Dear Editor:

The roundabout Mr. Coulombe is proposing sounds like overkill. There must be a simpler way, like the four-way traffic stop at the Center, which works very well. A roundabout would also be a major alteration of the landscape

No one seems to be very excited about the changes Mr. Coulombe has already made. He throws a couple million here and there – the new ambulance building, for example – as a sop to protestors, but he has pretty much been tolerated. But remember how they gnawed away at St. Andrews Hospital, like a rat in the walls, and no one thought much about it until there was no hospital left. Isn't that what is happening here?

I wonder when Mr. Coulombe will decide to move the cemetery – too depressing – and get rid of all those pesky lobster boats in the harbor to make room for a fleet of 200-foot yachts?

Perhaps it would be less agonizing to just throw in the towel and build a luxury hotel on the Common for Mr. Coulombe's golfing buddies, with a swimming pool where the dunk tank was. Another mere million dollars would build a solid gold flagpole with an eagle on top. That would do it for the Fourth of July. The right of eminent domain for the new Coulombe Highway to the golf course would eliminate Bet's, Northern Electric and any other holdouts. Mr. Coulombe could then bulldoze what was left and change the name from Boothbay to Coulombe City.

But I have a better idea. Mr. Coulombe, sir, why don't you go somewhere up north and buy a couple thousand acres of virgin forest, cut the trees down, and build the Coulombe Kingdom you've always dreamed of? You could always come back down here to Boothbay to play golf.

Alice Larkin Larrabee

Boothbay