Falls Church Water ‘Picked Wrong Right & Lost’

Editor,

The Falls Church News-Press’ coverage of “the great water battle of 2010” has been baffling.

You’ve constantly spun it as Fairfax County unfairly picking on The (Poor Suffering) Little City. But Falls Church started the fight by objecting to Fairfax simply changing its practices, which were never bound by contract or legislation. An earlier editorial noted that from FCNP’s point of view, every court decision on the matter was wrong. Somehow I’d bet on multiple independent and objective judges making the right decision, versus the hardly objective hometown newspaper strongly opining without citing legal reasoning. Perhaps the fault, dear FCNP, lies with legal advice given Falls Church to “act preemptively” which was unanimously (and unwisely?) endorsed by the City Council.

The most recent editorial is over-the-top revisionism, with “…Fairfax Water system sued and not only won, but was backed by a judge willing to compel Falls Church to pay out almost $7 million…”. Didn’t Falls Church start this litigation? And surely if things were reversed with Falls Church winning, and Fairfax using language such as yours, dismissing multiple court decisions as “flatly wrong”, you’d be up in arms about Fairfax being highhanded and disrespecting the legal process, etc. So get a grip: Falls Church picked the wrong fight and lost in multiple courts. Pay up.

Gabriel Goldberg

Falls Church

Hails Story of Atomic Monkeys’ Lego League Effort

Editor,

Thank you for the Dec. 2 write-up of the Atomic Monkeys’ success in the recent First Lego League competition.  These young men learned to work together to program the lego robots they had built to accomplish specific biomedical missions.  We are grateful to our corporate sponsor, SAIC, for its generous underwriting.  During the competition, the team members performed with gracious professionalism, maintaining a sense of humor and the ability to think creatively while under pressure.

Kudos to the monkeys – Teran Peterson, Matthew Puentes, Lou Lindsay, Graham Morrill, Nathan Royce, Braxton Puentes, Tony Peterson, and Kyle Zaenger.

J. Brooks-Lindsay

Via the Internet

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