According to The Salt Lake Tribune in a Sept. 12 article titled “State Begins Fencing Off Rio Grande Street,” the purpose of the fence is to keep drug dealers out. The 8-foot fence will be covered to reduce visibility and prevent drug dealers from passing drugs. The fence is part of a $67 million, two-year effort to reduce lawlessness, the Tribune said.
I had previously read about the possibility of putting up a fence, but what the article also pointed out was that the area was going to have a guard house where a security guard will check IDs. It will also have at 6-foot-high interior fence that will create a buffer zone so drug dealers can’t throw drugs into the area.
Between 1933 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its allies established 40,000 camps and other concentration sites. The perpetrators used these sites for a variety of purposes, including forced labor, detention of people thought to be enemies of the state and mass murder. To me, putting up the fence around the homeless is cruel.
Also in the same Tribune article, there was a statement that said 86 percent of respondents to a city survey said that closing the stretch of Rio Grande “will increase the safety of those seeking homeless services.” I volunteered down at the St. Vincent DePaul soup kitchen for nine years and found out that these homeless services were spread out all over the city.
The stupidest thing in Donald Trump’s litany of campaign promises is “We’re going to build a wall.” Donald, if you really are going to build a wall, do it with electronic sensors, drones, cameras and high-speed dune buggies. This is a much more cost-effective way of putting up a barrier.
An alternative to the wall would be to erect visitor centers every 200 miles along our border staffed with Hooters girls who would be moonlighting. Mr. President, if you agree with this plan, I will volunteer to recruit the Hooters.
The Tribune reported on Aug. 29: “Utah House Speaker Greg Hughes and Salt Lake City Mayor Jackie Biskupski took [their] public clash over Operation Rio Grande from the airways to a city hallway (recently), parting with smiles but apparently no closer to consensus.”
In the same article: “Biskupski told the city council … that her staff has identified $3.5 million by redirecting $685,000 it had budgeted to keep open 63 treatment beds associated with last fall’s Operation Diversion law enforcement effort to put toward year-one efforts. She asked the council to help in finding another $2.6 million to meet the city’s annual share of the $21 million funding gap.”
OK, sports fans, let’s see if I got this straight. So, we are taking away treatment beds from the homeless to replace with a Nazi Germany-style ghetto. It surely doesn’t make good sense to me. As a matter of fact, I think it is criminal.
As you will note in a previous paragraph, Biskupski uses the term “Operation Diversion.” I have long opined that developers want the Rio Grande property and are lobbying our political elites to make it happen. The effort has nothing to do with how we treat the homeless, but everything to do with silver and gold.
But there is a serious problem in the Rio Grande area. After a recent Saturday morning breakfast, I drove down to the soup kitchen, parked and walked throughout the ghetto. There is a completely different crowd there compared to when I visited the area in April. A lot more people were in a daze. A lot more people were speaking languages that I hadn’t heard down there before. And a lot more people were downright angrier. The solution is more law enforcement and not a fence.
“It happened so fast. The ghetto. The deportation. The sealed cattle car. The fiery altar upon which the history of our people and the future of mankind were meant to be sacrificed.” - Elie Wiesel accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, Dec. 10, 1986.
Robert Pembroke is the chairman of Pembroke’s Inc. and considers himself on permanent sabbatical. He can be reached at pembroke894@gmail.com.