I guess a little sewage is "good enough?"

By Mark Forsythe The Kansas City Post I campaigned for city council talking about how we could fix our sewer problems. Even though everybody told me "you can't win with sewers" (and they were obviously right). I talked about the impending multi-billion dollar project. I talked about how unconscionable it was to dump raw sewage into Brush Creek. I talked about how it was our responsibility to clean up the mess that previous City Councils had left us. In 2007 we have the technology to stop behaving like 19th Century polluters. It will be expensive, it will be difficult, it will be unpopular, but sometimes the moral thing comes with those pesky little add-ons that politicians seeking re-election are loathe to address. I had done the research. I had studied Louisville, Milwaukee, even St. Louis among others. There are no silver bullets to be found. To fix Kansas City's inexcusable sewer problems is going to take some intestinal fortitude. It's going to take surcharges, and yes maybe even taxes. First and foremost it's going to take a self-imposed moratorium on new connects and a system of environmental credits that only allow new connects as older sections in violation are repaired. It's going to take the establishment of an informal economy that allows the barter and purchase of these credits between developers in the built-out areas south of the river and the greenfields of the Northland. It's going to take the leadership ability to stand up and take an unpopular position. To impose a tax. To risk not being re-elected. OR.... We do as our current Transportation and Infrastructure committee and recommend lowering the bar. We say dumping a little sewage is better than dumping a lot of sewage in our lakes and tributaries. We wring our hands and blame our upstream neighbors to the west and say things like "I don't know what we can legally do to our friends to the West" as Councilman Ed Ford stated. How about picking up the phone and giving them a call? Why the immediate adversarial tack instead of some diplomatic courtesy? Maybe our "friends to the West" are not the evil sewage barons our council is making them out to be? “Do we care if people swim in Brush Creek, or could it just be an amenity?" Councilperson Jan Marcason asked. Yes we care! Yes we care that we can travel through space, store the entire Encyclopedia Britannica on a silicon chip smaller than the head of a pin, type a message on a computer keyboard and have it instantaneously appear around the world, but we can't stop dumping our raw sewage into Brush Creek?! "At some point, it just doesn’t become cost effective to do that” said Councilperson Marcason last week. That's a very cavalier attitude for such an important topic. Light rail? Downtown development? Sports arenas? These are the kind of projects we can pull out our calculators and talk about the bottom line. We can say things like "good enough" or "what's the harm?" But the health and welfare of present and future Kansas Citians? When did our health and environment become "just an amenity?"