UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN editorials
Unsigned editors represent the opinion of the Kansan editorial staff. Signed columns represent the views of only the writers.
OCTOBER 18, 1978
Life Flight needed
The addition of Life Flight, a helicopter ambulance service, to the emergency medical care available to Douglas County residents should be welcomed.
Currently the Douglas County Commission is considering a proposal that would allow the helicopter ambulance to operate in the county.
The helicopter service, run by St. Joseph Hospital in Kansas City, Mo., would be able to provide a readily available speedy ambulance service the existing Douglas County Ambulance Service cannot.
Life Flight is not yet licensed by the Kansas Department of Health and Environment to respond to emergency calls in Kansas, but St. Joseph Hospital has applied for such a license. Negotiations are under way with the state concerning the license's approval.
BUT THE immediate concern is with the county commission. They must decide whether Life Flight is worthwhile, and if so, how it will be used in conjunction with the county's existing ambulance service.
Life Flight is not a sales gimmick for St. Joseph Hospital. The helicopter service, funded by fees charged to
patients who use the ambulance, will transport a person to and from any hospital in a 150-mile radius of Kansas City.
Ted McFarlane, county ambulance service director, has said he would recommend signing an agreement allowing the helicopter service to operate in the county.
Since the service began June 1, it primarily has been involved with transferral of patients from one hospital to another. Only five of its 155 flights have been from the scene of an emergency to a hospital.
IN ADDITION, a Kansas license is not necessary for the service to make hospital transfer flights, making the ambulance immediately available to Douglas County residents.
Yet, there is no better argument in support of Life Flight than the one that its name connotes. A helicopter ambulance can save lives that otherwise might be lost.
For a majority of emergency cases the service may be unnecessary, but undoubtedly there will be at least one exception where it is needed. It is that one possible emergency that county commissioners should ponder most carefully when they prepare to vote on the Life Flight service.
Sheep industry profits at expense of coyotes
BY NOT ERYDEN
N Times Feature
By HOPERYDEN
NEW YORK—Conservationists always operate at a disadvantage. They must win every battle or the resource they are defending may be destroyed.
Explorers, on the other hand, can regard their defeats as mere setbacks to be followed by new ones. The table, therefore, that the 1972 presidential order banning the use of poison to kill wild predators on the public domain would not be accepted by sheep ranchers as the final outcome.
In the West, most commercial sheep are pastured on federal lands. The lands and the wild predators that reside there belong to them. They use these lands for sares, bullets, fire and gas destroy these animals by the thousands on behalf of the sheep industry. The sheep industry clamping to use poison again.
In 1975, they were successful in getting sodium cyanide exempted from the EPA regulations, so they called M44, withdrawn, but that deadly substance were re-installed across millions of acres of public lands. The trap shoot poisoned 20 percent of the area, bore or fox that investigates its scented tip.
Now wool growers are agitating to regain use of sodium fluoroacetate, or "1808." This poison is most deadly to coyotes, but it can kill any creature that feeds on corpses of its victims. In June, to dramatize their demand, Idaho sheepmen closed their private lands to hunters. Access would be limited they said, until 1808 is again made legal.
One would suppose from this that wool growers had experienced economic hardship as a result of being denied 1080. Not so. The majority of these higher profits than it had before the 1972 poison ban. It is true that fewer people raise sheep today. But this fact, in itself a boon to our overgrassed pore rangeland, can create a great increase. No real increase in predation has occurred.
MOREOVER, SINCE 1972, the Interior Department's Division of Animal Damage Control has killed more coyotes annually than when 1080 still was in use. In the past six years, federal predator control expenditures were nearly doubled from 1974 to 1979 and coyote population in the Great Basin and Mountain states has been reduced by 26 percent.
Still the sheep industry is not satisfied. One wonders how much government support this group can expect from the government, and how she raisers whenever the support price for wool exceeds the
national average. In addition, high import discounts for foreign competition and false claims against exports.
More government subsidy is available in the form of cheap grazing leaves on public land, and it will help control program wools wool growers the cost of paying shepherds to guard their
IN THE Mountain states, herders are employed by only 16 percent of the ranchers running sheep on public lands. In the Great Plains, they have been forced to protect their livestock. Of sheep enterprises of more than 5,000 operating on the public domain, only 8 percent have constructed lambing sheds to shelter newborn calves and to allow predators and none seem willing to try nonliethical chemical repellents to discourage predation. Why bother when a responsive government agency is so willing to use the nation's wild carnivores on their behalf?
In 1973, a panel of impartial scientists headed by Stanley A. Cain reported to the Interior Department that massive landslides caused public lands produc- no economic benefit.
THE INTERIOR Department's Division of Damage was chosen to ignore the breach. Body-courtyard order of the day. Last year's tally of dead coworkers 301-735 — is viewed as this year's top incident.
The cost of such "prophylactic killing," the report stated, far exceeded any realistic possibility and upon because only a few ranchers actually sustain heavy losses to coyotes, the scientists recommended the selective removal of manraiders in response to complaints of raiders.
The impact of all this slaughter on ecosystems cannot even be guessed. Without coyotes to hold them in check, rodent populations become a problem. An environmental impact statement on predator control is long overdue. Inadequate use of rodent trapping and bag-page option paper evaluating various approaches to coyote management.
One piece of information contained in the paper will surprise taxapers. Western ranchers tend to be the largest of ranchers. Fifty-six percent of all sheep on public lands are owned by only 6 percent of Western ranchers. That means fewer than one percent remain beneficientes of all the high-priced killing.
Hope Ryden is author of "God's Dog," a book about coyotes.
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Editor
Steve Frazier
Congress far from courageous
The 96th Congress passed into history Sunday, but before doing so, it approved a trackback of legislation during a marathon final session that lasted more than 34 years.
Among the legislation steamrolled through both houses of Congress during the lawmakers' last day were the largest tax cut in the nation's history, a diluted version of the Humphrey-Hawkins '18 employment" law that demanded energy and a compromise version of a $2.12 billion public works bill President Carter vetoed two weeks ago.
Carter called from Camp David to praise the two-year session as "one of the most courageous and constructive Congresses in the history of the country."
IN PRIVATE, Carter may be less enthusiastic about the 96th; they have had their differences. But the pleasure he expressed wasn't feigned. This Congress gave him much of what he asked for: ratification of the Panama Canal treaties, the first Civil Service reform in a century, extension of the time period for the Equal Rights Amendment, an energy bill, rejection of the B-1 bomber.
Carter's remark, of course, should be discounted somewhat for political rhetoric but, even charitably, it has greatly overvalued the 96th Council.
THE COURAGEOUS policy would have to begin abolishing Social Security and require people to invest that money in private pension plans, which do not involve regressive taxation and which will provide more financial security than the mandatory government system.
A president evaluates a Congress that
Rick Alm
The Humphrey-Hawkins bill, as passed Sunday, is but a shadow of its former self. It would undermine the government planning and interference that lies at the root of most of our current problems.
way; on how much of his legislative package survives and in what form. But how has the 96th Congress done in whittling down big government by increasing individual initiative, reducing excessive regulation and controlling federal spend-
Only six of the "pork-barrel" projects were in a compromise version of the public works bill that Carter vetoed. The remains wasteful and infatuary.
Yes, there were bright spots. For instance, Congress voted to deregulate the airline industry, a move that has stimulated price competition and reduced fares. Mandatory retirement was raised to age 70. effective Jan. 1, 1979.
Well, the Congress wasn't courageous. Nor was it constructive.
shortage in the Social Security pool in the late 1980s.
The final verdict on the 95th Council will be delivered at the poll Nov. 7. All 435 members of the House of Representatives and 35 members of the Senate face reelection. If voters agree with Carter that they will be indicted and constructive, most of them will be back.
MUCH OF WHAT there was to smile about, however, came from administration proposals Congress refused to grant. Squabbling between Carter and Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass, killed an expensive national health insurance bill. Legislation for national no-doubt insurance consumer protection agency go nowhere.
The constructive thing would have been to bury it, deeily and permanently.
Other bills probably could be counted in the bright column, but far too much of the
legislation passed by the 95th Congress reflects the same misguided, overprotective, paternalistic thinking that has made Washington a dirty word.
Voters should have more sense.
Examples follow, as space permits:
The federal budget topped $487 billion for fiscal 1979, including a projected deficit of $38.8 billion. Then, on top of that, an $18.7 billion tax cut, induced by the federal tax pass Sunday. The result of these actions will be an increase in the rate of inflation.
The courageous policy would have been a balanced budget.
The constructive policy would have been to deregulate the energy sector of the economy and allow prices to perform their functions, the allocation of a scarce commodity.
A NEW ENERGY bureaucracy was created and, in the energy bill, Congress gave it a broad mandate to meddie. The Department of Energy was created in August 1977. Energy efficiency standards for home appliances add to the reams of federal regulation manufacturers face. Taxes were slapped on cars made after 1986. In 1986, the tax reaches a maximum of $3,850 and applies to cars with less than 23.5 mpg.
The 95th Congress voted in December
1977 to increase payroll taxes for 100
percent.
Looking at the record, we will see that the 90th Congress, like others in the recent past, expanded federal authority. The 96th president must be sent with the opponent in office.
"HURRY... THE MICKEY MOUSE CLUB'S ON ..."
പുതിയ രീതികളും പ്രദർശിപ്പിച്ച്.
To the editor:
Stephan's campaign stand necessary
In response to John Whiteside's Oct. 9, column on the death penalty, and in particular his criticism of Bob Stephan, canonically general, several points must be clarified.
First, Mr. Whitedes has compared Judge Stephan to George Wallace, since his campaign is one for law and order. The judge has stated that the people of this state is to act effectively as the state's chief law officer. Therefore, isn't it absolutely necessary to maintain throughout the campaign concise, readily identifiable viewpoints on issues of law and justice?
Admittedly, there is little doubt about whether the moral and emotional questions of the death penalty outweigh the public's demand for reinstatement of capital punishment. One thing is clear, however. It would seem to be infinitely preferable for the attorney general of Kansas to respond to the president's call to restore Kansans to reinstate capital punishment as opposed to using that office to espouse his own personal, political viewpoint.
Further, Mr. Whitesides has assumed that the law is aware that Stone could Stepman would also consider a frank forms punishment. Anyone who is familiar with the law is aware that one does not assume responsibility.
Claire McCurdy Lawrence junior
An estimated 80 percent of the people in Kansas are in favor of restatement of capital punishment. Judge Stephan supports its restatement, only as allowed by the most recent guidelines established by the Court of Appeal and the reason. He is also concerned about rehabilitation in all but the most serious cases. He questions the deterrent value of capital punishment, because it is not certain, and he believes the certainty of law is its most valuable attribute. However, as the chief lawyer for all the people of Kansas, it is important to support the majority, which in this case can restatement of capital punishment.
UNIVERSITY DAILY letters KANSAN
Ignorant columnist can be misleading
After reading your recent columns and editorials on Rhodesia and South Africa, I am reminded again how misled people can become upon reading columnists writing on topics about which the columnist himself is totally ignorant. It is a dangerous thing for people to disseminate rabbit, and represent it as fact or even as information onion.
To the editor:
Jim Brewer Associate professor of mathematics
Dykes' knowledge of education doubted To the editor:
In regards to the Higher Education Week speakers controversy covered in the Kansan article of Oct. 12, one primary question comes to mind: If Chancellor Archie R. Dykes actually does not "know anything about" Jonathon Kelson I, seriously worried about it, keep up with new directions in the American educational system in the past 10 years
Judy Browder Lawrence graduate student
To the editor:
Intense noise level causes sore throat
About two years ago, an individual was asked to leave campus because he was playing his guitar in a "high intensity academic area," according to the entrance to Wesco Hall. It was felt by the administration that the acoustic output of the
guitar (maximum about 70 decibels at the sound hole) would disrupt the learning process.
I teach a class at 8:30 a.m. on the third floor of Strong Hall. There are individuals employing buzz saws at distances of less than fifty feet from the entrance to the classroom. The acoustic output of a buzz source is approximately 125 decibels.
I have an extremely sore throat at this moment. As I sit here munching on Halls' Mentholptus, two thoughts occur to me: "If I can make the numbers of 100,000 times more intense than 70 decibels, because decibels are logarithmic units," (2) Intensity decreases as distance
I suddenly stopped wondering why I have a such a sore throat.
Colleen Kitchen
assistant instructor of computer science Consumer merger
The article about merging the two offices of the Consumer Affairs Association contained some misconceptions which should be clarified.
to increase services To the editor:
The merger will not make filing complaints inconvenient for students. For many students our community location is located outside of free parking and proximity to downtown. In fact, during the last three months, more students filed complaints at the community location
Students who find it difficult to get downtown can still file complaints at the campus office, but those complaints will be banded from the other office.
more people are using the community office than the campus office. About
two-thirds more complaints and inquiries were received at the community office during the last three months than at the other two. The staff, who try to maintain the two offices full time.
Our decision was also influenced by the instability of the Comprehensive Employment Training Act contract which has been paying salaries for two staff members at the community office. Because CETA favorably considers organizations that transfer employees to positions salaried by the organization, our transferring employee will receive a salary increase our chances of receiving CETA funding for our other employee.
The fact that I am resigning is coincidental not a cause of our decision to stay.
isy funding and maintaining one office instead of two, we feel we can save both time and money while increasing services to both students and community members.
Judy Kroeger
Campus director for the Consumer Affairs Association
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