Wellfleet town meeting: doing the after math [May 2009 / CCT]

OK, on the premise that Wellfleet, as a canary in the coal mine of contemporary regulatory America, is of interest elsewhere (a parochial premise, I know): our recent town meeting. Much of the first night consisted of rubber -stamping budget items which in most cases most citizens didn’t know enough about to either approve or disapprove with much enthusiasm. For a while there it seemed like democracy in Wellfleet was dying of boredom.

Things did perk up toward the end of the evening when we voted money for a pre-school program and bylaws to guide in the creation of wind turbines in a way which eliminates pretty much all the objections that have plagued the Nantucket Sound Cape Wind proposal.

The real action came the second night: the vote to expand the public water system. Although the issue seemed never in doubt, lively debate dug at the issues: do we really have, except for a few known troubled buildings downtown, a water quality problem? Just what percentage of all town residences have a water problem? Does the individual well-and-Title 5 septic system work or not? Shouldn’t we address septic problems first? For known troubled downtown sites have we really considered the cost advantages of smaller solutions? All good logical questions.

One citizen gave an enlightening and diverting dissertation on the folly of spending 5.6 million dollars for pristine water most of which will be used to flush human waste back into the water supply.

But a selectman got up and explained that all this talk about the logic of town water was beside the point. It’s not a water issue, he said, it’s a regulatory issue. Debate the actual need of the bigger system all you want, but the real reason we have to vote in the larger system, the state DEP will make us do it, as last time, whether it makes sense or not. (Several years ago with the DEP gun at our heads, we voted in a minimal system to provide water to certain public buildings).

It turns out that the DEP simply defines the individual well system as substandard even when it works fine (as with the well that currently serves our elementary school and fire station). End of story. You could present to the DEP solutions for all the trouble spots in town–filtration systems, engineered septic systems, whatever. And they would still say: a public water system is the only solution we’ll recognize.

No doubt much about this town would be regarded as substandard if the great world started scrutinizing us.

You had the feeling from the tone of the meeting that many left Tuesday night in a triumphant mood: finally, decent water for our town. About time. But for others, it was a sad night in which basically we were forced to to spend 5.6 million dollars—and endanger a logic, a way some regard as vital to this town—to solve a largely nonexistent problem. Or, as that reluctant and cynical selectman would put it, our DEP problem.

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Sunday was Pete Seeger’s 90th birthday. I’ve waited long enough to say thank you to him. He’s one of those people who work their way into the very texture of life so that it’s hard to imagine life without them. Pete Seeger has long been on my short list of great Americans whom it seems it took exactly this country to turn out, which Europe would never have produced in a 1000 years, and who, in turn, help to define that term, great American. Thanks Pete, for the banjo pickin, for the Weavers, for layin it on the line, standing up to the ACLU, for all the inspirational songs. Happy 90th . And congratulations on a great life.

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