Lancaster Eagle-Gazette from Lancaster, Ohio • 10

B2Lancaster Eagle-Gazette, Thursday, April 24, 1997 mm Lancaster Eagle-Gazette Serving the Lancaster area since 1807 Gregory PtacinPublisher-General Manager s. I JUST KM SEE A ROOP ter -j Ohio could take hit from EPA combined expenditures by the utilities nf Npw Ynrlr New Hamnshine Dave llobson rT petitiveness will be hamstrung even as we are seeking to expand our eco- nomic influence around the world. The president's own Council of Economic Advisors predicted that the benefits would be small while the costs of reaching full attainment could total $60 billion. The Small Business Aatoinistration said that the EPA's proposed new rules are "certainly one of the most expensive regulations, if not the most expensive regulations faced by small businesses in 10 or more years." The costs of proposed ozone standard have been vastly underestimated. Although the EPA estimates the annual compliance costs for the ozone standard would be $600 million nationwide it is estimated that the annual capital expenditure cost for Ohio utilities alone will exceed $730 million a.year.

These costs are estimated to boost Ohio utility rates more than 17 percent in some areas, with an average rate increase of 7 percent Ohio businesses have spent more than $5 billion since 1972 to control me primary pollutants that are regulated under the Clean Air Act Since 1995 alone, Ohio's public utilities have, spent $3.7 billion on air pollution controls, which is more than the U.S. Representative proven health benefits are minimal while the economic costs will be great The EPA acknowledges that benefits from tightening the ozone standards may be as low as zero. The EPA originally estimated that hospital admissions for asthma would decline by only 1 percent well within the margin of error. Many metropolitan areas will not meet the proposed new standards according to the EPA's own admission thereby negating any possible health benefit, regardless of how uncertain. The EPA is even now realizing that the existing standards are providing greater health benefits than originally thought, thereby further reducing any proposed benefits.

Without a significant health benefit, why impose these job killing rules? Businesses large and small alike will be hurt by these new regulations and our nation's global com THE air we breathe in Ohio today is not the same air we breathed 20 years ago. In the past two decades, Ohio has made significant strides in cleaning its air. Ozone has dropped by 25 percent overall and by as much as 50 percent in some urban areas. Columbus, Youngstown, Canton, Cleveland, Akron; Toledo and Dayton are meeting their air quality standards. These have been hard-fought gains and have come at great expense to businesses and consumers, but their benefit has heeri real and significant.

Now, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has proposed new clean air standards mat would throw all tfiis out. It would ratchet up the standards against ozone which is related to car emissions, and it would create new standards for super-fine particles of dust in the area, which it claims are generated by industrial businesses. Under these proposed standards, Ohio would have more new counties in violation than any other state in the nation. I pride myself on being a reasonable, thoughtful legislator, and never say no to an idea without thoroughly considering all sides.

The EPA's idea for new standards gets a big "no" from me, however, because the What was LAST December, a freighter steaming down the Mississippi River crashed into a New Orleans shopping mall, injuring more than 100 people. The accident has been blamed on a Chinese crew that couldn't understand its English-speaking captain. A year earlier, an American Airlines jet plowed into a mountain, killing 1 50 passengers. The tragedy was blamed on an air-traffic controller, barely able to speak English, who was unable to warn the plane's pilots that they were off course. These two incidents are worst-case examples of what can happen when people are unable to communicate in the same tongue.

It is one of the reasons that an increasing number of employers are imposing "English-only" rules on their workers. Aside from fears of language-related accidents, employers have tremendous economic incentive to encourage their workers to speak English on the job. Ohio University economist Lowell Galloway estimates that the lack of English proficiency among foreign-born U.S. workers costs em- EDITORIAL Harris case i example of system's woes ON May 1 2, 1 995, Larry Wayne Harris was arrested at his Lancaster home for illegally obtaining three vials of bubonic plague germs. On Tuesday, he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 18 months probation and 200 hours of community service.

The sentence may have been appropriate. However, the problem is the resolution of the case took almost two years. Had Harris opted for a jury trial and possibly appealed that outcome, the delay in bringing the matter to an end could have been much longer. Something is drastically wrong with our legal system when it takes so long to process even a relatively simple situation such as mail and wire fraud. The John Wesley Frazier case is another horrendous example.

Because of fumbling along the way by prosecutors, defense attorneys and judges, a person who was obviously guilty of a crime "worked" the system for more than three years after fatally shooting a Lancaster police officer only to plead guilty and finally end the debacle. Lawyers argue that the delays are safeguards for the innocent. In some cases that may be true. However, the way our court system works, there are no reasonable deadlines. Lawyers for the defense and prosecution can be unprepared and get extensions.

Defense attorneys can use one delaying tactic after another in order to do nothing but delay. In some cases, the hourly fees paid the attorneys may be a major conflict of interest There are attorneys who agree that the system needs to be overhauled. However, until mat is done, they must "play the game" or they're not providing their client the best defense possible. Who pays for all this? We do. The taxpayers.

Court-appointed attorneys, prosecutors and judges' time and court arrangements are paid for through public funds. And we don't get a chance to vote on it. We need to let the people in control of our legal system -know that the public wants change. Without it, radical groups such as common law courts can easily convince people that the system is flawed and should be thrown out We don't advocate But changes must be made. Ground rules that establish when a case must be brought to trial must be enforced and delays limited.

Guidelines for time limits regarding when a defendant can change a plea in order to avoid trial must be followed. Once convicted, criminals must lose their right to any lawsuit other than one appeal of their own conviction. Admittedly, some variation would be necessary if new evidence were uncovered. We get a lot of letters regarding local issues that affect taxes on which we can vote. We encourage people to write us let- ters on this issue, which is buried in the public funds used without a vote.

We will forward all letters, both pro and con, to state and federal legislators as well as the Ohio Supreme Court. Now it's your turn! Write us! Humans shouldn't be used as guinea pigs JOYFUL news in the fight against AIDS came in 1994, when a study found that the HTV transmission rate from in- fected mothers to their babies could be cut from 23 percent to 8 if both parties received a complex treatment with the drug AZT. Refinements in the therapy, which can cost $900, ultimately dropped that rate to 4.8 percent. But these good tidings come with disquieting small print an ethics controversy that some compare to the infamous syphilis study of black Alabama sharecroppers. Since 1994, AIDS researchers have struggled to find a simpler means of delivering AZT to Third World women and their children, who cannot afford complicated therapies.

Alas, these federally funded experiments have ill-served some mothers: Each study includes control patients who get placebo pills rather than medicine that could keep them from passing the virus to their offspring. The group Public Citizen calculates that 416 babies have needlessly contracted HIV, and that current methodology will doom hundreds more. The cry is going up of "Tuskeegee Two!" recalling the health officials who lied to syphilitic blacks about their illness, purposely withheld penicillin and coldly charted the men's decay over four decades. The National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Controlwhich together are financing nine such AZT studies, hotly dispute the Tuskeegee analogy. For one thing, they say, every studied mother is told that she may get worthless pills.

But even if researchers scrupulously communicate that, uned-, ucated women, without other medical options, may be gulled into thinking that the learned men in the white coats know best The experiments are being conducted in places like the Ivory Coast and Malawi. Who really they would be tolerated in, say, Belgium and Norway? Certainly they wouldn't be in the United States. The AIDS establishment claims that the placebo approach will bring the fastest answers about a promising therapy. Besides, it notes, if researchers hadn't contacted the placebo-provided women, they and their babies would have had no effective treatment anyway. But such ends-oriented arguments don't sanitize the use of human beings, some of whom medicine could save, as expendable guinea pigs.

There must be a better way. Scripps Howard News Service that again? Speak 1 New Jersey, Vermont, Massachusetts, Maryland, Maine, Delaware, Connecticut and Rhode Island. I sav this to demonstrate that Ohio businesses i i i VIU ULVUl IllUIVUlb VIM WI1 V1VU11V4 about following the law. And, we're succeeding, miai is must miauawm lu jut is mat uuo luwcuia uuumig iv uiv bureaucrats at the fcPA. Despite Ohio's record of achievement, and Aacrs'tta tViot t-MiM-or rtanrloTvIo oro nrtt guaranteed to make any difference in the quality of air we breathe, the EPA new standards.

Tn date anneals tr the F.PA's rea- son have failed to get it to back down or reverse itself. It plans to go full- stenm nheaH nn imnnsino these rrin- nlino neu'niles on nnr pcnnnmv anH our consumers. I hope an agreement can be reached to reconsider this po- sition.Ifnot then Congress might. -have to consider stepping in to cor- -rect what could he a severe blow to our nation's economic security. Kl no i'o oriirui iwuif mmptinnc nnA i ivaav aiuui.

ijuvauuua uiiu comments with me. I caft best be reached by writing: Congressman Dave Hobson, 15 14 Longworth House umce ounoing, wasmngton, 20515. English companies can make a justifiable i apparently, infectious-disease labs). lot of the claims are in his view, "as onerous and offensive as suggesting mat ror me purposes or your ousiness imao-e all vnur emnlnvees nnaht tn "-e, i uc wmic in nave uiunu uou. But this is just plain ridiculous.

An amnlAtiar incirfinnr that airanrnna V111U1VYV1 UlOlOUliC UJXU. WTU TUIIW speak the same language is hardly the moral (cor Ipoaft pnnivn1fn't nf an pm- iniivL.i inni.vii tin a i ii in ii it uiv juliuv utia ayuij ivu cut wauwiu- na hhi nnr onnntai on aviram ict riPTininnn rvr mcrnminannn xn much so that companies boasting eth- mcai ly inverse wont iorces wun lihireo arm hlanlrc anrl an1 hrnuns renresente1 in nn htiral rnr- rect proportions risk running afoul of the EEOC if they ask all their em- ployees to speak the same language on the job. Most Americans do not believe that it's unfair or discrimina- tory to require that everyone in a given work force native and foreign bom speak English. It is, after all, the 'Hm mi acre nt the I mten xtntec whether official or not 1 get to sleep. The following morning he asked, "Did it pass, did it pass?" i ti i vim i.iiur iii.ii.i an ii.v aiiniur unn tears coming to my eyes, I could not i ii.

apecui umjuni aiituic my ncau iiu, nc looked at me with such sadness and said, Mom, don they think we are worth it?" All I could say was, "I guess not." kids in school when yours were little' paid taxes for yours to get a good ed-ucation. It's the circle of life. We chmilH npvpr tnlfA mnrA than wta ara tirillinnr tr nia 1 rrrt a rvront AliiAn a a tion and mine and yours deserve the same, yes, even if it costs more. Roger and Linda Morgan Lancaster cent of the U.S. work force.

That means that there are millions of people working in this country who can't even speak English and millions more who can speak English, but who regularly chit-chat with fellow foreign-born workers in their native language. The most.perverse thing is that the federal government is actually encouraging language divisiveness in the workplace. Indeed, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has filed language-discrimination lawsuits against 32 employers around the country who have required their workers to speak English on the job. The EEOC asserts that English-only work rules are unlawful unless an employer can prove "business necessity." One victim of the EEOC's language-rights crusade was an American Red Cross infectious-disease lab in Rockville, Md. The commission saw no reason why lab workers and office personnel should be compelled to speak the same language.

Indeed, to the mind of EEOC Chairman Gilbert Casellas, very few view more important? There is nothing today that costs the same as it did 10 years ago, or even five years ago. Can you purchase groceries for yourself with the same amount of funds you did five years ago? If you can, I would like to seek how you do it, or share that secret with the rest of us. Therefore, how can anyone realistically believe that the school system operates on the same funds as it did five or 10 years ago. Yes, they have possibly made some grave errors in spending in the past, but are we going to "dig in our heels" just to show them. What a terrible state we are in.

On the eve of the last voting our third son was so pumped about the outcome of the levy, he could hardly Joseph Perkins Syndicated columnist ployers $40 billion a year in lost productivity, including on-the-job mistakes, time delays and poor output. Immigrant-rights advocates take offense to virtually any proposal that would give official or formal standing to English over other languages (like the English-only laws that have been passed by 23 states, including California). They view such proposals as subtly "racist" and "xenophobic." But one has to have on blinders (or ear plugs) not to recognize that America is facing a language crisis. Especially, considering that more than half the 24 million foreign-bom residents of this country acknowledge that they speak little or no English. That's a substantial figure considering that immigrants make up 1 1 per Youn to be addressed.

Credibility and consistency are greatly lacking fii our system. There must be some way to address these issues without holding our kids "hostage" (hostile) while we try to make a point to the administration that we don't agree with all of what they are doing with our money. In the meantime, our property values, business values and jobs are at risk due to a deficient (or it will be soon) school system. During the last levy campaign, our family supported and encouraged the folks in our immediate vicinity (elsewhere when the occasion arose) to get behind the levy and what it stands for the future of our children. Is there anything Like everything else, education costs more To the Editor: Everyone has heard just' about all they em stand to hear about the upcoming Lancaster City Schools levy.

May! add just a few comments to the affeady lengthy discussions? Mhusband and I own our own business, and we own our own homcj We, just like everyone else, do not wish to pay any more taxes. It seems that every day someone else has their hand out wanting more and more-However, we have four children the LCS system, and it is very important to us (and should be to everyone else) that they get a good education. I will be the first one to agree that there are some vital issues that need.