To the editor:
In the Oct. 17 Tryon Daily Bulletin, Mr. Ennis noted that only 22 percent of the county responded to the visioning survey with a small majority of these indicating a desire to preserve the county’s rural nature.
From this he suggests the will of 12-14 percent of the county’s citizens was trying to be imparted on the remaining 86-88 percent. REALLY?
Did he go out and survey the 78 percent that didn’t participate in the survey and find they were all in opposition? I doubt it.
I would suggest that if persons want to throw out citizen responses based on small percentages of the total participating, then we should be looking at all elections at the county, state and national level being invalid as we are truly a nation that chooses not to exercise our given right. We need to make decisions based on data in hand, not on speculation biased to personal interest.
I seem to recall a previous TDB in which Mr. Ennis expressed his disagreement with slope limits for building. I believe the UDO had slope limits at 25 percent, which was the same as what USGS recommended, but Bill felt a higher slope was safe and preferred from his point of view.
I would like to compare this view to what the aircraft manufacturing industry does when they design a plane. They establish, to the best of their ability, the worst case scenario for which that aircraft would experience in flight. They then structurally design that aircraft to survive that condition without having metal yielding (i.e., permanently bending without breaking). Then they increase that strength level by 50 percent as a safety factor.
To me, what Bill is doing is recommending a decrease in nominal design limits. Would you put your family on a plane that was designed taking the safety factor in the negative direction just so someone in the industry could get some personal gain out of it?
– Bob Strickland, Sunny View