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S.E. Wood Necessary or just nice? Take a drive on Interstate 40 between Cookeville
and Crossville. There you will see quite a collection of the
usual bulldozers, front-end loaders and the like, plus massive
track-mounted specialty items for timber cutting and handling.
Mechanized saws, grapple hooks, mobile wood-chippers and shredders,
capable of reducing undergrowth, saplings and even trees to sawdust
and mulch. They are clear-cutting the areas outside the guardrails,
between the guardrails and the boundary fences. Their work isn't
confined to the flat roadside areas. They are working the cuts,
the stone embankments, and the almost inaccessible areas atop
the escarpments. Now don't get me wrong. When they finish,
it does look nice. Where once there were trees, saplings and
undergrowth, now there are nice smooth areas of mulch. But it
looks like a project you would undertake if you had everything
else all paid for, such as road surfaces, bridges, schools and
maybe even TennCare. Gentle readers, we are talking hundreds of
thousands of dollars on less than a 20-mile stretch of I-40!
And I am sure it doesn't end there. And what for? It's not a
matter of visibility. It's not a matter of road safety. And it
certainly won't attract a single additional tourist dollar to
the Volunteer State. Where there was once lush undergrowth, there
are now barren hillsides that will forever have to be mowed,
or otherwise maintained, to prevent erosion or a regrowth of
what they have just cut down. I don't know how much of this is state-financed
and how much is federal, but it really makes no difference. It's
still your money, and it's being wasted on a non-essential project.
So when you hear our state legislators crying
that we need to pay more taxes, and our federal legislators telling
us we don't need a tax cut, just remember that when they are
spending our money, it is very difficult for them to tell the
nice from the necessary. This roadside landscaping may be nice, but it sure ain't necessary ... especially right now when they are talking income tax again! |