Thanks Daily Gazette for the Rhythm on the Ridge (ROTR) Roots Music Festival coverage at Maple Ski Ridge last weekend. We appreciate your support to help keep our community informed about the great events that take place around Schenectady County and surrounding areas! J. Peter Yakel, ROTR Festival

Workplace diversity should be a naturally occurring result of the best qualified persons chosen to fill a position. Unfortunately, Affirmative Action policies force companies to hire people who are not best qualified in order to create an artificial quota and percentage amongst the workforce. Substituting race or gender for ability not only diminishes the quality of the goods and services that are made available to the customer, it also leads to long-term degradation of quality in any given work field. People should be hired based on their abilities, not their skin color, race or gender, otherwise we're just discriminating against another group of people - those who are best qualified for the job in the first place.

All hard working, law-abiding citizens should be outraged by the article and the NYCLU. Rather than supporting New Yorkers, once again a group like NYCLU opts to take the side of illegals and non-citizens over, similar to the Obama Administration standing side-by-side with foreign countries to take a stand against one of our own states. What a travesty. Illegals are crushing the public school system. They cost American taxpayers over $29 BILLION dollars annually. Folks, that's your school tax dollars! If you want to know why your taxes keep going up, a major portion of that increase is to recoup squandered dollars that have to be spent on illegal alien students, and their parents, who are being rewarded with free education for doing the wrong things - entering this country illegally, and not following our laws. NYCLU, find some other cause that actually supports our state and nation, not burdens our citizens even more.

It's both a historical disaster and a moral crime that the Niskayuna Town Board ever allowed the Ingersoll Manor property to be raped and ruined. That corner property was a beautiful gateway into our community, and it's forever gone, largely due to the inept, faulty town leadership. The last thing our generally quiet community needed was more commercial sprawl on Balltown and State. Even more disturbing is that the St. James Square property, already commercially built, and in prime location, has sat, largely unused for years. As a town resident, I'm sickened almost daily when I drive by the remains of the Stanford Residence, and reminded that our town has tremendously failed us in an everlasting way. Ours is an example of how to take its community's faith and trust, and relinquish it to the garbage heap.