This is written in response to Tracy Overstreet's article about the Grand Island smoke-free ordinance. Since their respective smoke-free ordinances took effect, there are parts of Omaha's Old Market, Lincoln's Haymarket and outside of many 'smoke-free' businesses where it is hard to walk on the sidewalks without breathing other people's smoke. This is because of smoking being allowed near doors and in outdoor dining areas. Popular bars are difficult to enter if you have a problem with breathing secondhand smoke. Smokers gather around the doors, making it next to impossible to hold your breath as you work your way through the crowd. Allowing smoking and ashtrays with smoldering cigarettes right next to doors of 'smoke-free' buildings will not keep inside these businesses smoke free. I have been in many businesses where the smoke from the people smoking outdoors is sucked into the building in large clouds every time the door is opened and more slowly through the cracks around the doors when they are closed. This defeats the true purpose of a smoke-free law. The smoke-free area should include an area of at least 20 feet outside of doors to more fully protect everyone from the toxic secondhand smoke. The State Office Building in Lincoln has pushed the smokers at least 20 feet from their doors because of too much smoke entering that building and I can still smell smoke in their entry hallway.

Will the council members and mayor put back the 10-foot outdoor smoke-free area after they confirm that City Attorney Dale Shotkoski gave them wrong information about their inability to have a stronger ordinance than the state law? Did one or more of the council members or the mayor vote to remove it because of the erroneous information provided by Shotkoski? If Shotkoski was correct, Lincoln, Omaha and Ralston could not enforce their current ordinances because the state has had a weaker smoke-free law since 1979. It and the new state law do not pre-empt stronger local ordinances. Hopefully, they will vote to include a 20-foot outdoor smoke-free area, or allow the citizens to vote on that larger limit. As Ryan King said, this would be a self-enforcing restriction. It would not need to be a high-priority police call.

Grand Island's city council and mayor should not further weaken the ordinance by allowing smoking in stores that sell nothing except tobacco since that is allowed in the state law. There are probably no such stores in Grand Island, or in Nebraska right now because selling anything else, including candy, gum, incense, pop, or anything else that is not closely related to tobacco disqualifies a tobacco store from allowing smoking under the new state law.

Mark E. Welsch, Pres. of GASP of NE, Inc.Omaha

Legislators are harming education

The right to a fair and independent Nebraska education is once again under attack in the Unicameral of Nebraska, that strange inane governmental body existent only in Nebraska.

Under the banner of Apple Pie and Child Welfare, this body has already defied the will of the people of Nebraska by closing many of the public schools in rural Nebraska.

Now this body is attempting, once more under the banner of Child Welfare to interfere with the education of our children.

Usurping the duties of the state commissioner of education, the Department of Education and the State Board of Education, the Unicameral is attempting to undermine the present system of learning assessment existing in Nebraska, a fair and independent system which encourages creative and local control.

Even though the commissioner of education is appointed by the governor, a statewide elected position, and the State Board of Education is a board elected by the people to represent the entire state of Nebraska, these local politicians, representing only their districts, believe themselves to better represent the public good of the state. The members of the Unicameral are believing themselves (mistakenly) to be better judges of learning assessments than the experts (such as the commissioner of education), who are by state statues required and recognized to be experts within the field of education. According to members of the Unicameral, it is all in the name of efficiency and the welfare of the state and our children. The mindset of this body of legislators seems more in tune with the mindset of 1930s Germany than with the Nebraska of 2008.

Could it be that the push for statewide tests has nothing to do with child welfare and everything to do with money? The new proposed assessment would demand schools to be assessed exactly the same way, thus allowing the Unicameral more power to blackmail the schools and students of Nebraska by using the assessments to dole out money as they deem fit.

The arcane representation of the Unicameral excludes fair representation to a large minority of Nebraska citizens simply by the basic design and flaw of the Unicameral system. This system prohibits a fair and independent education to all the children of the state by usurping the duties of the Department of Education.

Because of a weak and dim-witted executive and a gutless judiciary, the state of Nebraska is slowly coming to resemble a bee hive, with the Unicameral the queen bee. The rest of the state and its citizens are becoming drones, trying to satisfy the ever-growing appetite of the queen by being forced to jump through more and more hoops, all for the welfare of the state and its children. All hail the Unicameral!

Doug Polk

Kearney