It must be nice...

January 16, 2004

Dear Sirs,

Boy it must be great to be Nelson Bascome III. Arriving on a flight home with marijuana strapped to him, an importer gets between eighteen months to eight years but probation, that?s unheard of.

And now he wants out of the Regimental duties. Sure why not?

He can get out of a prison sentence so surely the Regiment must be a piece of cake. Right? Wrong.

But Jr., if you would have gotten your deserved prison sentence you wouldn?t have had to worry about the Regiment, because they wouldn?t have wanted you!

Baretta?s saying comes to mind when I think of Mr. N. Bascome Jr:

?If you can?t do the TIME, don?t do the CRIME. I got one year for 13, ten dollar bags of heroin; where was my probation???

Confusion over law

January 19, 2004

Dear Sir,

The present confusion surrounding the seatbelt law could have been easily avoided by simply listening to the public input when it was announced last year on 1340 radio.

The first introduction by R. Christopher for the Road Safety Council raised many pertinent questions necessitating subsequent ?explanations? by both the TCD director K. Monkman and the Minister of Transport who also failed to address these concerns fully and left the listeners more confused and unsure.

They ignored these points and forged ahead passing and implementing this law. Since the public can?t be trusted to ensure their own personal safety without being coerced, then our opinion doesn?t count.

So concerned callers were written off as ?whiners and complainers? and thus laws drafted by civil servants advised by Dr. Froncioni and the Road Safety Council overseen by the TCD and the Ministry of Transport, the Police and the DPP.

The Senate passed it to the House where both the Opposition and the Government unanimously passed the law only to find out a year later that what the public had voiced was in fact the truth and now at least eight amendments must be made in order to even write a ticket for the offence. This is unacceptable.

The combined salaries of the above mentioned bureaucracy alone should be reason enough that we review the decision making process in drafting legislation. If this team can?t draft a simple seat belt law then how much other flawed legislation is there?

Although I have never questioned the benefit of a seat belt the fact that it is an offence which requires a court appearance rather than an out-of-court settlement of $50 like a stop sign ticket (arguably more dangerous) serves only to clog the courts even more.

Here is where the DPP and Police failed to consider enforcement of weight regulations for children. Also two baby seats and a booster seat cannot fit in the rear seat of the largest ?G? class vehicle and no one found out until last week.

Large families were not considered at all and were advised to ?make two trips? by Ms Christopher. After having Dr. Froncioni refer to the majority of us repeatedly as dummies for the better part of a year and then told you have had a year to get used to it.

Tickets have even been issued already, although invalid, and the arrogance now transforms to blame shifting. We would like to see some accountability after all who is going to foot the bill to set this straight?

All these concerns surfacing now were discussed and completely ignored within half an hour of the introduction over a year ago. Every day people were able to see inherent problems without even seeing the law, yet all these high paid ?yes men? couldn?t see it even after being told.

By the way if safety really is a concern, why are children still riding on the front of bikes, cellphones being abused and boaters not carrying life jackets (even when they cannot swim) and car bumpers a major safety feature, are still tampered with to adhere to the length limits. Pure foolishness.

Three years in the making with so many big shot advisors, I think some resignations should be tendered or the axe start falling and replace these Council members and directors, etc. with promising young students who could obviously do a much better job for a more reasonable wage. Public input should also be mandatory before legislation is passed since the legislators obviously cannot manage on their own.

Just run ideas by Everest DaCosta?s talk show and monitor the input which you do already, only now actually analyse these concerns rather than scoffing at them. This would save some major embarrassment later, not to mention huge savings of money needed for high level talks, meetings and subsequent amendments.