I have read the plans of the Mayo Clinic to desert Albert Lea to not even leave us poor rural hicks with a place to have our children born here! What young family is going to want to move here with their children can’t even be born here!

After Mayo strong-armed Minnesota taxpayers and threatened to leave, I believe they extorted taxpayer money to expand the Rochester clinic. And now they plan to desert the outlying rural communities so they can look down their noses smugly at the lower, rural people who will have no local hospital!

For over 100 years Naeve  Hospital Mayo Clinic has served our community. Now they are going to leave. I don’t believe that they won’t.

I think they are a bully and treat employee and the rural towns as lesser people from their gilded ivory towers in Rochester.

I wonder what the Mayo brothers would think of their clinic today abandoning Albert Lea and rural Minnesota! I think they would be appalled!

Austin has Hormel and the research center, and Mayo is playing hand-in-hand with them.

Albert Lea will never be able to attract business and people without a hospital, and the long-term economic development of Albert Lea and Freeborn County will suffer and make us a second-class town.

I agree with Paul Overgaard, a man I have always respected from his days as a state legislator, that the citizens of Albert Lea and Freeborn County have been played and lied to by Mayo, and all the goodwill over the last 100 years is gone!

All the good people who have worked at the hospital for 100 years would be shocked what Mayo has done to our town! Our schools will decline also as fewer young couples would want to live here with no hospital or place to have their children born!

It’s a shame, and it’s a travesty!

John Perschbacher

Alden