STORY TOOLS

• E-mail story
• iPod friendly
• Printer friendly

Tell us about it

• What would you add to this story? Tell us what we missed.
• Do you have photos from this event? Documents we need to see? Share with us.
• Upload photos & videos
• More ways to get your stuff online and in the paper.

More Letters

• Letter To The Editor: Marco Island ‘under construction’
• Letter To The Editor: The humane thing
• Letter to the Editor: For America’s youth

Share and Enjoy [?]

I am so happy to read that the city is stepping up efforts to protect us from seawall failures, which are clearly a problem equal in magnitude to the problem of replacing a bridge — until the revised numbers come in, or another bridge that might need to be replaced in 20 years when the traffic quadruples.

Whew! For a while there, I was afraid our city government might only be willing to spend 15 percent more each year, which of course is not nearly a large enough increase in spending.

And I was beginning to worry that the city would focus too much on problems at hand, instead of doing what it does best, which is to invent problems, select insiders to study them, and then cram down the solution. And of course if you don’t like the solution, you can be publicly humiliated in council meetings.

Please let me propose a few additional ideas for the city to study, in view of the crumbling infrastructure and unattractive optics and the dangers these conditions pose to all of us:

1. Rain abatement. The city’s streets allow water to run off onto the sides, where it has to seep into the ground – sometimes a process that takes up to a few hours – which is clearly not conducive to taking pretty photos of the streets. So we need a scoop and dump system of giant corrugated tubs suspended by cranes, which can be airlifted in whenever there is a heavy rain, to scoop up the roadside water and take it by helicopter to the Gulf.

2. Citizen upgrading. There are clearly some very undesirable persons on the island, and these “people” are giving all of us a bad name. We cannot permit unsupervised reclining, unapproved poetry or musical lyrics, or, the worst of all, food and beverage containers placed anywhere other than on a shiny new boat. We need to ask these people to leave. (We can do that indirectly, and perhaps more democratically, by forcing them to pay for item one above. This strategy has apparently worked before.)

3. Office building replacement. The number of commercial structures on Marco Island which do not resemble the Esplanade is unacceptable if we are to retain our tourist destination status. A program should be started immediately, preferably with the city hiring a new architecture staff, to replace all of the buildings that appear to have been constructed by someone else, or without an obvious Mediterranean influence, or with fewer than two arches per customer entrance.

4. Canal rejuvenation. As we all know, the city’s extensive canal design is 30 years old, which is when ancient Rome was built. The canals are not wide enough for the kind of luxury boat the more desirable residents want to own, nor are they deep enough to handle large-draft hulls and sailboat keels. Thus, the canals must be widened and deepened. We have the people on the Island to handle this job, but we’ll need to bring on a city supervisory staff to overprice, er, sorry, to oversee the work. We have enough money in the budget to handle this project, because last year we deferred approval of the proposal to launch a satellite so that we wouldn’t have to do without cable TV after a storm. I appreciate the foresight of our leaders.

Thank you for your attention. I know this is just a short list, but I wanted to keep the ball rolling as our officials wrestle with the difficult job of forcing everyone who can afford to live here to leave, and forcing everyone who’s thinking of coming here to confuse us with Ave Maria.

Lawrence Honig

Marco Island