One board will do

THUMBS UP: The New Ulm Board of Zoning Adjustment voted this week to recommend its own dissolution, and handing off its duties to the New Ulm Planning Commission. The New Ulm City Council will take up the question at its next meeting.

We think move makes sense. For years, the Board of Zoning Adjustment and the Planning Commission have met on the last Thursday of each month, meeting a half an hour apart. The Zoning Board would adjourn, and the members would sit and wait for the five or ten minutes before the start of the Planning Commission meeting because most of them were also on the commission. Both boards handled basically the same issues — dealing with city zoning questions and variance requests.

We think one Planning Commission will be able to do the job of both boards more efficiently.

The JFK files

THUMBS UP: A vast number of documents related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy were released this week, almost 54 years after the assassination. We applaud the move, and hope it will settle questions raised by conspiracy theorists who have been hard at it since that tragic weekend in Dallas, and especially since the Warren Commission concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin.

That tragic weekend in Dallas changed forever the spirit of the American people, and the additional information will, we hope, finally put the questions to rest.