To the Editors:
The Village website contains an April letter from Ohio EPA that says, "We understand that the Village plans to have a public meeting soon to discuss these options [septic enforcement v. centralized sewer] with their residents and are encouraged by these developments."
Maybe we blinked, because it looks like the "public meeting" the EPA expected has come and gone.
In their April meeting, Council`s Wastewater Committee (Weygandt, Kaplan and Krusinski) presented their assessment of the septic/sewer pros and cons in a PowerPoint they had developed. They agreed to invite public comment on their work for 30 days. They courteously did so in May`s edition of Your Community News, but closed the comment period just after the YCN was delivered. By the time they adopted their meeting minutes a few days later, the deadline they`d included in those minutes had already passed.
So -- their Final PowerPoint is now on the Village website -- along with another "Final PowerPoint 2" containing only Committee additions. Odd, since they never discussed those additions in any meeting thereafter.
But odder still, this additionally final, final document includes nothing about the risks of development — the risks that both the EPA and the Health Dept suggested we discuss as a community when they addressed the village publicly in May of 2018. Instead of a public discussion about development, Council authorized a meeting with the County`s sewer department at its last meeting, with this final final claim of our community`s thinking in hand.
Until the past two months` mockery of public input, I`d wanted to take no position on sanitation enforcement v. centralized sewer, hoping to avoid the angst that even asking for open data and deliberations seems to create. But this kind of backdoor decision-making is a risk to us all. If we can`t acknowledge all of the disadvantages of centralized sewer, how can Planning effectively mitigate against them? And If we can`t deliberate our decisions openly, how can we expect to defend them against the kind of development that even sewer proponents will abhor?
| Kathy Bertsch |