Payson Roundup

Editor:

For months, our town leaders have pushed hard to get support of their proposal to lease town property to the YMCA. Their main concern, they claimed, was the town’s youth. “It’s all about the children. They need a place to go and something to do to stay out of trouble. We owe it to them.”

Now the town is in a dire financial crisis. So what have our fearless leaders decided to do? They’ve approved layoffs of more than 120 seasonal and part-time workers — mostly in the parks department.

Quoting Friday’s Roundup, “Most of the youth programs are self-supporting … [but] the layoff of part-time and seasonal employees would not be affected by whether they work in programs that pay their own incremental costs.”

So let me get this right. Let’s cut out one of the few self-supporting programs. The one that offers recreational opportunities for our youth. Doing so will allow us to eliminate dozens of part-time positions. Let’s get rid of one of the few and best employment options currently available to teenagers in our town.

What happened to that overwhelming concern for the children?

Wanda Randall