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Show Community Comments I It's always a pleasure to . A fl) Join other local Moabbusi- Jvj- TO v ness PePe welcoming icVJrV visitors to Moab for the . Vy-rzw 'L Easter weekend, and in par- jtrh ticular for the annual Jeep ShlfllLJM Moab has long been an V XA'ArEaster weeken( get-away ujvi point for upstaters, with U) Spring breaking just a few weeks earlier than in most Utah communities. The addition of the ever-growing Jeep Safari has made the weekend even more active in the community. As in past years, we have gone all out to make our big Safari edition in a special effort, and although that effort requires longer hours, it is a very satisfying satis-fying task. Over the years we have found that requests re-quests for this particular issue continue throughout the year, leaving our files annually depleted to the zero point. This week, we are nearly doubling our normal press run, to make sure that sufficient copies will be available, not only for the week's visitors, but for those who wish them during the remainder re-mainder of the year. -sjt Saturday of last week couldn't have been a worse day for a cleanup drive, but the volunteers turned out in mass, and from the tabulated results released this week by Chamber committee chairman, Keith Peterson, they did a really fine job. With problems the community has experienced with one facet of the youth population making most of the headlines of late, it was particularly heartening to see all the kids who really pitched in on the community com-munity cleanup project. We sometimes lose sight of the fact that only a small portion of the kids are malicious vandals, and the rest are real credits to the community. We join in congratulating the youthful youth-ful winners in the cleanup competition, and add our editorial thanks to the adults who assisted with the annual dirty, but necessary task. -sjt- Action of the Moab City Council and the Grand County Commission, in requesting a detailed accounting ac-counting by the Moab Community Action Program is well within their rights and responsibilities, I feel, after reading the copious amounts of information, pro and con, which have been pouring across my desk the past few weeks. And in the event there is massive duplication of efforts here with already existing programs, it is my feeling that the duplication should be eliminated, despite the fact that the funding comes from Washington Wash-ington for the CAP-connected activities. CAP . was created originally under the federal poverty legislation created in the early years of the Lyndon Johnson administration. That was modified considerably under Richard Nixon, and CAP has gone from one sponsorship to another, remaining viable in some areas and going completely out of existence in others. There was a need, I feel, at the time the legislation legisla-tion originally passed, for this type of program. And there is still a crying need for the program in some areas. It would appear logical, however, that CAP efforts should be concentrated in areas of extremely high unemployment and centers of poverty, and' not so much in areas experiencing pretty fair employment ratios. Grand County, for example, has an unemployment unemploy-ment percentage of around 7, compared with double-digit double-digit unemployment in a number of the counties that surround us, and considerably under the statewide state-wide average. This means, to me, that every able-bodied able-bodied person who really wants a job here can probably pro-bably find one if he or she really tries. That isn't the case in a number of areas. When finding employment, increasing benefits, improving standards of living for adult families, etc., cease to be big factors for poverty -fighting programs, it is only natural that they seek out other responsibilities rather than simply fold up the tent and steal away. Naturally, when that happens, an agency could easily move into areas being cared for by other already existing agencies, and that may be the case in Moab, as one County Commissioner pointed out this week. I believe CAP should be given its day in court, and feel that the documentation of their case to be presented to the City Council will be well prepared. If, however, the elected officials feel the presentation presenta-tion doesn't warrant further local governmental support, sup-port, then they should make the decision they were elected to make. I hope the presentation and decision can be made rationally and calmly, and I'm glad the officials didn't choose to select the medium of a "public hearing" hear-ing" for the discussion. Such a medium would have led only to the kind of dialogue we have been seeing in our letters column of late, and couldn't have lent itself to a very objective analysis. If Community Action Program reflects the precise pre-cise meaning of its own name, it should indeed reflect re-flect the needs and wishes of the largest part of the populace; and if it does not do so, or appears to be acting contrary to these, as documented before elected officials, then it no longer has a place here. A community should be able to choose what it wants and what it doesn't want in the way of services, agencies and programs; and this holds true whether the programs are locally, state, or federally funded. As news analysts, we at The Times will be interested in-terested in the case presented by CAP on April 1. By the same token, we have a good deal of faith in the ability and conscientiousness of the city and county officials we elected to serve us, and feel that they will make a decision we can fully support. |