In yesterday’s Journal, guest columnist M. Robert Cooper says the City of Winston-Salem’s effort to improve waste management, though well-intentioned, is jeopardizing Salem Creek:
While our City-County Utility Commission has worked to improve the quality of our creeks and streams, it is obvious that good intentions and hard work are not adequate. In 1952, the Nut Island Sewage Treatment Plant went into operation to help clean up Boston Harbor. Presumably, it could treat all of the sewage produced in the southern half of the Boston metropolitan area and was hailed as the solution to the harbor’s waste-water problems. This state-of-the-art plant became a self-sufficient island, but every show of interest from corporate senior managers and the public was seen as an unwelcome intrusion. After 30 years of hard work and dedicated service to the city of Boston, the Nut Island team was disbanded – and left Boston Harbor no cleaner than it was 30 years earlier.
We have a group of hard-working, well intentioned individuals in Winston-Salem attempting to improve our water supply. And I am convinced that there have been improvements in the management of our pollution of Salem Creek. But as I look at the current denuding of Salem Creek and sequential heaps of slag along its banks, I am convinced that our hard-working and innovative staff may be headed in a “Nut Island” direction. To date, attempts of Salem Creek landowners to work with the City-County Utility Commission and the Soil and Water Conservation District on this problem have been unsuccessful.
Meanwhile, lost amidst last week’s semi-uproar over the missing Klan-Nazi files is the looming showdown between the Piedmont Triad Regional Water Authority and the cities of High Point and Greensboro over construction of the pump station for Randleman Lake. The N&R editorialized that PTRWA should accept the cities’ offer to build the station, in a supposedly more time- and cost-efficient manner, while PTRWA director John Kime was quoted in this week’s Rhino saying “that if High Point and Greensboro wanted to build the pump station and the PTRWA Board agreed to it, there was no reason it couldn’t be done that way.”
If that’s the case, then the board should sign off to at least show the public that they’re tryng to get this deal moving as quickly as possible, which hasn’t exactly been the case so far.
