Letters to the editor 2/15/24

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OTHER PRIORITIES

Just in time for the city’s budget hearing, Prairie Rivers Network has published Reconsidering Hunter Lake, a public brochure highlighting significant flaws in the claimed need for Hunter Lake. CWLP officials have outlined a plan for a two-year, 74% water rate hike to pay for decades of neglected water infrastructure, but its plan only begins to touch the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

For example, only about 20% of needed dredging of Lake Springfield will be undertaken. Only about 7.7 miles of leaking, aging water mains will be replaced, ensuring that CWLP’s “unaccounted for” losses of 20-25% of treated water will continue indefinitely, since there are 200 miles of mains near or past the end of their useful life. Only 350-500 lead pipe service lines will be replaced each year, out of 11,000, guaranteeing years of adverse health effects. 

Worse, the rate increases will not fund dredging the main body of Lake Springfield to prevent cyanotoxin outbreaks, where 90 years of phosphorus-laden sediment has accumulated, leading to significant taste and odor problems in the water supply. The increases do not even pay for the $30 million expense of treating the taste and odor problems, or the expensive watershed improvements  (estimated at over $100 million) to keep sediment and phosphorus out of Lake Springfield once dredging is done. The increases also do not address looming costs of replacing the failing, 120-year-old-plus combined sewer system, estimated by the former mayor at over $100 million.

Those are all infrastructure improvements that the city desperately needs. These rate increases do not include one other project pushed by CWLP for which there is no demonstrated need: Hunter Lake, with its bloated price tag and its destructive environmental impacts. Even if the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and then the Illinois EPA issue permits, it will add immense increases to water rates already stressed by long-delayed infrastructure needs.

Don Davis
Coalition of Concerned Citizens

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UNFAIR TO POSTAL WORKERS

Thank you to all who carried and delivered mail this holiday season (“Postal problems, Dec. 14). In addition to the large, unprecedented volume of mail, what is most crippling is an obsolete condition in the current contract. New hires are on totally temporary status – meaning they have no guarantee of a job and can be dismissed. Even after an exemplary probation period, a new carrier has no guaranteed career, no pension and no benefits. The starting salary is poor for today’s economy, equal to or less than some fast-food services.

Contract negotiation began in February for a new contract that will likely improve that, and though it’s slow or stalled, will possibly go to arbitration. Meanwhile, where is the incentive to stay or do a good job?

In the rushed season, regular carriers and new hires have been working 10 to 11 hours a day, six to seven days a week, with continual, excessive overtime. That means working after dark, which is more difficult and less safe.

Thank you to all the new – as yet not career-status – carriers for staying with it and trying to learn and become a dedicated professional in this difficult time. Thank you to the regular carriers who have maintained their commitment to serve in a particularly overburdened environment.

Roz Stein
Former letter carrier
Springfield

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DOUBLE STANDARD

The author of a letter in the Jan. 11 issue believes that the need for windmills trumps their detriment to the “beautiful country” where they are placed. I wonder if that writer would support constructing several windmills in Washington Park and Pasfield Park?

Years ago, Al Gore was flying about the country in a chartered jet preaching that common people should all give up our automobiles and ride the bus. Most of the fossil-fuel-avoiding endeavors he recommended – which we can and should adopt – have some offsetting financial and energy costs, such as the additional electric energy and greatly enlarged transmission and distribution facilities to deliver it as more electric cars are sold.

One of the very few things we could all do, which has virtually no offsetting financial or environmental costs, is to dry our laundry on outdoor clotheslines. After Gore delivered his speech in the liberal San Francisco area, one citizen had a clothesline built in her backyard. Her neighbors and HOA almost lynched her – wealthy, sophisticated Californians cannot have clotheslines in our gated neighborhoods like hick farmers in Iowa or hillbillies in West Virginia – a literal “not in my backyard” response.

I somehow suspect the windmill advocate letter writer similarly envisions all of these windmills being out in the country, rather than in Washington Park or Pasfield park, or atop the building in which she lives.

Clark Germann
Chatham

This article appears in The Wedding Issue 2024.