EPA jerks Newark residents, but not Fiberglas

Regularly raising the cost of living in Newark is what appears to be unrestrained power of the EPA and the city water/sewer department to hike rates. Though we're scarcely into the latest fee hike to build a sewer system for rainwater, here comes Roger Loomis, utilities superintendent, with another "mandate" to jam us again, this time for "a new high-rate treatment plant to process the wastewater," as reported recently in the Advocate.

Nobody ever questions this, not any of it. Nor does anyone ask who controls this agency that controls the city's - and its citizens' - purse. Same song. Yes, Roger. Yes, EPA.

But there's a strange twist to the EPA's ability to put the brakes on pollutants going into our rivers. That has to do with Fiberglas Dump Hill, that ever-growing monstrosity in our back yard which is not just ugly but about which you don't need the expertise of Roger Loomis nor the EPA to know that thing is leeching bad stuff into that same river being so closely guarded from grains of poop.

Does the EPA not know about this? And if it doesn't, why doesn't Roger tell them?

While city officials so gladly lie down for EPA, they ought to ask if this Fiberglas thing is not someday going to require yet another increase in our cost of living to contain the run-off and/or perhaps take the whole ugly hill down to the flat field it once was and haul it away?

For a view from Griffith Road on 7/3/08, go look at a picture of it here.