To the editor:
The Wellsburg -Brilliant Bridge isn't, that is, in Wellsburg at all. It is been constructed outside the city limits. That is a big deal for Wellsburg city residents who face ever-increasing water rate increases. Any business that would be constructed or opened after its completion would not have to pay the city business and operating tax. Bridges increase cash flow when they join two places that complement each other economically. It can have a powerful impact when an area that has a large money supply is connected to one that has goods or services to sell or people who need work, but that is the whole problem -- Wellsburg is being bypassed.
This tactic is not unfamiliar to city residents who watched the development of Washington Pike during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. However, the city limits were never extended so those living in these plush neighborhoods could share in the burden of helping maintain city services.
Those who failed to extend the city limits south to meet at the Beech Bottom line know who they are. It is not my place to point fingers. This is Keynesian economics in reverse. Jefferson County's economy is larger than all of Brooke County and Hancock County combined. Let alone little old Wellsburg's small budget. As Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Labor Secretary Frances Perkins explained Keynesian economics, "(A) dollar spent on relief by the government was a dollar given to the grocer, by the grocer to the wholesaler and by the wholesaler to the farmer, in payment of supplies. With one dollar paid out for relief or public works or anything else, you have created four dollars' worth of national income."
What I am saying is that travelers on Ohio State Route 7 heading north or south have no reason to come across the bridge, but the person on the West Virginia side has all the reason in the world to cross over. Sales in Wellsburg will fall and so will tax revenues. I will skip the celebration while I figure out how to pay the next utility bill.
The forgotten man in town whose interests have been neglected -- Roosevelt used the phrase in a radio address he gave on April 7, 1932, to describe the poor men who needed money and were not getting it.
Word from the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid
Michael Traubert
Wellsburg