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Teachers shouldn’t jump
seniors in vaccine line
The California Teachers Association spent nearly $94,000 on cable advertising highlighting COVID cases in schools. They say a January 2021 outbreak at Oakmont High in Roseville forced hundred’s of students to quarantine for 14 days. (Roseville Joint Union High School students have been learning on campus since fall 2020.) They conveniently leave out the fact that as of the week of Feb. 22, only four students and one staff member had confirmed cases of COVID out of a district with 11,524 students and staff, a positivity rate of 0.043% .
CTA insists teachers must go to the head of the line and be vaccinated before they return to classrooms. But the CDPH website shows 74% of COVID deaths have been in people over 65 years old. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 75% of California teachers are between 25 and 54 years old. The CTA says they want to put safety first. For those over 65, not so much.
Martin Wilmington
Castro Valley
DA overreaching
with felony charge
It sure seems like our district attorney is over-exercising the long arm of the law in terms of electing to prosecute Segundo Collazos for the felony of violating labor standards (“DA charges landscape owner in death of employee killed by tree stump grinder,” Page B2, Feb. 5), the consequences of which led to the death of his employee.
The basis seems to be that Cal-OSHA found he failed to instruct the employee on the safety aspects of working near the business-end of a stump grinder. This was a tragedy (one which Collazos will live with for the rest of his life), but it certainly looks like District Attorney Diana Becton is overreaching by selectively prosecuting a ‘small fish’ to send a message to all the other fish.
Harold Mantle
Walnut Creek
GOP wars have cost
nation high-speed rail
High-speed rail should have been built all over the United States by the federal government over 20 years ago, just like in Europe and Asia.
But Republicans started the war in Iraq, on the biggest lie in American history, wasting more than $2 trillion of our tax money and killing thousands of U.S. personnel.
That’s why our country has fallen behind countries all over the world in infrastructure improvements, so don’t blame Democrats in California for trying to build something that should be already in place
James Jackovich
Oakland
HSR’s $23 billion could
have been better spent
Letter-writer Rod Diridon Sr. says (“First HSR line heads to finish despite critics,” Page A6, March 5) high-speed rail is only $136 million per mile. That comes to $23 billion that could be far better spent on things California needs rather than a railroad through mostly vacant farmland to Bakersfield.
Forecasts of ridership show it will have to be subsidized with as much as $90 million a year. It will never be tunneled through the earthquake-riddled Tehachapi Mountains to Los Angeles. Even our great, great-grandchildren won’t need it.
It’s way past time to shift the billions of HSR funds to speeding up commuter transportation and other far-more-important priorities.
Ed Kahl
Woodside
