Letters: Gilroy mayor | Football safety | COVID lies | Kidney donors | Monetizing candidacy

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Blankley’s record of
success deserves vote

Marie Blankley’s achievements as Gilroy mayor are too numerous to list here but a few stand out: a proven commitment to public safety; economic and downtown development; Gilroy’s new street maintenance plan; bringing Shark’s Ice to Gilroy; sound fiscal planning to meet the city’s unfunded pension liabilities; and addressing housing and homeless issues.

Gilroy deserves a mayor whose record proves that she will deliver performance, not promises. I am voting to reelect Blankley. I hope you will as well.

Patrick Dwyer
Gilroy

Delay football season’s
start to offset heat

Re: “Climate change making prep football fatal for some players” (Page C2, Sept. 21).

At risk of sounding like the old guy from the olden times, I have what may be a simple solution to the issue of high school football players overheating and suffering heat-related illnesses on the field: start the season later in the summer.

There’s no good reason for high school football games to be played as early as Aug. 23. When I was in high school (old guy talking) our season didn’t start until the second full weekend of September — usually around the 12th or 13th of the month.

There’s no good reason we cannot revert to a later season start for the sport. It would be safer for the kids and, as a fan, football is a fall sport, not a summer sport.

Mark Carbonaro
Monterey

Trump’s COVID lies
were his most egregious

The most egregious thing Donald Trump did was to lie to the American people about COVID.

He said, “It was like the flu,” and, “It would be over by summer.” Then he told reporter Bob Woodworth that it was a health disaster and that he could not tell the American people the truth for the panic that would ensue. He made that up. There is no document, meeting or conversation with anyone or group telling him not to tell the truth. He consulted with no one. He “knowingly” lied to all of us and people died.

Why is he not prosecuted for that? How can we forget this lie among all the lies he told us?

Mark Grzan
Morgan Hill

Tell Congress to pass
bill to pay kidney donors

Every year 130,000 Americans are diagnosed with end stage kidney failure; they must be put on dialysis or have a kidney transplant. The average dialysis patient dies within 5-10 years; transplant patients live a normal life.

In California, there are 11,000 new cases of kidney failure diagnosed each year. Nationwide, 1,000 people a month on a transplant wait list are removed either because they die or become too ill for transplant surgery. The California wait list time is up to 10 years; hence California has an even higher fraction of wait-list deaths.

A proposed law, the End Kidney Deaths Act, now in Congress, provides $50,000 incentives to donate a kidney (people only need one), saving 10,000 lives per year and, since transplantation is much cheaper than dialysis, saving taxpayers $37 billion over 10 years.

The bill would save lives, save tax dollars and reward donors for their sacrifice if passed. It deserves our support.

Dana Seccombe
Foster City

Trump’s monetization of
candidacy is distasteful

Has there ever been a presidential candidate who has so blatantly monetized his name and image while seeking office or found multiple ways to enrich himself in the process? At the least, it is not presidential; at worst, it is downright sleazy. Surely, we can and should expect more from a president who will represent us on the world stage.

Dave Riggs
Aptos