Dear Mr. Thompson,

I am a long-time fan of the Fayetteville Up & Coming Weekly and your articles! This letter is in response to your most recent opinion piece, entitled “Hits and Misses” in Volume 22 Issue 40 of the magazine. 

While I often agree with many viewpoints in your articles, I was cautioned by your response to the recent traffic congestion caused by road construction and traffic accident investigations in our community.  I don’t view this as a contractor or a law enforcement problem. According to the US Department of Transportation’s Work Zone Management Program, there has been an increase of 7.8%  in work zone crashes, with more than 96,000 accidents occurring each year. There are at least 70 work zone-related incidents every day in the U.S. that also include an injury (https://ops.fhwa.dot.gov/wz/resources/facts_stats/safety.htm). This is primarily caused by less mindful drivers who are either in too much of a hurry or not cognizant of the hazards that they approach on the roadway. For this reason, contractors and police have expanded their boundary markers, in the need to exercise much greater caution in order to protect themselves, as well as,  sidelined vehicles.

The bigger issue that is avoided in this discussion is the overall increase in the number of road construction projects that are occurring simultaneously across the entire county. Every major thoroughfare, from Ramsey Street, to Owen Drive, to Hope Mills Road has some type of long-term road construction going on at this time. This began in the late half of last fiscal year. What is apparent to me is that the big push for new projects fell in line with end-of-year expenditure of funds and was poorly planned.  I have an 11-mile commute to work from home and it now takes me just shy of an hour of one-way travel each day to make this trip due to commuter congestion and rerouting caused by the work zones that are peppered about our region.

I think we both agree that the road construction zones are a big “miss” for our community. But our leaders and decision makers for these projects need to design more responsible plans in the future to ensure that our citizens can efficiently, and safely, reach their destinations. The contractors and law enforcement are just doing their job. It’s not their fault and they aren’t to blame for this problem.

Thank you, Rebecca – Hope Mills, NC Citizen/ Workday Commuter to North Fayetteville

Dear Editor:

I am writing this letter in response to the Publisher’s Pen, dated Oct. 3. After reading this particular article for the fifth time, it is disturbing how anyone can demoralize the reason why Colin Kaepernick started to take a knee. To state that it is disrespectful to the veterans, military service members, and the United States, it just absurd given the fact that there are several service members of different nationalities that continue to be disrespected by racial slurs, injustice, and inequality. All this article did was just ignore the fact that it continues to happen, and deflect the real issues that are going on in America. The NFL is not an issue in my book. As an African American female veteran, I have experience this social injustice in the military and after I got out.

Since we are on the subject of Donald Trump, NFL, the American Flag, and the National Anthem, there is no one that is discussing why the American Flag was laying on the ground at one of the NFL games (https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DLOi2E7W0AI4Am0.jpg). From the opinion of someone that has served, this is the upmost disrespect that the service members and veterans that have served or continue to serve to protect this great nation. When politics started to play a part in regards to the NFL, they created the upmost distraction, and an abundance of people are falling for it. At the end of the day, this article is just an opinion and it doesn’t represent the reason why I served in the military.

Chanda Walker