So what do you do if there's a problem in your home? A switch that won't work, peeling exterior paint, a window that won't slide fully open or closed? Suppose you own a three-year old house, and the handyman tells you might have a shoddy installation; or you might have just got a bad unit. Either way, he says, builders just throw up the structure using the cheapest materials they can scrounge and any jake-labor they can hire. So, you gotta make some decisions.

Sell your home? Move? Cut and run? Take the loss on the current mortgage, see how big a new home loan you can qualify for, and buy a new house?

More likely you'll refigure the budget. Postpone buying the new computers or bigger TV. Devote a little each month to the Home Depot account. Work it out.

Unless you're Russ Johnson.

LISD Trustee Johnson assures us all that any money spent in maintenance, repair and renovations in old school buildings is a complete waste. He says he can't understand why anybody would waste one dime on maintenance. He tells us it's worse than a waste, it's downright theft to take money away from salaries, textbooks and fuel and spend it on old buildings.

This may actually be a more defensible position than I have been able to paraphrase. I dunno.

I was overcome with the incongruity of hearing this particular position articulated by a man who lives in the HISTORIC DISTRICT of Lancaster, in a home built in 1910. I wonder how many times over the original construction cost various owners have "wasted" money in repairs (to a roof, maybe, after a hailstorm or tornado?) or upgrades (I presume Mr Johnson's home has an air conditioner, that was added during renovations some decades after the place was built.)

I was further dumbfounded by the audacity of hearing this particular claim made in the newly refurbished Centre Street building (built 1903). Are we to understand then that Russ Johnson thinks the three million dollars of 2004 bond funds spent on that old school building was wasted? (There is a lot of community support for the proposition that '04 bond funds have been wasted but I hadn't heard the Centre Street project offered as the sole and best example before.)

And I finally struck by considering the possibility that Mr Johnson might try offering that analysis to the congregations of the various churches nearby -- Presbyterians, Baptist, etc -- many congregations still meeting in buildings half again as old as the Centre Street property. Have the generations of church members that have been sacrificing to maintain, repair, and renovate those sanctuaries been wasting their efforts?

I just don't know.

But I think I'd rather hear the proposition come up for a debate rather than a one-sided rant by a public official at his constituents.