Please help us Occupy the comments section of our local newspaper for this Letter to the Editor. This man will present a proposal tonight at our city council and we will be there to mic check him.
“The economic downturn that has affected our nation has stymied Martinsburg. Our town officials have been overwhelmed and are powerless, or unwilling, to prevent the spiraling decline of our city. The recent improvements in the town square may be in sight of the mayor’s downtown business, but the mayor lacks the vision that the rest of this town so desperately needs. We are a group of residents and businessmen who want to save our beloved city.
This is an invitation to join us: Lend your voices, your thoughts and your ideas to help in this effort to turn this decline around and make Martinsburg the city that we remember:
1) Businesses have been lost, succumbing to economic hard times, local over regulation, and excessive local tax and fee burden. There are no more jobs for unskilled labor. We challenge our town officials to take the initiative to attract new businesses, to go wherever they need to go, approach whomever they need to approach, to give incentives, to develop a presentation to attract business and industry to Martinsburg to employ our citizens.
2) We have allowed ministries and congregations, who live and are headquartered outside our city, to turn our Martinsburg into a mecca for homelessness on the East Coast. Our city opposed the expansion of local relief organizations, but were legally powerless to prevent it. We are expressing our outrage that these ministries are busing homeless people to our community to shelter them at night and allow them to roam our streets during the day. The vagrancy, urination and defecation on the sidewalks and the panhandling take a toll on the remaining businesses already struggling to stay downtown.
We challenge these ministries and congregations to help us, the taxpaying citizens of Martinsburg, who have paid for the amenities that the homeless enjoy for free, to provide a supervised work force recruited from the population they shelter to clean the streets soiled from trash, defecation and urination. We challenge them to create a supervised work force for hire that could be transported to other cities, businesses and farms on the same buses that brought them to Martinsburg to perform labor, such as cleaning, trash removal and field preparation.
3) Pimps, prostitutes, johns and drug dealers are part of the mix who roam the streets day and night. They are near our businesses, on our porches and in our alleys waiting to conduct their illegal transactions. We need help. The police need help to rid our neighborhood of these menaces. We challenge the city to install security cameras to monitor businesses and residential areas known to johns, pimps, prostitutes and dealers, and when they are arrested to make every effort to prosecute them to the fullest extent of the law. The irony is that the perpetrators do not frequent the boarded up, rundown areas of town; they loiter in front of some of the nicest businesses and beautiful old homes in Martinsburg. There will be more.
If you would like to help us fight this blight, if you have any ideas about how to improve our city, we would like to hear them. We are not asking for money; we need you, concerned citizens of Martinsburg, to help return our city to the prosperous days we all remember.”
http://www.journal-news.net/page/content.detail/id/574821/Local-residents-seek-to-improve-Martinsburg.html?nav=5061
http://occupymartinsburg.org
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