Calculating the costs to the resources such as clean air or clean water are not part of Prince George's County's simple arithmetic. In fact the now 19 million dollars of proposed over runs suggest that the county is incapable of doing any calculation whether environmental or budgetary. The bill to address the growing costs of the ill-conceived water transfer station was heard last week – CB-12-2010 An Act concerning the issuance and sale of General Obligation Bonds to finance the Waste Transfer Station capital project in an amount not to exceed Nineteen Million Six Hundred Seventy-Five Thousand Dollars ($19,675,000). The Patuxent Riverkeeper, Fred Tutman, told me that "[t]he irony is that there may be some broad truth to the idea that onerous uses are not fairly distributed in the County, but heaping a fresh industrial trash venture on top of a region related to the drinking water supply and where the County has already spent millions and decades preserving open space is pretty silly."
How did the citizens of Prince George's County get into this mess? First it seemsthat our county leaders have decided that no one will need needs clean water or clean air in the future or that it will magically arrive from somewhere free of charge; that there is no value in green space that can not be superseded by the immediate economic gain of a few continues to bedevil planning. Then there are historic issues that color the conversation, "The familiar shell game of taking noxious uses and sticking them on the community that lacks power du jour, or that is the "odd man" out is a protocol from a different era. It has outlived is usefulness. Surely we know that any neighborhood that hosts such uses takes a black eye? This is especially true in this latest instance when the selected site is an especially bad and unacceptable site for this purpose." Hiding a bad site choice under the very valid concerns of historic abuse of minority and economically challenged neighborhoods is symptomatic of our current random development process. Our leaders expect to be able to create a quality county by legislating planning and development one small parcel at a time with no concern as to how the pieces fit together, and much like as in Russia they do this by creating isolated community interests divided against one another inside a larger plan that benefits a few today and costs everyone tomorrow.
I am going to let the Patuxent Riverkeeper, Mr. Tutman, eloquently sum things up: "… a stronger truth is we don't want it [the Waste Transfer Station] adjacent to a nature preserve or draining into Maryland's deepest and longest intrastate river. The simple "truth" that these uses have to go somewhere does not soften the bitter blow that wherever they go produces blight and injustice. Whether in Russia or Prince George's we need to get wise that these pitiful choices are not solutions at all. Such measures only defer real solutions. All over this land, the landfills, dumps, incinerators, rubble fills, feed lots and other projects that bring waste, blight, a legacy of smell, ugliness and yes, social stigma to any host neighborhood is the product of expedient politics. We spoil land and place forever, stigmatize communities and conduct business as usual. Someone has to suffer? It has to go somewhere? It was your turn? Pretty hollow stuff. The only thing more certain than our need for convenient places to dump our trash is our penchant for bad politics. How sad, how bad, how wrong."
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