After the school board meeting on April 3, Councilmember Skillicorn approached me and said he really liked my letters to the editor. I can’t fault a man with such impeccable taste and discernment, but then I read his letter the following week and couldn’t believe my biggest admirer had so quickly lost that keen sense of discernment.

Like Reagan, I allowed myself a bemused chuckle and thought, “There he goes again!”

My friend thinks the environmental plan will 1) Remove gas and diesel cars from town roads; 2) Force transit ridership; 3) Ban gas-powered leaf blowers; and 4) Implement new building codes and regulations. My dear admirer, please read it as closely as you do tax cut legislation.

The actual wording that was forwarded to Council by the Strategic Planning Advisory Committee, an appointed Town committee of volunteers, was approved in the General Plan (required by the state) by voters in 2018.

There are no mandates in the recommendation. None. They purposely and correctly described the recommendations as “encouragement.” Might I gently suggest reading comprehension over tax cutting for a while?

There were no words like “ban,” “force,” or “remove” in the SPAC presentation. Town officials are not trying to “control our lives” nor are our “rights and freedoms” at stake. They were setting goals, which will be achieved organically anyway at some point.

Tractors replaced horses on the farm. Nobody was frog-marched into a John Deere dealership by a County Extension bureaucrat; tractors were just more efficient. New technologies like electric cars and leaf blowers will become ubiquitous in the same way – people will flock to them because they will be the obvious choice.

Plus, statists would rather watch a good MLK documentary than herd people into a Tesla dealership on a Saturday. Too much work!