HARRISBURG—We come back from spending several days at the farm to find this in the PO box:
Let’s have a little closer look at this, shall we?
Notice anything?
Deadline to submit, per the EPA or we’re going to be in BIG TROUBLE, was May 31.
Mail postmarked June 6.
I guarantee you it wasn’t in the mailbox on June 6. We cleared out the Harrisburg PO box (number 83, for those who are interested) on Tuesday, June 10, in order to get subscriptions out the next day (June 11) so we wouldn’t miss anybody…and it wasn’t there on the 10th.
Oh the joys of metered mail.
So Ang called the pleasant ladies up at the water department (252-6344) and asked what the deal was.
She was told that the water department “got those surveys out late.” So she asked, “We’re not going to get in BIG TROUBLE if we send them in late?” to which she was told no.
Okay, one concern down.
Then she asked about the questions on the “survey.”
Questions such as “Do you raise animals commercially? (hogs, cattle, chickens etc” “Do you operate any kind of business which uses water?” “Do you mix any type of chemicals?”
“We live IN TOWN,” she said. “People walk through our yard once a month to check the meter. You don’t know whether we’re RAISING CATTLE at our place??”
“We’re required by the EPA to have you complete the survey,” she was told.
“Why?” she asked. “Grants? These questions are ridiculous. Y’all know all the answers to these.”
“Well, they’re concerned with backwash in some places,” the water lady said. “Some people have a pool and keep a hose in it, and it could backwash.”
“That’s what t-valves are for,” Ang said.
Throughout the course of the conversation, over which I was cracking up (at least listening to her repartee, which was all I could hear) because Ang points out these ridiculous and egregious wastes of the public’s money with more deadpan than even I do, she didn’t learn anything except that Harrisburg “has to do this every two years.” “Or WHAT?” wasn’t a question she posed, so who knows? Except that we’ve been through this kind of crap with the other municipalities where we’ve lived, and THEY couldn’t put it into words why this needs done, either. Only that it “needs done.”
Whether you believe in the t-valve conspiracy or adhere to everything the EPA spews, the point of it is that it’s a waste of time, money and effort. If the water department is being run well, the EPA shouldn’t “check up” on them—and subsequently, the water users—every two years. And in the case of Harrisburg, fat lot of good it’s doing, anyway…there’s still that unaccounted-for $400,000 loss discovered in the 2012-13 audit…which no one seems interested in addressing to this day…probably because Eric Gregg’s no longer in the picture, ergo, problem solved.
So we’re going to fill out our survey. We’re going to fill it out with more questions than answers, just like we’ve done in all the other municipalities where we’ve had them issued to us. We hope the folks at the water department and EPA enjoy the responses. We don’t even drink the water in Harrisburg, anyway…we don’t make ice with it, we don’t make coffee with it…we bring water from the well at home, in copious numbers of gallon jugs each trip. That shit coming out of the tap in the ‘burg is NASTY. And it’s highly unlikely that any amount of survey-ing the populace is going to rectify THAT problem any time soon.