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Opinion

Drug Boat Strike Raises Questions

In Our Opinion

Congress is mostly a media circus these days, so credit the members who take their duties seriously. Lawmakers are doing a public service by trying to get to the truth on whether the Trump Administration killed defenseless survivors of a drug-boat strike. The controversy involves a Washington Post report that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered that no one survive a Sept. 2 missile strike on an alleged drug boat in the Caribbean. The story cites unidentified sources claiming that the U.S. military, on Mr. Hegseth’s orders, conducted a second strike to finish off survivors clinging ...

Reconsideration Of NC State Lake Proposal Is Interesting

In Our Opinion

We had all but given up on the five-year Chautauqua Lake Management Plan proposed and developed by Dr. Robert Richardson of North Carolina State University. NC State’s Aquatic Plant Management Program officials propose, for those who have forgotten, a staged plan that deals with the entire lake rather than the 2017 Chautauqua Lake Macrophyte Management Strategy’s approach that divides the lake into subsections based off of shoreline use and the need to balance human interaction with environmental considerations. University officials said the approach is good for small areas but ...

City’s Actions On 2026 Budget Speaks Volumes

In Our Opinion

It’s obvious from the way the City Council split $786,450 in changes to the 2026 budget that council members are more concerned about the city’s fund balance than they are the city’s tax rate. Sales tax trends convinced city officials that increasing the sales tax budget by $348,857 was achievable. While we are typically wary of increasing the sales tax, both Mayor Kim Ecklund and Comptroller Ericka Thomas have shown themselves to be conservative when it comes to the sales tax in the past. At the same time, new information allowed the city to decrease its health insurance fund ...

JCC’s Business Decision Has Impact On Community

In Our Opinion

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Jamestown Community College will close JCC Total Fitness to the public on Feb. 1. Many city residents likely have no idea that the little marketed service is available on the Jamestown campus. It hasn’t been well advertised, and public habits changed after a lengthy state-mandated closure during the COVID-19 pandemic. College officials say they spent three years trying to rebuild membership, but participation remains too low to pay the costs to keep JCC Total Fitness open to the public. While Total Fitness had increased membership by 50 ...

Federal Rural Hospital Funding Is Far From Restored

Local Commentaries

You have to hand it to Nick Langworthy. Not everyone would be willing to go out in the rain and stand in front of a microphone to tell us temporary funding for rural hospitals that offsets only one-third of permanent funding cuts is a win. Langworthy called the $50 Billion Rural Health Transformation Program (RHTP) “one of the largest federal investments in our history to support rural healthcare.” Why was this bill necessary? Because the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, a bill Langworthy voted for, made drastic cuts to Medicaid, an important funding source for hospitals and nursing ...

Can You Complete These Oxymorons?

Local Commentaries

Having taught all Core Elementary and Middle School Subjects (including Grammar, Spelling, and Writing, as part of our Language Arts Curriculum) in the Jamestown Public Schools in my career, one day at home when Chasy was about 6 years old, a Campbell Soup commercial came on TV and finished with their slogan of that time, “Soup is Good Food.” When she saw the words and heard the slogan, she asked why “good” and “food” didn’t rhyme. In my classroom, many times, I had students who wanted to know the same about words like rough, cough, through, and though, and other words like ...