YOYO plan about only way out for ratepayers

ToThe Eagle:

A bit of this week's political activity is devoted to trying to get the area's escalating utility rates under control. Here in Cathlamet, a town hall meeting is scheduled to try to sort out sewer fees, and next door in Longview a couple of nice folks are on the ballot for PUD Commissioner to try to end bickering and gridlock in that organization. That town's water supply, administered by the city council, is also out of control both financially and chemically, but no one figured out a way to get it on the ballot. Just as well, because all these efforts are likely to be in vain. In all cases, technical incompetence has trumped politics.

As pointed out by a number of citizens, Longview well water was pronounced unusable by town officials in 1923. Nonetheless the money's been spent on the Mint Farm well system, and more money will be required to either clean it up or come back to river water. Our local water supply for Cathlamet and Puget Island was the subject of hot political debate last year. Our town council kicked the political can down the road a decade or so by resolving to cut off Puget Island's water, and the PUD has started a leisurely but expensive investigation to determine what kind of conventional system to set up.

Our local sewer problems are also carved in stone. We have built a seven-plus million buck sewer plant on a mountainside which requires the shtuff to be pumped uphill (big electric bill) where it is only partially processed and must then be hauled to some other county and dumped, since we have prohibited such dumping here. All these costs, both accrued and ongoing, can't be reduced and must somehow be divided amongst this small group of ratepayers, so the town hall will probably devolve into pitting commercial versus homeowner and multi hookups against single hookups.

Solutions to all of these problems were suggested before the politicians headed off into terra incognita. Refurbishing the sewer lagoon, repairing existing septic systems and encouraging new ones, and exploring alternatives such as incinerating toilets and catchment water systems. Perhaps incompetence is too strong a term, since most of these solutions require supporting individual homeowners installing stand-alone and neighborhood systems, which doesn't fit the template of the usual centralized command and control system these people are used to, but it certainly wouldn't hurt if our politicians tried a little thinking outside the box now and then.

About the only way out for suffering rate payers is to build your own systems and check out of the public ones. That's called the YOYO plan: You're on your own.

Howard Brawn

Puget Island