One published report said that CSX would bring in 8,000 new employees to the area.  Where will these employees come from?  The Florida Chamber of Commerce, the US Chamber of Commerce, the Florida agriculture community, homebuilders, road builders, and manufacturers all claim that we need a guest worker program and ask that the 12 to 20 million illegal aliens who are here be allowed to remain and eventually become citizens.  All of this they urge because they claim that we do not have enough Americans to do the jobs.

Now, it seems that some county officials and the Chambers of Commerce are touting the CSX complex as necessary to create additional jobs; for whom?

If 8,000 new jobs are created, as one newspaper report claimed, how many more policemen, sheriff’s deputies, emergency medical teams, fire fighters and hospital workers in emergency rooms will we need to hire to take care of these workers and their families?  How many teachers will we need to hire to teach the children of these workers?  How many classrooms will we need to house them?

And ultimately, how much will all of this cost tax payers?  What new taxes or increases in present taxes will be imposed?

If the predictions are true that the construction of this complex will dump another 1,200 to 1,500 trucks daily on our roads, how long will it be before someone will be demanding that we embark on an expensive road building program to take care of the new truck traffic?

How many more hundreds of thousands of gallons of water per day will be needed to be drawn from our already scarce water resources? An article in Wednesday’s Ledger talks about a future deficit of 106 million gallons per day.