I have always had a copy of the final report of the Water and Sewer EA from 2001 on my desk and I know what is in it. There is nothing that supports any of Waugh's assumptions. They are not even assumptions just rhetorical scare tactics that were common during the first two years of Noble's term to try and justify the $452,000 that was spent on Powerbudd. I have seen the invoices and they make for some wild reading. Do you know lawyers bill for every minute spent on the phone? Details of the phone conversations are in the invoices.

I have outlined that proper septic systems are not leaking on to the beach in a discussion elsewhere. (An inspection program will force correction of any out of compliance set ups.) see http://sbp.teledyn.com/node/642#comment-823
Also I have discussed the limnology of beachwater elsewhere and stated the EA supports the conclusion that the nutrient load from the Sauble River is 90% of the beach load which results in the algae bloom we are seeing in summer months which gives a green tinge to the water on calm days. We don't need to add to this by dumping treated wastewater and more nutrients into the river from a sewage treatment plant.

I doubt that Dick Waugh wrote most of this letter as it contains too many of the catch phrases used to try and scare people these last three years.

Noble's radio ads on Beach 98 Radio are an outright lie. There is no application made to the Canada Strategic Infrastructure Fund and funds are not going to be awarded. As such Beach 98 is guilty of participating in this lie and it makes no sense to me that they would shoot themselves in the foot like that. It is possible they even donated the radio spots to Noble and this would make them twice guilty of supporting the big lie if true. All of this, including Waugh's editorial has been carefully orchestrated to try and swing a few votes Noble's way.

It is a fools strategy since Carl Noble and John Close are competing for the same votes from a limited pool. One takes from the other.

Not even Jaymor can help. The only strategy that would have had a chance was for Noble to drop out and support Close. I wish I could have heard that discussion. It is way too late in the game for an end run from Waugh or any of the other suspects. Things have changed and I hope the die is now set for another kind of change. People are smarter now and more knowledgeable then they were in 2003.

Waugh mentions Dan Kerr's statements. Neither Dan nor Thom Noble are fit to hold office. Since they tried to get a sitting council to break their oath of office by breaking a court order meant to protect all the citizens neither of these two individuals could understand or honour the oath of office that our elected officials have to take before they assume their duties. Dick Waugh should well understand this oath. He could have written an editorial on something he is actually an expert on instead of wasting his time on that which he knows nothing about.

It is unfortunate that the Sun Times printed this as most of the community has moved on. Water under the bridge. Down the river. Out into the lake.

Interesting. Interesting that a paper should print this when it is such obvious rhetoric bent only on fueling discord. "Some number" is not a number. Jacob's Number is a number, so is Avogadro's Number, but "Some number" is rhetoric. One? Two? Twenty-Two? Those are all numbers, and this letter of Waugh's appears to state only that the deadly effluence is so vitally dangerous to the Public Good that the exact number didn't even stick in the author's head.

Like the old saw of the cannibals eating a clown, one has to ask, "Does this taste funny to you?"

I'm not saying his claim is false, I don't have that data and don't pretend to know the state of every septic on or near the beach. I only know that my septic is kept in good working order, and I am only really saying here again why I no longer listen to CFOS or subscribe to any media that spouts misleading language bent only on dividing our community. Want to be helpful and work together as good neighbours should? Then don't exploit fear for political gain, point a finger at those specific septic systems that are putting lives in danger and then let's get together and fix them.

It is that simple.

Fix them. Fix them all. Fix them and send the resident to Florida for three months while we hire first-rate septic people to put in a gold-lined tank, and I will wager we will still be no where near a final bill of $80,000,000. I don't have any figures, but I will wager there is some number of dollars that when applied to some number of poison cesspools will still weigh in at less than $80,000,000. But that is just a guess.

What is not a guess is what was proposed back in that original paper that's being cited above: a decentralized, local, distributed approach, a modern approach like what I have outlined here before in several articles that I'm sure Bub will be quick to link :), solutions which could weigh less than $10k per site, and could be deployed today, would create local industry, and which would turn us from the victim of largescale centralized monopoly controls into a vanguard of a new and greener age. Not surprisingly, that's the same distributed small-scale solution which I heard Gwen espousing, also quoted elsewhere here on the SBP, although I think she is still not thinking wild and free enough to make that leap out of old-school treatment into new-school waste water management. What was it I said? Oh, I remember. Waste water is not a problem, it is an opportunity, it is our pennies from heaven solution.

And speaking of ostriches, who I'm told do the head trick because that is where their food is, let us also keep firmly in mind that Walkerton was not caused by unmaintained septics or by local block-level Living Machines, but by simple human foibles and frailty combined with a centralized monopoly control paradigm. That's important. One bad apple, there goes the whole bunch baby.

Back at the mainstream media and Waugh's assertions, I would implore you, since it is so very obviously very important, pertinent and of highest priority, to beg of him, to have him speak here where we can see him, and please, for the love of the children and all that is decent, post the addresses of those failing septics so we can drag them into the light of day and fix them pronto because to soothe any itch, you first have to know where scratch.

In today's Sun Times John is musing about a post mortem. I think we better get the election over with before the Monday morning quarterback routine.

After that we who are forward looking will want to move on. Looking in the rearview mirror will just bog us all down again.

John was out of the gate early announcing his candidacy in Jan. 2006. By Feb he was being quoted in a leading Sun Times article on his platform. In the Sun Times article Close says, “When it comes to contentious issues such as sewer and water the community should be able to have their say.”

Well well. Guess what became the biggest issue?

But now it looks like John has changed his thinking. Here is today's leading thought: the community should have their say if we can successfully feed the right information down their throats. If they get hold of information that does not agree with our point of view and it goes horribly wrong at the ballot box then we need to do a post mortem and do an exhaustive analysis of all that other information.

It is all so typical of Close.

Instead of cutting spending and dropping the mill rate to reduce taxes while delivering basic services and doing it well, John Close talks of a two tier tax system. The fog is just a little thick. If some group of waterfront properties pays less all the rest have to pay more. There you go. It won't sell in this Town.

After the election do a post mortem on that.