No to Gateway Connector

To the editor:

When credit is tight and dollars few, the last thing you would do is shred a paycheck. And if you gave some of your money to someone else, you wouldn't want that person to waste it either. So, when I saw two different articles about public spending, one of them set badly with me.

The first was a story from St. Louis University, which received $23.7 million from the National Institutes of Health for its new medical research facility. They planned to use that money to help find cures for infectious diseases. Nice. I'll be glad to pay for that.

The second story was about the new Illinois capital spending program. The state also plans to spend $23.7 million, but it wants to spend the money to study the location of a new roadway called the Gateway Connector. Not so! They've already spent $10 million of our dollars to pick out a 400-foot corridor, so what's to study? There are roads and bridges to fix instead.

Folks, if this isn't waste that you and I cannot afford, then Gov. Blagojevich and Michael Madigan are best friends. Illinois -- with its $2 billion shortfall -- needs to revisit its spending plan.

Call Milton R. Sees, Secretary of Transportation at 217-782-5597. We can't ask this guy to cure disease, but we sure as heck can ask him to spend our $23.7 million on things that will benefit us.

Richard Skillings
Troy