Editor:

The craziness just doesn’t end, I guess. In Friday’s issue of the Aspen Daily News, there was both a letter of stunning witlessness by Ken Neubecker and an utter backhand by the board of the Ferdinand Hayden Chapter of Trout Unlimited to its members.

Ken argued that electricity use is greatest in the winter, so why build a clean hydro plant that will be turned off in the winter? I don’t know Ken, why recycle? Why try at all? We should all just give up, lie down and die right now, I guess. Ken also randomly threw in a Love Canal reference. I loved that, let me try: I heard Ken and the Western Rivers Institute caused the Three Mile Island disaster. Snap!

Then there were the board members of Trout Unlimited, who in their very first paragraph state that their “mission is to conserve, protect and restore our cold-water streams and their watersheds.” Then why are they against the hydro plant?

It just makes no sense. By far the biggest threat to these streams is global warming. The 280 local members should really feel sockeye’d by their board for utterly abandoning their mission.

Don’t forget that there used to be a functioning hydro plant right where this one is getting built, and the fish and the streams did just fine; this isn’t an entirely new experiment.

To suggest that the world will end is to ignore all empirical evidence. Then they twisted words in an attempt to fool the readers with this gem, “At times as much as two-thirds of the native flow may be removed from the streams for hydro and other water needs in Aspen.” First of all, “at times” is during the winter when stream levels are at their lowest and visitor levels are at their highest, during which, as they know, the hydro plant wouldn’t be operating.

Second, during the rest of the year, “and other water needs” is the vast, vast majority of the use, i.e. flushing your toilets and taking showers. So 31/32nds flushing, 1/32nd hydro. The board should be ashamed of themselves. I am embarrassed for their members.