Rialto Needs Country's Help With Perchlorate
Joe Sampson & Ed Scott, Guest Columnist
As the two City Council members of Rialto's perchlorate subcommittee, we applaud the Daily Bulletin for its Sept. 6 editorial titled "Rialto, county need to tackle real problems."
The editorial emphasized the overwhelmingly serious nature of the perchlorate contamination problem and the health threat it poses.
Furthermore, the estimated $200 million cost of cleanup and water treatment is well beyond the resources available to Rialto. That is why Rialto sued the suspected polluters of the water basin, including San Bernardino County and the U.S. Department of Defense.
The City Council strongly believes that the companies and agencies that polluted the basin should pay for the cleanup, not the innocent citizens of Rialto. The council also believes that it is unlikely that these polluting corporations will "voluntarily" spend hundreds of millions of dollars to do so.
In a related guest column by Supervisor Josie Gonzales, the supervisor criticized Rialto for suing 40 corporations, the Department of Defense and the County of San Bernardino for their part in containing the water. The supervisor stated Rialto and the county should work to submit join grant applications for federal funding for groundwater cleanup.
For example, the supervisor suggested a program similar to the one used for groundwater cleanup in the Santa Ana River watershed and the County of Santa Clara.
If Rialto were a beneficiary of a similar $25 million program, when divided among the cities and water agencies within the watershed area, the $5 million possibly allocated to Rialto would provide only a small fraction of the money necessary to address Rialto's $200 million problem. Federal grants in the $5 million-$10 million range are good because they can provide a few wellhead water treatment systems – but they are not sufficient to eliminate the cause of the pollution and also provide needed water treatment.
The supervisor points to a Ground Water Cleanup white paper which calls for an equal division of funding between several water agencies. That is like a doctor seeing three patients, and giving each patient $10,000 to cure their illnesses, but knowing that one patient has a sore throat, the second a broken leg, and the third has cancer and needs ongoing care.
Rialto is the patient with cancer. Rialto needs $200 million to clean up a contaminated site within its city limits. The site is one of the most serious perchlorate contamination problems in the nation. If Rialto were to agree to the supervisor's plan to divide up inadequately funded federal grants among numerous agencies, the city would condemn its citizens to a future of having no viable solution to its massive problem.
Instead of relying entirely on federal grants, the Rialto City Council made the considered judgment that only a lawsuit against the 40 suspected corporate and government polluters could provide the funds needed to solve the problem. The lawsuit shifts the financial burden of cleanup and remediation from the city to the polluters, where it belongs.
Why sue the county? The Santa Ana Regional Water Quality Control Board found that the county-owned Mid Valley Sanitary Landfill was one of the sources of pollution. The Regional Board issued a cleanup and abatement order to the county to provide replacement water to Rialto.
The county has complied with these orders, not because the county is being "proactive" or a "responsible neighbor." It has complied with the orders because it is legally obligated to do so.
Why aren't the county and Rialto working to settle the dispute between Rialto and the county? That's what Rialto wants to do. In fact, the parties had a tentative agreement to settle their claims with Supervisors Postmus and Gonzales.
Unfortunately the Board of Supervisors never ratified the agreement. Supervisor Gonzales' chief of staff, Bob Page, was quoted in the Daily Bulletin on Aug. 7 as saying, "The county's insurance company has rejected the deal saying it's impossible for the county to step out of the suit without a settlement involving all the parties."
In addition to avoiding a settlement, the county is actively working against Rialto. The county's attorneys, Mr. Joel S. Moskowitz and Mr. Robert L. Jocks, have become leaders in the polluters' defense efforts. They have filed numerous motions in court and other documents on behalf of the fireworks and munitions manufactures that operated on the site.
These are the very corporations that have polluted Rialto's water and are now being aided by San Bernardino County's attorneys at the taxpayers' expense. The corporate defendants in the Rialto litigation are worth billions of dollars, and can ably defend themselves. Why does the county feel called upon to defend these polluters and attack Rialto in the process?
When Supervisor Gonzales tells us in the newspaper that she wants to work cooperatively and then unleashes her attorneys in court to attack Rialto and defend the polluters, we have a hard time believing her. The Daily Bulletin in its recent editorial stated, "The city has made scant progress" in its lawsuit. We believe the county's aggressive defense of the polluters in court is greatly responsible for that lack of progress.
We believe it is long past time to begin working together. The first step is for Supervisor Gonzales and the county Board of Supervisors to ratify the tentative agreement, which was negotiated in August 2005. The second step is for the county to join Rialto in its suit against the polluting corporations, and recognize that the county's current litigation strategy hurts all citizens of San Bernardino County, especially those in the 5th District. The goal of the lawsuit shouldn't be only for Rialto to prevail; the county should seek recovery of its costs as well.
A federal lawsuit seeking to shift the financial burden of a thorough water treatment program to the responsible parties is the only way Rialto citizens will continue to be provided with clean water, now and in the future. If Rialto prevails in court against the polluters, the monetary judgment will be used to remediate Rialto's supply once and for all.
The citizens and taxpayers expect and deserve that the elected officials will work together to solve this monumental problem. Only through litigation can Rialto obtain the funds needed to completely rid itself of the contamination.
Smaller water treatment grants are helpful, but they don't address the fundamental problem of cleaning up the cause of pollution. Solving the larger problem is where we need the supervisor's help.
– Joe Sampson is Rialto's mayor pro tem and Ed Scott is a Rialto City Council member. They are on the
Rialto Subcommittee on Perchlorate.
BS Ranch Perspective:
I don't know about you all, but the authors of this document, the so called Guest Columnist's that wrote this. I am not all that sure can be trusted! After all they are the same ones that came out and said that we want a new Division of Law Enforcement to take care of the city's needs for Law Enforcement. The law enforcement that they had selected was statistically proven to be worse then the one that they were replacing, yet they felt that public Safety didn't matter in this case as long as it appeared to cost less, that was more important to them at that time.
So, this comes up, another public Health crisis, and it makes you wonder are they on the side of the public health or the all mighty dollar, the best treatment for the public health or the all mighty budget dollar, and how far it can take them.
What it appears is that they want to take care of the public, but they want someone else to pay for the damages. I was mistaken earlier because I thought that they were not even caring for the public health and allowing the Perchlorate to run free in the pipes of the city, without doing anything about it, but come to find out that they had started to filter it out they just started to take tabs on how much money it costs so that they could start this law suit and sue the county, so it makes you really wonder. about how they are taking care of the public health.
My feelings were that everyone ultimately had to take care of their own water treatment plants and I guess I am wrong, because what the City of Rialto Water Department is saying is that the County is the ones that should be paying for the filtering of the Removal of a contaminant that resides in the soil under the city of Rialto!!
I don't know what the Right answer is at this point when it comes to the law suit, I feel that every Water Department should take care of their own Customer's in a way to make the water safe for all to drink. If Perchlorate needs to be removed then it should be up to the water department that pumped the water out of the ground, unless the county somehow is at fault, Directly, for the Perchlorate getting into the water to contaminate it. If that is the case the follow through with the law suit, and get what you can!! However, if it is not that, and it is due to the business that resides in Rialto City, Namely the Fireworks plant, then they should pay for some of the removal of the Perchlorate from the water.
Well, My ultimate thing about this is I don't know about the author of the story, and how true the stuff that they are writing about, because there has been a whole gob of half truths told in the Police Department/Sheriff Department Contract Issue! Even though that is a dead Issue, there is a lot that is left to be learned from it! After all a skunk may be able to loose the smell, but they cannot change the strips!!
BSRanch
No comments:
Post a Comment