Letters to the Editor: What Are Ballpark Boosters Smoking?

Editor, Times-Dispatch: My first thought after reading the headline, "Help Is Needed, Say Consultants to City," was: "My gosh isn't anyone thinking rationally about a baseball facility in Richmond?" We are talking about a minor-league ballpark! I repeat: a minor-league ballpark! This is not Wrigley Field or Camden Yards.

At present, only a double-A team has expressed interest in coming to Richmond. Nevertheless, the city is projecting a huge development in Shockoe Bottom. Further, the city now tells us this development will require taxpayer funding.

Someone please tell us who is giving the city advice on this project -- other than those who stand to benefit up front, then disappear and leave the city with an albatross around its neck.

Who are the business, hotel, and condo owners who will move to be close to a minor-league ballpark? Doesn't the lack of significant permanent development around The Diamond give anyone second thoughts about Shockoe Bottom? How many potential condo buyers will desire to buy a condo with a beautiful view of center field in a minor league ballpark -- a ballpark vacant and desolate for six months of the year?

Finally, has the city thought of an exit strategy for this project? In my 60-plus years, I have visited a reasonable number of minor-league ballparks. As a teenage member of an American Legion team, I even played in a few. I know of very few that were viable entities for more than 15 to 20 years. Those that have been successful were in accessible areas, apart from center city, or in areas set aside for recreational development.

A minor-league ballpark in Shockoe Bottom is a flawed concept. It may be defunct even before the public debt is paid off. David M. Dean. Midlothian. Editor, Times-Dispatch: Virginia might be for lovers, but Richmond could be for fatalities. To place a colorful, well-lit visual distraction along one of the trickiest, most attention-demanding one-mile stretches within I-95's almost 2,000-mile run is begging serious injury and death for hapless families traversing our city, much less baseball fans backed up at exits for Broad and Franklin Streets.

Beyond creating a deadly bumper-car death match for I-95 travelers and baseball fans, the proposed Shockoe Valley stadium would be a bust for Richmond history, and yet another sucker punch to Richmond taxpayers from persuasive, open-handed, risk-averse developers spewing charming, civic confections while woefully downplaying the utterly unrealistic expectations of financial benefit to Richmond coffers. Just maybe we shouldn't let ourselves get fooled again.

Not only is The Diamond's current location more convenient to most Richmonders, we already own the footprint upon which we could retrofit, scale down, and redesign the current facility within the current trend to more intimate, family-friendly baseball stadiums. For a change, why don't we follow the money -- who profits first, regardless of the ultimate success or failure of project expectations, and who bears the actual risk if the silver-tongued pronouncements don't pan out?

It's just baseball. Why does it have to be shrouded in stupendous profit incentives for developers, while paving over Richmond's best asset -- its history?

If Richmond's powers-that-be seriously wanted our city to be a major tourist destination, to complement the well-established Jamestown-Yorktown-Williamsburg triad, they would not be repaying for feasibility studies on how to best pave over our potential historic assets. We were too squeamish several years ago to make an aggressive offer to locate the National Slavery Museum in Richmond. That museum should have been, and could still be, located in Shockoe Valley, along the slave trail, next to Lumpkin's Slave Jail.

If we don't blow it, we might get yet another chance to present our city as ground zero for an all-encompassing look at the Civil War and antebellum America, without the whitewash. That would be a timeless, world-class attraction, worthy of a major tourist destination, and the tourist dollars that would follow. Tommy Moore. Richmond. Editor, Times-Dispatch: Recently President Obama called for dialogue and compromise on the question of abortion. Sometimes political and moral issues converge; whether or not to murder the unborn is such an issue.

The president has made clear his views on abortion. As a candidate, he said that the first thing that he would do as president is sign the Freedom Of Choice Act. As an Illinois senator, he refused to vote for a born-alive infant bill that would have outlawed infanticide. It is Obama who signed an executive order allowing the use of taxpayer funds for overseas abortions. It is he who supports the use of taxpayer funds to provide abortions in the U.S.

I wish to commend all Christians and Christian organizations that follow the Bible command in the Ten Commandments: "Thou shall not murder."

How can a Christian compromise on an issue involving the sanctity of human life, given as a sacred gift from the Creator Himself?

In 2 Corinthians 6:14-17, the Apostle Paul admonishes that "light and darkness" can have no communion. "Come out from among them [evil doers] and be ye separate . . . touch not the unclean thing."

Again in Ephesians 5:11, Paul writes, "And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them."

1 John 3:4 tells us that sin is the transgression of God's law. Ezekiel 18:20 states that the person who sins shall die. Therefore, the Bible clearly teaches that mankind shall be judged by God's law, His word.

When political and moral issues converge, light must make no pact with darkness! Fillmer Hevener. Farmville. Editor, Times-Dispatch: Sen. Mark Warner sent me some spam promoting the idea that he has been hard at work protecting the consumer. Implied is how he made his millions in the cell phone business, so he must really, really care about us.

Oh, really?

Warner neglected to tell me how he had just messed over the UAW that so staunchly supported his party and, by extension, one could assume, him.

Chrysler was literally seized from its rightful owners -- the shareholders, many of whom were UAW members -- and given to the same UAW organization that helped break the company to begin with.

If that weren't enough, Warner does nothing to stop that gift from being rendered worthless by new fuel-efficiency and cap-and-trade regulations.

However, it gets worse. What was once the world's largest corporation, General Motors, is now all but bankrupt. Its assets are about to be put in the hands of the same U.S. government that has refused to rein in the demands of the unions and protect our industry from unfair foreign competition.

Indeed, there doesn't appear to be any industry these socialists aren't after: food, beverages, health care, cars, guns, energy, broadcasting -- just about anyone who attempts to do business in America will find it a rough row to hoe.

Considering Warner's failure to act against any of these depredations, I am led to question his business acumen. How could any of this be said to build new jobs or protect consumers? Perry Hicks. Sandston.