SpeakOut 5/29

Call 471-6636

I think it's a great thing that our young adults graduated last Tuesday night, although I don't believe that talking on your cell phone or laughing at the other graduates is appropriate and very rude too. I would understand a little if it were kids, due to the fact kids are kids, but for an adult to sit there and laugh like a wild bandit or talk at the top of their lungs is inappropriate and you would think they'd know better than to do something so childish. My opinion: If you don't know how to act, don't go. And if you do go, try to act your age.

I live in Mini Farms and would like to thank all the people who helped sandbag around my house on May 17. Without my neighbors and friends, I don't know what we would have done. It seems no one else is interested in what is going on in our area, so we are all supporting each other. If it weren't for these people, this eye-deep water filled with slugs, snakes, overflowing septics and 2-foot-long fish would be in our home and several other homes.

Why doesn't the county feel it's responsible for the drainage problems in the Mini Farms? I'm still wading two and three feet of water and it's not receding at all. We're depending on Mother Nature and no more rainfall, which is highly unlikely, and the ground is so saturated it won't soak in any water. The county doesn't have any problem cashing my personal real estate tax checks, but they still aren't responsible. I'm confused. Will someone explain this to me? Also, if the media doesn't feel like there are any problems out here, why don't they deliver my newspaper?

I read in the paper where they had a big meeting with officials and residents of Scott and New Madrid counties, commissioners and so forth, discussing the St. John's Bayou and New Madrid projects and the people in Mini Farms were told this was a closed meeting. I see where they finally came up with the deal that it was nobody's jurisdiction, that Scott County officials have neither the right nor the obligation to maintain the ditches such as St. John's. Landowners can clean the ditch up themselves, mindful of the possibilities of lawsuits from the flooded to the south or farmland drainage ditch district. The St. John's ditch was there long before Mini Farms. Who maintained it then? They probably did. And I'll tell you one thing, I am paying four times the taxes living in Mini Farms that I paid when I lived in Sikeston. What goes around comes around. You people better look around, especially the commissioners.

Will the ditch by Crowe Street be cleaned out when the water goes down on Oklahoma and Pam Street and other surrounding streets? This needs to be done as soon as possible.