Editor’s note: This commentary is by Kai Mikkel Førlie, founder of Water-Wise Vermont (formerly known as “Vermonters Against Toxic Sludge”) .
[V]ermont’s Clean Water Board, a recommending body comprised of “… representation from five state agency secretaries: Administration; Agriculture, Food and Markets; Commerce and Community Development; Natural Resources; and Transportation … [and] … four members of the public … [as] … appointed by the Governor,” is once again surveying the public for guidance on how and where to spend public money in the furtherance of tackling our shared water quality woes.
I’ll be honest — the above survey seems to me like yet another distraction. Why rely on the public for assigning totally arbitrary percentages of total funding to major categories of the problem when the sources of the problem are all well understood and the fixes to correct those problems are clear? Just spend the money to get the biggest bang for the buck.
Instead, if the public mistakenly thinks that legacy sewers and wastewater treatment plants are the main culprit (which flies in the face of the evidence), then the public will say, “spend most of the money on upgrading legacy wastewater treatment plants.” How is this a worthwhile exercise and outcome? Good grief.
Eliminate conventional dairy, enact sweeping changes to the way municipalities handle stormwater, place a moratorium on new development, educate the public on the need to adopt alternatives to how we handle our excreta (transition to dry urine diverting toilets), ban the use of synthetic pesticides/fungicides/herbicides, transition all agriculture to organic, require all industry to bring their wastewater discharges to drinking water quality, etc., etc. This isn’t rocket science and fixing the various sources of the problem doesn’t need the public’s (largely uninformed) input. Just fix the problems accordingly!
Said another way, I was insulted by the survey (and ones like it rolled out in the past). Just fix the problem!
On a related note, PFAS contamination of soil and groundwater is being discovered all over the state, the frequency and intensity of cyanobacteria blooms is worse than ever before, rivers run brown after every rainstorm (or all the time), applications of synthetic pesticides are at an all-time high and anyone who knows anything about water quality is loath to swim in major bodies of water or drink straight from the tap. Meanwhile, it’s pretty much business as usual in Montpelier with these issues garnering a moderate level of discussion but not producing very meaningful changes in policy or approaches.
If you care about the primacy of clean water, clean soil and clean air, please urge your elected officials to pressure state and federal regulators to move forward on tackling the sources of the problem rather than spending another dollar on Band-aiding symptoms. There is simply no time to lose.
