LETTERS: LAKE `FACTS' SOUND LIKE SUPPOSITION

To the editor:

Glory be! I finally received my lake facts in the mail. In fact, I got two of them. One of them was addressed personally to me, because I requested to be put on the Lake Facts Committee mailing list months ago. How stupid of me to assume I would receive any literature before the general public.

While looking through the brochure for facts, I kept coming across words and phrases like will serve, enhanced ability, could stay, will increase, projected, will be created, potential and will alleviate -- words and phrases I hardly associate with facts.

In my school, they taught me that facts were events or occurrences that had already happened. What we have here are hypothesis, assumptions, suppositions, predictions and an engineer's pipe dreams.

The brochure also goes on to tout the expected economic benefits of the lake, citing a report prepared by Dr. Bruce Domazlicky of the Southeast Missouri State University Economics Department. What was not contained in the brochure was an evaluation of the feasibility report done by Dr. William Weber of the same department, same university. In his evaluation, Dr. Weber found that the economic assumptions contained in the feasibility report to be overly optimistic, incorrectly generated and extremely erroneous.

I will gladly share this report with anyone interested, especially since it has been available since 1990.

If facts are to be dispensed, fact this: Wayne County, home to Lake Wappapello since the 1940s is still one of the poorest counties in the state. Southern Illinois is dotted with recreational lakes but has never experienced an economic boom.

On April 19, 1996, Ronnie Lemons, the author of the feasibility report, stated that the cost for constructing the lake had risen from $73 million to $93 million to $100 million due to increased construction costs and the permitting process, a factor he did not figure in the original price tag. When the original price of $73 million was announced, a former presiding commissioner labeled it a "bombshell" and said that thousands of acres would be stricken from the county tax rolls.

JAMES C. ROCHE, President

Cape Girardeau-Bollinger Counties Landowners Association/Citizens Against the Lake

Jackson