To the editor:

For anyone truly interested in the good and welfare of our Cape Coral I would suggest they read two articles which appeared on May 10. One, in The Breeze, was entitled “Buyout proposal targets firefighters” and the other, in the Fort Myers News-Press, was headed “Cape Police Chief upset by buyouts.”

A tip of the Curran hat goes to Police Chief Petrovich and council woman Dolores Bertolini. Their insightful view into the pending buyout programs which, if not given a deep study, projects a down grading of our city services and another vehicle which may cause a furtherance of the “double dipping” which we are all well aware of that exists throughout our society today. The Fraternal Order of Police is proposing that the city offer four years of pay for long-time members of the force to retire now. Oh yeah, what is long time, 10 or 15 years? If they’re, say, making around 60 grand a year (and that’s undoubtedly low,) that would be about a quarter of a million dollars. Just to say “goodbye.” How many of them tid-bits would we give away?

Come on, let’s get real, put your 20 in and then take your walk. We can’t have all departments staffed with rookies. We all know that if that were to happen we would all go to hell in a hand basket, quite rapidly.

The main thing in this overall picture is that the economy is down. We don’t like to see anyone hurt, and have to lose their job, but the people who run our governmental machines have got to take better care of the taxpayers’ dollars to avoid these dilemmas.

Will that happen? I don’t know, but I would certainly like to see more of our leaders trying.



Joseph F. Curran Sr.

Cape Coral