Loch Raven unsuitable for golf

John Steadman's April 18 commentary regarding the Pine Ridge golf course expansion showed very little evidence that he has followed the dictates of good reportage and checked out his facts and sources.

If the city employees who used to run the courses had operated under the same conditions agreed to by the Baltimore Municipal Golf Corp., they would have been able to keep the courses in good condition and probably added to their number.

BMGC, after all, is allowed to keep the surplus it generates as capital to be used in upgrading and improving the courses, and apparently to build new courses. Instead, past city employees were required to hand all money over and above current operating expenses into the city's general fund.

So the courses went into the inevitable decline. Whether the city employees would have been as successful as BMGC is problematic, as they would likely not have been free from interference, but they never had the chance to prove their capabilities.

At the time Pine Ridge was built, environmental questions were not being asked, nor were questions of legality.

The original grant by the legislature stated specifically that the watershed property should be afforested. It did not say that it was OK to also use it for recreation or whatever somebody might think was a good idea.

A watershed has a very specific and unequivocal purpose -- to control the flow of rain water into the reservoir in such a fashion that it is cleansed of pollutants and nutrients, and soil erosion into the water is minimized.

There is no better system than an old, undisturbed forest to accomplish this objective.

Unfortunately in the case of Loch Raven Reservoir, this objective has not been met, primarily because those who controlled the watersheds did not understand their responsibilities.

At the time, they believed that it was all right to log the forest, develop hiking trails, golf courses and the like.

The watershed suffers today because of this lack of big-picture understanding.

A proper watershed is an ugly thing, a forest primeval, where trees live, die, fall over and rot, and underbrush struggles to survive. It is not a park, nor is it a commons, to be exploited by anyone who comes along.

There is no acreage in the watershed available to use for a golf course. All the land is taken.

I do not drink the water from Loch Raven Reservoir, but my children and grandchildren do, along with a million or so other people.

I do not want their source of water jeopardized for the pleasure of a relatively small segment of the population.

BMGC should take its money and search for golf course land elsewhere. Mr. Steadman should return to basics.

Jim McCoy

Phoenix

Health plan

Why don't the Clintons tell the truth about their health care plan?

It will cost everybody more money for less quality and less coverage than they now have.

Also, some bureaucratic decision-makers will decide if you are entitled to the treatment that is necessary to save your life. They could decide you are too old to be bothered with.

Rhetoric to the contrary, the Clintons must know their plan will result in rationing.

They claim the cigarette tax will pay for everything, but their favorite representative, Dan Rostenkowski, claims large tax increases will be necessary.

H. J. Herrmann

Timonium

____________

Our two presidents, Bill and Hillary Clinton, along with all their stooges and sycophants, are roaming the countryside, knocking themselves out, trying their best to get Americans to swallow Hillary's brew of cure-all, snake-oil health care reform.

The words spewed forth are slick and the promises misleading. As the Bible would say, "There is a time for sleeping and a time to be wide awake." Now is not the time for any napping.

Hillary Clinton's madness, if left as is, can severely damage the quality of our nation's health care. There will be rationing, especially for seniors, but also for everyone else.

In certain situations, seniors, infants and others will be refused critical tests and needed treatments on the grounds that their care has become too expensive.

Every aspect of Hillary Clinton's health care plan will be dictated by faceless bureaucrats, appointed by the political geezers in Washington, most of whom you might not even buy a used car from.

Once this madness concocted in secret by Hillary Clinton and her pals becomes set in concrete, there will be no escape. As a matter of fact, trying to get around the dictates of the bureaucrats shall result in hefty fines and even prison terms.

Don't believe the slick words of those who speak with forked tongues. Inform yourselves as to what is at stake here.

Wake up everybody! We have a right to speak out, to do some hollering and to have our input as either additions or changes to Hillary's mad plan. It's our health, our life and death they are messing around with.

Joseph Coltelli

Toms River, N.J.

Society, not social workers, is to blame

I protest Mike Royko's social- worker-bashing in his column about twins who were removed from their loving foster home to be placed with their maternal uncle -- with whom their bizarrely abusive mother lived (April 20).

His contention that social workers are "obsessed" with returning foster children to their parents even if their family environment was "nothing more than a torture chamber" is uninformed and simplistic.

Federal child welfare guidelines assign priority to efforts to return foster children to their families. When family reunification is not possible, the guidelines require that an effort be made to place children with relatives . . .

As a Foster Care Review Board member and social worker, I know that these guidelines may be blindly followed even when it is clear that family reunification or relative placement is not in the best interests of the child.

Many workers and supervisors treat the guidelines as law, do not use their discretion and thus do not act in the best interests of the child.

Why is this so? For one thing, child welfare has been de-professionalized. In Baltimore City, for example, many child welfare workers are classified as human service workers, not social workers, and do not have an master's degree in social work.

Thus, they do not have the training that would enable them to assess a situation and judge the best interests of the child.

Secondly, before a worker can initiate adoption, she must (1) document that efforts at family reunification and relative placement have failed and (2) obtain approval from an administrative committee.

Further, the courts -- not the child welfare worker -- decide whether to terminate parental rights, thus making the child eligible for adoption. Documentation of family re-unification and relative placement efforts must also be provided to the court.

This fosters a bureaucratic mentality in which one sticks to the letter, not the spirit, of the federal adoption guidelines.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, child welfare workers work with very complex, sometimes dangerous, situations; their caseloads are too high; success is too seldom experienced; salaries too low; staff turnover rapid; burn-out rampant.

Is this a situation which fosters competent, caring and effective intervention?

In addition to questions of policy and its implementation is a philosophical issue.

I began my social work career in the 1960's as a child protective services worker. I have never forgotten a remark made by my agency director, "No parent wants to be a bad parent; every child wants his own parent, no matter how bad they might be." . . .

I was also taught that we should help parents to be the best parents they could be, whatever their limitations. Thus, we aimed to maintain family ties, however minimally.

For a particular family, for example, our goal might have been long-term foster care and one parent/child visit a month . . .

So who is to blame when a child is returned to an "environment which is a torture chamber"? Not obsessed social workers, but a society which is throwing away its children, especially ones who are poor and are children of color (i.e., the ones most likely to enter foster care) or whose parents are drug addicted, homeless, imprisoned or mentally ill, i.e. our social "untouchables." . . .

Julia B. Rauch

Baltimore

The writer is associate professor at the University of Maryland School of Social Work and director of the Maternal and Child Health Social Work Leadership Training Project.