City makes risky investments

To the editor:

As a dog returns to its own vomit, the Cape Girardeau City Council has twice engaged its taxpaying citizens in a crapshooter's roll of the dice at the municipal airport. There is nothing in the city charter that encourages city officials to play loose and fast using taxpayer funds to engage in and, in effect, partner with private, risky, vertical-market businesses that have a proven failed track record of going belly-up.

With the city's bonded indebtedness at an all-time high and with aviation sales in the tank due to massive increases in fuel costs and other factors, it is foolhardy to expect yet another startup firm with its assets reassembled from the ashes of bankruptcy to do any better than its predecessor that failed in far better economic times.

City- and state-run private businesses have no place in the new Soviet Amerika. Why our mayor and city fathers fall all over themselves to cater to unknown, out-of-town, bankruptcy-prone businesses is beyond the pale of common sense. City officials need a good, old-fashioned whipping with a tar-and-feathering at the next ballot box. In the meantime, they need to be held personally and severally liable for their stupidly repeated errors and omissions.

ROBERT T. KRONE Jr., Cape Girardeau