CA's sports subsidy stifles competition

The Columbia Association (CA) should stop subsidizing Sport and Fitness with assessment money paid by CA homeowners.

A resident can't even use these facilities without paying additional money for a membership card and fees for the services they desire to use. These services are also offered to others (nonresidents) who don't pay an assessment.

CA continues to use artificial prices since assessment money is needed year after year to cover the shortfall of revenue obtained from memberships and other charged services.

I checked a competitor (BallyFitness) and found 16 facilities in the area, none of them in Columbia. Several of the competing facilities were in towns with populations smaller than 30,000 (Columbia has nearly 90,000).

Why won't they build here? Are the ways CA packages and prices their services affecting competition? If CA just provided services to residents would they have so many duplicate facilities? The competition can't fall back on assessment money if they don't price things at cost.

Shouldn't the competition be allowed to compete fairly for the business of Columbia consumers (especially nonresidents)?

Steven Pine

Columbia

Logic should apply also to Columbia

It seems that the Court of Appeals is saying that Dundalk can't be divided into separate legislative districts. Well, if that's true, the same reasoning should apply to Columbia. Here we have a city that is split right down the middle into two districts. If the court is determined to make Dundalk whole in applying its interpretation of the state constitution, it should apply the same standard to Columbia.

Kenneth A. Stevens

Savage

Guilty until proved innocent?

Reading the article "Telling parents of arrest at issue" in The Sun of June 9 made me realize how wrong I was regarding the American justice system.

The quote by Patti Caplan, Howard County school system spokeswoman, that suspending students until they are proved innocent in court (italics mine) was "perfectly reasonable" made me realize my thinking for the last 64 years was flawed. I had always thought that in America one was innocent until proven guilty.

However, I guess if a spokeswoman for a school system with the stature of Howard County's says that one must be proved innocent, it must be so.

Donald J. Wise

Marriottsville