, if he had not, Congress might have found a way to spend it anyway. FOREIGN POLICY: Another plus and perhaps the most surprising of all his marks. Reagan's detente with the Soviet Union, that he once called the "Evil Empire," may be one of this nation's most lasting contributions to world diplomacy. DRUGS: minus. The interdiction mindset netted some impressive arrests and Nancy Reagan's program was a sincere attempt to fight the problem.

The results, however, have been deeply disappointing. GOVERNMENT ETHICS: D. Reagan's appointees brought a warped sense of ethics to the administration not necessarily through any fault of the president. Fortunately, President-elect Bush has vowed to take a tougher stand for more ethical government, in both the executive and congressional branches. DEFENSE: plus.

The president refused to weaken the nation's military might without reciprocal moves by the Soviet Union. But the military waste and fraud turned up under his administration was embarrassing. SPIRIT: A plus. Even if you don't like President Reagan the man has to make you feel better about living in the United States of America. That counts for a lot a whole lot.

Pat Louise is the political reporter for the Star-Gazette. Her column runs on Sunday. 7 iJyi TUM Villi MAeve AW SYMPTOMS You WW OTHER OPINIONS Enough's enough The government's case against Oliver North is slowly crumbling away, and that's neither surprising nor lamentable. After nine months of costly legal preparations for trial of the former White House aide, independent counsel Lawrence Walsh has asked for dismissal of the two charges that were central to the prosecution. He had little choice but to drop the conspiracy and theft counts because of the Reagan administration's refusal to release classified material a judge said North needs to get a fair trial.

With the heart of this case gone, Walsh should now move to drop the remaining 12 charges and put an end to this fruitless endeavor. The Daily Oklahoman, Oklahoma City sv' wrav Small bookstores survive because they have a personality NEW YORK With its ornate black Beaux Arts facade embellished with gold leaf, 597 Fifth Avenue looks like a building with a furrowed brow, a pleasantly serious place. It looks like a bookstore, which it is, but not for long. Intellectuals like loitering in bookstores and they like detecting signs of the decline of the West. They can do both simultaneously on Jan.

22 when Scribn-er's bookstore closes its doors after 75 years. But discerning large cultural portents in small commercial decisions is usually, as in this case, a mistake. Bookselling is still a sphere of robust pluralism, even healthy eccentricity, among the more than 21,000 bookstores. The 10-story Scribner's building opened in 1913 and until 1984 housed the offices of Scribner's publishing company, which was founded in 1846 and once dominated American publishing as no house has since to display. One of the sublime delights of being an author is attending the teeming conventioaof the American Booksellers Association.

There, you are apt to be told by a no-nonsense woman that she is "thinking about" ordering six, maybe even eight, copies of your book for her store, The Bookworm in Jackson, Miss. It is of course splendid when one of the large chains orders your book in the thousands, but there is a special pleasure in the personal judgments of these intense individualists who bring their interests to the attention of small portions of the reading public. Among owners of, and aficionados of, small bookstores there is resentment of the big chains Waldenbooks, B. Dalton, Barnes Noble and Crown Books. The chains emphasize mass marketing and thus cater primarily to mass preferences.

They en-joy economies of scale that But it can be done. There are several Fifth Avenue bookstores nearby. But the intractable problem is how to be sufficiently profitable while being interesting. What makes a bookstore worth supporting, or mourning, is a rich selection of slow as well as fast-moving titles drawn from back lists and from the smaller sources of the nearly 56,000 new titles published each year. Away from the highest rent districts, bookselling on a small scale, as a haven of quirky individuality, is thriving, or at least surviving.

Consider Bridge Street Books in Washington, D.C. It is the pride and joy of Philip Levy, 44, who in his bulky sweaters and un-pressed slacks looks like what he is: a. '60s radical who has come to terms with commerce. Levy recalled, with middle-aged bemusement, an early crisis of conscience. He wanted to specialize in literature of the Left.

Shpuld he sell Henrj Kissinger's memoirs? He did. Booksellers read election returns. However, Levy's Georgetown store is a small island of individuality where his tastes and hunches are offered to the eclectic whims of bookstore browsers. He has packed about 8,000 titles into a two-story building 12 feet wide and 27 feet deep. He specializes in trade (high-quality) paperbacks and hardbacks, many of which you would not find in the sort of bookstores that sell board games and greeting cards.

His hardback best seller he sold about 20 copies during the Christmas season was Richard Posner's Law and Literatu-renr from the Harvard University Press. His second best seller was 1 791: Mozart's Last Year. It is highly probable that no other bookstore in the nation had those two books at the top of its list. But other small stores had other odd lists because other proprietors exercised interesting discretion in what they decided enable them to get from publishers and give to customers discounts which small sellers cannot match. But the existence of the chains does not mean the extinction of the small bookseller, any more than McDonald's has killed the neighborhood restaurant.

Price isn't everything. Small bookstores survive because enough readers, like enough diners, will pay a bit more for the pleasures of personality. So is the West doomed? Sure. So is the East. Everything is.

Nothing lasts. Even the continents drift. Why should Scribner's stay there forever? But intellectuals are too easily convinced that commerce is homogenizing America. Bookselling, like the country it reflects, is still a bouillabaisse, not a bland puree. George Will is a Washington columnist.

His column runs Thursday and Sunday. GEORGE WILL done. Its authors included Edith Wharton, Edmund Wilson, Ring Lardner and Winston Churchill. In a fifth-floor office the celebrated editor Max Perkins dealt with Fitzgerald, Hemingway and the chaotic manuscripts of Thomas Wolfe. One of the first shoppers downstairs was Teddy Roosevelt.

But all that's beautiful drifts away like the waters, and when has beauty been a match for the iron laws of real-estate values? The basic problem is that Manhattan is made up of just 14,000 acres and those in midtown are so pricey that it is hard for book sales to pay the rent. rTV" a LETTERS appliances rid unsightly junk from community yards; and the paintfix-up incentive program provided applicants in target areas with a welcome face-lift. Has all this made a difference in Elmira? You bet it has, but we can't quit now. We still need your help. The Mayor's Clean City Commission is currently working on suggestions to curb blight in Elmira.

It has made recommendations to the Community Devel-opment Agency to reinstate an InvestorsOwner program which is designed to help upgrade substandard housing that is not owner-occupied. We are also encouraging the school system to begin an ongoing pollution awareness program, starting with an anti-lit-tering and recycling emphasis. A portion of the money for local programs comes from federal community development funds which are used in wrong when there is a need to publicly blame someone when any accident such as this occurs. What did this accomplish? Did publicly hurting these two persons help the fire victims? Perhaps Mr. Wade sees their negligence as a crime which deserves some form of punishment, and he has used his position to see that this is accom plished.

NED C. STRAUSER Westfield Working together will improve city To the editor: The city of Elmira has an on-going program for helping home owners. The spring dumpster program with everyone's help saved taxpayers over the collection of furniture and the four-year paintfix-up program. Two target areas were initiated last year and new areas will be designated for the next three years. A look at the newly painted houses in the '88 target areas on north and south sides of Elmira should convince you of the benefits.

As Harry Reidy said in his It was good to live and be in an area where you could see your neighbors painting and upgrading their homes." Your help is needed to support anti-littering, recycling, and general paint fix up programs. Your help is needed to encourage city council to keep up the good work; and your help is needed to set a good example for our youth. We can't lose if we all work together. MRS. ROBERT PROCHNOW MRS.

ARTHUR M. MILLER JR. Members, Mayor's Clean City Commission Elmira were put away. Now, because she didn't watch her son, I have to try to explain to my daughter why her best friend died in that fire. SHERRY GREEN Elmira Story about fire termed insensitive To the editor: I cannot believe the insensitivity displayed by Garth Wade in his front page article, "Wind fanned fatal which appeared in the Dec.

30 Star-Gazette. Mr. Wade directly placed the blame for the deaths of Sandra Ferris and her two sons on Debra Hoyles and Kevin Morgan. Something seems to be drastically How do you explain why a friend died? To the editor: I am writing in regard to the fire on Elmira's southside on Dec. 28.

My 7-year-old daughter lost a very close friend in that fire, as did many other children. I'm very angry to think that a mother of a 3-year-old child was too busy cutting her boyfriend's hair to pay attention to her son. This lady knew her son was one to set fires. It would seem she would at least make sure that all the lighters and matches in the apartment 4.