Division Street closure a necessary inconvenience

 

Last updated 6/27/2013 at Noon



Just about every day someone expresses their frustration over the closure of Division Street. Folks are frustrated and fed up with the inconvenience of the blocked roadway.

If you’re accustomed to zipping up or down Division, sailing along the straightaway east and west from one end to the other of the city, the chain link fence, caution tape and barricades are aggravating.

Imagine the impact it has had on Steve and Vicki Poling and their small business, a daycare located within the closed portion of the street. Moms and dads stop daily outside the daycare to drop off and pick up their children. Their regular routine has been disrupted for more than a month now.

Then there’s the school district’s agriculture program. The students and instructors were literally evicted from their shop facility in the name of safety. The district was forced to move the program into a pair of vacant classrooms at the elementary school.

Law enforcement, fire and emergency medical services must use alternate routes when responding to emergency calls. And so on.

The list of us in Ritzville who have been inconvenienced by the closure of Division Street is long and growing longer.

We should all remember who allowed this mess to occur. To do so, we would need to look to the longtime owner of the building and those tasked with caring for it on their behalf. They failed Ritzville and its citizens. And now someone else has to clean up their mess.

Meanwhile, the City of Ritzville has prevailed in court and is moving ahead as expeditiously as possible to remedy this inconvenience by finding a buyer capable of taking ownership, demolishing the old high school and cleaning up the debris as quickly as possible so the simple life can return.

Until then, the inconvenience is a small price to pay. Imagine the outcry, anger and frustration levied upon the city if the street was left open and the building collapsed. If property was damaged or someone was injured or killed, the city would be blamed for not doing more to protect its citizens.

Sure, every day the blocked roadway forces The Journal staff to take a detour. We’d rather do that then print a Page One article about a tragedy. Please try to be patient for just a while longer.

 

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