Letters to the Editor

Keller Williams RED Day helps an elderly couple

Two weeks ago we received a call from Mary Nobel Braden with Keller Williams. Yearly Keller Williams Real Estate gives back to the community with RED Day.

My husband and I have both been struggling with serious health issues for awhile and have not been able to do a lot of spring yard work. We are elderly, and our fixed income and health expenses precluded us being able to hire the work done. Our two adult children have been working hard to keep up with us, but we were just able to manage necessities.

We were nominated to be one of their RED Day recipients this year. Last week our yard was full of Realtors in red shirts working like Trojans on a Thursday morning. We were astounded by the amount of work they all accomplished! Cleaning gutters, mowing, cleaning leaves, cleaning our screened porch for summer, trimming hedges, weeding, clearing trash, on and on. And they are sending landscape help soon!

We are amazed and so grateful for these wonderful people. You never think you will be in a position to need help with daily living. It can happen. We feel so blessed to live in a community where people obviously care. Thank you Keller Williams from the bottom of our hearts!

Vickie and Bill White

Black Mountain

While governor fiddles, addicts get burned

The average cost for lifetime care and treatment of an individual with fetal alcohol syndrome is nearly $2 million.

Drug use, and the cost to society it brings, need to be talked about more in elections.

On the national level, drugs and alcohol cost the nation $417 billion dollars annually – hardly a surprising statistic, and one that is easy to dismiss in the grand scheme of government expenditures and massive government debt. But in North Carolina alone, almost 10 percent of the population has an addiction problem, and this costs the taxpayers $12.4 billion yearly.

The Neil Dobbins Detoxification Center, based in Asheville, runs up a tab of over $600,000 treating addition annually. The Julian F. Keith alcohol and substance abuse treatment center used nearly $1.5 million in taxpayer money in 2013.

In Buncombe County alone, almost 20 DUI arrests are made every single day. Our governor has already passed up a $10 billion dollar no-strings-attached offer from the federal government for Medicaid. This money would have helped individuals unable to afford treatment for addiction. Little else is being done to address the massive, and growing, issue of addiction.

Ben Marsico

Swannanoa