Letters to the editor Nov. 1

A gut punch to nurses

Attn: Montana Legislative Committee that voted against the retention proposal for financial incentive towards local healthcare workers.

I have been a nurse in Kalispell for 10+ years. Since August, literally half of my coworkers have quit from my department. They live here in Kalispell, but work elsewhere for more money. Now my department is 50% travel nurses. They make two or three times my base pay and are here for three months. On top of doing my job, I train and watch over their shoulder to make sure they are doing their job correctly.

Sometimes the high proportion of new/temporary staff means more problems are created by their presence than are solved by their help. Those few of us locals remaining have to make sure traveling nurses don’t accidentally kill the patients because they are unfamiliar with the rooms, equipment, charting, physicians and flow. The patients and our local staff is suffering. But why would a rational nurse stay when they can make more money crossing the county line?

With regard to recruitment bonuses for out-of-state health care, over 10 years in Kalispell, when critical-care nurses were in short supply, we had sign-on bonuses of $5,000 for two years. The overwhelming majority that were hired with a bonus left after completing two years, leaving local nurses feeling cheated.

Nurses are pleading for retention bonuses to make working in the same community we live in worthwhile - where our kids go to school and our parents go to church. We feel dejected, degraded, underappreciated, and foolish working next to new people coming in daily and literally making two or three times our wages for doing the exact same job.

The legislative vote against retention bonuses for health care workers who stayed during the pandemic was not a slap in the face; it was a punch in the gut.

— Risa Sibbitt, Bigfork

Elect councilors who will listen

My neighborhood changed because of Rod Kuntz’s Flathead High School parking district plan. Folks sold their homes and others turned their homes into rentals as a result.

When he last served in City Council, he had pledged to work with the neighborhood parking committee but in the end he carved his own policy and got it approved. I think this behavior may have factored into his loss last election. Rod really disappointed my west side neighborhood.

It’s important to elect council members who not only listen to their constituents but stand with their constituents on issues affecting their lives and neighborhoods, not “re-elect” ones who don’t.

— Francis Khor, Kalispell

Star Spangled Banner

I’m proud to substitute for a school that encourages the National Anthem. Glacier High School supports the importance of both the flag and the song.

— Sonja Merrill, Lakeside

State rights

So, “it’s a Republic if you can keep it,” Benjamin Franklin stated in response to a question about the form of government provided for by our new Constitution. Now today, Ben’s concept is quickly disappearing under the weight of the vicious assault being delivered by our “president” which is, in turn, driven by the Covid hysteria and panic the Biden administration is using to drive a final stake in our Constitution’s heart.

The left and its legions of bureaucrats have always hated the inherent rights of each of our states given to them by the Constitution. Now comes Biden looking to administer the final “coup to grace” by forcing employees of businesses with over 100 employees to be vaccinated or be fired even in states like Montana which have outlawed such draconian measures.

To enforce his dictate on an unsuspecting public, this doddering fool is using his attack dog, OSHA, to implement the final rules. In that regard, OSHA is quickly becoming more and more like agencies used by Germany in the early part of the 1930s emulating the excuse of “we are just doing our job.”

This action is not just wrong, it is against the Constitution of the United States which states, “The powers not delegated to the United Sates by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

Individual states and the people who live in them are not required to obey unelected bureaucrats who work to take away their individual freedoms to make their own choices regarding their own health and well-being. For, today, it is just our businesses of over 100 employees. If these actions are successful, tomorrow it will be every business, our churches and every individual.

In these now desperate times, there are only two options. Support a convention of states where specific amendments to the U.S. Constitution can be promulgated and used to corral the “beast” of our federal government inside of the fences our Constitution originally intended. If not that, the only other solution is to secede from this overreaching and/or overbearing corrupt central government in order to preserve the best self-governing document every made, which protects the right of the people to live in freedom. Slavery to the totalitarian state is the only other road.

The game is afoot. We must participate and resist for the sake of ourselves, our children and our way of life. The stakes are too high to sit on the sidelines uninvolved.

— Mark Agather, Kalispell