Letter To The Editor

I really sent this out this morning...


Dear Kerry,

I’m writing to personally thank you and your newspaper for, in less than eight days, essentially killing the results of my efforts spent over the past five months working on what I call the “K Street Tree Project.”

It was actually Tuesday’s thoughtful, insightful, yet totally incorrect editorial that probably drove the last stake into our fundraising efforts.

Last week I managed to quell the firestorm you created on the local morning radio talk show with your incomplete article of July 10th by explaining to the listeners that the $35,000 cost figure was just an estimate, that the project was still in the preliminary stages, and that most if not all of the funding would be coming from private donors and federal/state grants for the Arts.

Now this week it is apparent that you not only believe your own shoddy reporting, but that it is worth your while to come out and devote editorial space to deride my efforts without even asking any further questions.

Having spent an additional two hours on the phone Tuesday morning with structural engineers and concrete contractors soliciting pricing and guarantees of discounts in return for recognition and publicity, when I saw your ill-informed editorial I realized that I was fighting a losing battle.

After all, who in their right mind would want to get involved in the project now that the Brunswick News has single handedly turned the public against the effort to resurrect the old tree?

Never mind that, from the very outset, when I PERSONALLY conceived of and presented this project to the Mayor and the City, I emphatically stated that:

“I would like to minimize the use of taxpayer funds for the purely “artistic” portion of the project…Funding could be raised through donations from local individuals and businesses, including services to support the artist/craftsman’s per diem costs (hotel rooms, meals, etc.)”

The only thing I wanted from the city was a place to put the tree once it was carved and help moving it—something they were already obligated to do once they ripped it out of the ground to make way for the sewer project.

Remember that the city saved tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars by killing the tree rather than routing the sewer line around its roots?

The only difference I asked for was carving the tree and putting it back in the neighborhood where it came from for public viewing rather than hauling it to the dump for disposal.

Yet you, in your infinite wisdom, with your building filled with so-called “professional” journalists, have seriously damaged my efforts.

Not one single person at 3011 Altama Avenue has managed to pick up the phone and ask me where the funding was coming from, even after I hand delivered a package of material describing our project last Tuesday to Keith Laing, the author of the original article.

For all you and your staff of “professional journalists” know, I PERSONALLY might be giving the city the money to do this project.

For all you and your staff of “professional journalists” know, the Mayor might be donating some of his recent, very publicized, game show winnings to the project.

What you and your editorial staff apparently don’t know or didn’t bother to mention in either the published article or your editorial is that we spent at least half of the last meeting at city hall (conducted on July 6th) talking about fundraising and applying for state and federal Art Grants.

Why was that fact omitted?

After all, the Brunswick News had a reporter and a photographer present in our meeting.

I assume that Mr. Keith Laing was that reporter.

Is Keith deaf, stupid, a partisan hack, or just forgetful?

I forgot to mention Attention Deficit Disorder…but I digress…

Tell Keith that I really admire his journalist skills. By the way, you might also consider buying Mr. Laing a new tape recorder because his pens and pencils obviously don’t provide enough information gathering technology to enable him to actually REPORT a story accurately.

You see, Mr. Laing forgot to mention or failed to remember a number of other things that came up in our meeting.

Things like that the actual carving of the tree was only going to cost ten or twelve thousand dollars.

Things like that we were going to ask for local artists to submit ideas and even be involved in the carving if they could do so safely and competently.

Things like that, even if we took the Brunswick News’ advice and handed your newsroom a truck load of chainsaws so that “local artists and volunteers” could do the carving, we’d still need cranes to lift the massive trunk and a concrete foundation to rest it on once it was finished. The last time I checked, cranes and concrete cost money, something that it’s apparently easy for “professional journalists” and uninformed amateurs to overlook when considering the viability of projects like this. (By the way, the trunk weighs somewhere between 80 and 100 thousand pounds, not 180,000 pounds as your band of “professional journalists” has incorrectly reported not once, but twice now.)

Things like that we were going to ask the children in the local neighborhoods for suggestions for what they would like to see in the artwork. We might possibly have a competition in the middle schools looking for ideas. I personally came up with the names of General James Oglethorpe, Poet Sidney Lanier, and Civil Rights leader the Reverend Martin Luther King in my initial proposal, but those names are not fixed in stone (excuse the unintended pun.)

For all I care, we can put your newspaper’s owner’s visage up there along with commissioner’s Cap Fendig and Tony Thaw, throw in a bunch of Arabs, camels, and add 72 naked, dancing Virgins up and down the tree trunk—all I’m trying to do here is save a giant 200 year old tree from a landfill, and get some positive PR for the city of Brunswick, Georgia in the process.

Why the hell do you have to go off half cocked and tear this thing apart before you know all of the facts?

Why do you and your newspaper seek to have it both ways?

I seem to recall numerous articles lamenting the political process leading to the removal of the tree in 2005. I seem to recall that public opinion was AGAINST the city taking the tree out, but now that the City wants to put it back, you’re against that too. And by the way, you need to leave the city council out of your editorializing because thus far, to my knowledge, the council is only involved by default.

The bottom line here is, until you received this letter, that you and the Brunswick News knew less about what you were writing and editorializing about than you should have—and that’s a crying shame because you’re in the reporting business…I think.

Or are you just in the editorializing business?

The ultimate irony in all of this is that liberals and the liberal media are constantly lamenting the plight of minority inner city neighborhoods and demanding that the government increase taxes in order to steal some of the wealth to be transferred to the “needy” and “downtrodden” in our society.

Thanks to the Brunswick News, funds from a bunch of mean old wealthy white men and women from St. Simons Island most definitely won’t be used to donate a world class piece of art to the citizens of the city of Brunswick.

And as to all you “professional journalists” down there at the Brunswick News—thanks for not hiring me for your recent position, because I refuse to work around and tolerate incompetents like Keith Laing.

You keep writing, and I’ll keep holding your feet to the fire.

Best Regards,

Virgil Raymond Rogers, III


That aught to get my message across...