Excerpts:
“Behold the Obama Administration’s new public works plan. Sue cities for polluting waterways and then as part of a settlement require them to spend, er, “invest” billions in extraneous sewer improvements. The White House doesn’t even need legislation to pour this money down the drain.”
“The Justice Department and Environmental Protection Agency have taken enforcement actions against 25 cities over the last four years for allegedly violating the Clean Water Act, and there are another 772 on their list.”
“The EPA says this extraordinary intrusion on local sovereignty is justified because cities are discharging waste into waterways during heavy rains.”
“The U.S. Conference of Mayors says the EPA’s heavy-handed management can’t be justified by the supposed environmental or economic benefits.”
“Fossil fuel CEOs couldn’t have said it better.”
“Since cities don’t have that much spare change, they’ve been making improvements incrementally. But the EPA is demanding that they accelerate their work, which means they’ll have to issue bonds as well as raise residents’ water and sewer rates. David Berger, the Democratic mayor of Lima, Ohio—which has a median household income of $26,000—told Congress this summer that the EPA’s consent decree could raise the average resident’s $333 annual sewer bill by $539. Call the surcharge the Obama storm tax.”
“New York City’s deputy mayor for operations Cas Holloway is less charitable. The EPA, he wrote in “The Environmental Forum” journal this month, is “treating cities as it might have treated Standard Oil early last century.” The agency is “imposing billions of dollars of unfunded mandates without a clear scientific and public health basis for doing so.”
Perhaps by targeting cities the EPA is merely trying to show that it’s an equal opportunity harassing regulator. To adapt one of the President’s favorite phrases, everyone deserves a fair shakedown.”
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444799904578052673425236066.html
That’s interesting. EPA is concerned with the cleanliness of the Ohio River, but they have never been concerned with the 20 years of sewage backwashing into the homes of Evansville’s southside.
“The agency is ‘imposing billions of dollars of unfunded mandates without a clear scientific and public health basis for doing so.’â€
No scientific or public health basis for preventing untreated human excrement from being dumped wholesale into our waterways? Really? I suggest Mr. Holloway take a long, liesurely swim in Bee Slough after the next hard rain. Afterwards we can discuss the relative merits of EPA regulations concerning these matters. I’ll even pay for the first round of antivirals and antibiotic treatments he has to get. Follow up visits to specialists (i.e., parasitologists) will be out of his own pocket, I’m afraid…
The clean water act has been around since 1972 and in my opinion municipalities should be treated no differently than private industry where regulation and enforcement is concerned.
City executives, knowing how hard it is to successfully sue a municipality, have chosen to stave off any real attempts to use their tax revenue for upgraded sewer and storm-water projects, with the result that the costs of the needed upgrades have now reached the point that even increasing user fees by previously unheard of high percentages does not produce enough revenue to make the significant upgrades that are needed to meet compliance. In short: the local chamber of commerce was not pounding on the mayor’s door demanding sewer and storm-water projects. A new downtown arena, however, well that is a different story now, isn’t it?
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Cogent analysis, pressanykey.
Presiding over ongoing sewer maintenance projects will not get a politician on the news. Opening a new arena will. Maintaining exisiting roads won’t get a politician on the news. Building new roads will. Maintaining existing parks won’t get a politician on the news. Presiding over the opening of new parks will. The palms of the corporate masters and political power-brokers must be greased, regardless of the damage done to the citizens that politicians are sworn to serve.
I defy somebody to present a convincing argument that it is not in the best interest of our citizens to control untreated sewage runoff into the surface (or subsurface) waters of this nation.
Fewer celebrities, more public servants.
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It’s great to see two arch conservative CCO commenters cogently and correctly nailing it with regard to source, practicality, and politics of Clean Water Act regulations. Bravo and Press on!
Arch-conservative? Moi? Most of my friends and family are conviced that I’m an absolute foaming at the mouth liberal. If I’ve got everybody confused I must be doing something right… 🙂
Delta: You sound like an independent thinker to me. In my experience, most such people end up identifying themselves as ‘libertarian’.
If there is one guy making a lot of sense in a room full of silly people who all look at him suspiciously, you can pretty much bet he’s a libertarian. 😛
Well, then it’s nice to see a flaming liberal agreeing with a staunch conservative and having an avowed libertarian trying to recruit you!
I don’t have to recruit libertarians…it’s based in pure reason, and properly it is the natural state of man. Only those whose decisions are corrupted by the whims of emotion are NOT libertarians. Even “liberals” used to be libertarian.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_liberalism
Problems occur where “free will” meets civil responsibility in society.
Each “party” has their own method of dealing with the problems.
Everyone cherishes freedom. Would that the same could be said of civic responsibility.
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When wienie-boy and his toadies on the city council were demanding that we build a $130 million arena the conservative Republicans in this town demanded that we spend the $500 million necessary to clean up the sewers. Their reward for trying to be environmentally responsible was getting shot down by not only wienie-boy, but also the Courier and Depressed news-rag.
I am in no way amused or impressed about the controversy in today’s CCO. Hindsight is 20-20, and as usual the left wingnuts are trying to have this issue both ways: The sewer improvements for which they were opposed are exactly what they are demanding that we address immediately!
Hypocrites!
DJ…
It’s the age old saga of politicians being smarter than their constitutes, they always know more and make better decisions don’t they?
JMHO
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