June 18, 2004

To: members of the environmental improvement commission

Dear friends,

In a meeting today (June 18) with Mayor Starnes and city manager Tony Cox, I was informed that the city's Environmental Improvement Commission has  been recommended for elimination in a fiscal year-end restructuring of city commissions.

Apparently there are some 50 commissions (?) and of them 3 have been recommended for elimination. ( Im not sure which others -- it will be in the newspapers.)  Five more are to be greatly reorganized.

The city council vote to reorganize the commissions will take place June 28.  This of course is the last meeting of the old city council and does not give the new city council members a chance to weigh in on the issues.

I offered to resign in order to have others appointed to the commission, with the idea that perhaps I had not been effective, but they said the issue was structural not personal and that they were not dissatisfied with the commissions performance or any person's service.  (They also thanked me for getting out that recent letter supporting the New River Resource Authority's recycling initiatives, by the way.).

The reason given for eliminating the EIC is, as you might expect, that it is inefficient and redundant.  But as I talked with the mayor and the city manager, it was clear that the advocacy positions I have taken on various issues, particularly the foundry's air and solid waste problems, are not seen as helpful to the city when they come from inside city government.

For example, it has been clear that state DEQ members have not been truthful about the emissions coming from the foundry.  But is it helpful to have someone inside a city commission say that the state has been protecting industry at the expense of public health?  I would have said yes, but there are plenty of people who say no.  The mayor and the city manager are among them.

Obviously, the EIC serves at the request of the city council, which can expand, contract or eliminate its mission, and I would not want to be anything but gracious and understanding of this very basic fact of civic life.

Still, I continue to have a good many concerns about the city's environmental problems.  The mayor and the city manager listened patiently as I respectfully presented them with a long list of issues.  These included the railroad ties, the foundry air and solid waste issues, the unregulated trash dumping near Glencoe and other areas, the debris in the river, the raw sewage problem, and of course the many problems associated with recycling at 17th street, the university and the high school.

The mayor and the city manager understood each of these concerns quite well.  They wanted to reassure me that the environmental problems of the city are being dealt with to the extent feasible, but frankly, there were no specifics and I did not leave feeling terribly reassured.  Still, that was not the purpose of the meeting, we're all aware of the city's  constraints,  and I hope we'll all keep watching this process in the future.

I would like to hear your reaction to all this, but here are some of mine:

First, it was gracious of the mayor and city manager to invite me to discuss the situation with them. They could have simply informed us in a letter.

Secondly, the city's environmental problems are far larger and far more serious than anything this commission is structured to deal with.  If we had the same kind of powers as, say, the planning or recreation commissions, there might have been some progress. ( I would add with no false modesty that this would have required a chair more adept at local politics. )

Third, yes, this is a setback, but one that I think we should concede gracefully, and in so doing, take the opportunity to strongly remind the city council that there are grave environmental problems that remain.

We cannot shirk from our responsibility to public health on the mere chance (or as we have recently seen in the Intermet pullout, the self-evident fiction) that heavy industry cannot stand the financial burden of simple environmental regulation.

Sometimes we need to take a step back in order to go forward.  The city needs environmental advocacy, and I hope that each of us can think about joining an existing environmental group (Friends of the River, the Sierra Club, etc) or possibly creating a new one for Radford.

In conclusion, let me thank you for your service to the city and for electing me to chair the commission.

It has been a great and rare privilege to serve with all of you. Despite the occasional disagreement, I come away from this with lifelong friends and many warm memories.

Sincerely,

Bill Kovarik
wkovarik@environmentalhistory.org