ONE DRAGON DOWN, ONE MORE TO GO

CITIZENS AWAIT DOWNTOWN SHELTON AIR MONITOR

Submitted to Shelton Blog by Connie Simpson Mason County Progressive

Whew! ADAGE, LLC has seen the light and departed! They are a big, rich company with teams of accountants, economists, lawyers, engineers, public relations staff, and lobbyists. We are a small community with curious, interested, intelligent, active citizens…and we won the day!

Today is another day, and another problem is appearing to engage Mason County’s curious, interested, intelligent and active citizens…Simpson/Solomon. As with Adage, Simpson has lots of money, teams of professionals dedicated to earning their salaries and promotions. They tell us they are different than ADAGE. Their pollution won’t hurt us, hasn’t hurt us, but I know different. Shopping or doing errands downtown Shelton on a “bad air day” of inversions, plus active smoke stacks sends me home to get my inhaler.

I was shocked to learn that there is no air monitor in the bowl of Shelton’s downtown, despite the Simpson/Olympic Panel industrial complex in the bowl with our city proper. One thing the effort to understand air pollution and its health consequences has done is to alert people to the deficiencies of the ORCAA monitoring system. There must be a monitor placed near the source of pollution to know how much pollution is emitted—common sense, right?

The City Commission has been hasty in their judgment that increasing the amount of pollution affecting the downtown and residential areas on the hillsides would be harmless. It is incomprehensible that ORCAA doesn’t take the emissions from Olympic Panel, and Simpson into account when determining the amount of pollution they will allow the new polluter, Solomon.

It appears that Simpson, with those teams of professionals, just has to form a separate company for each finger of their hand and they can keep adding sources of pollution. That might not be so concerning if a monitor were recording what they are putting out in their emissions now.

There is another issue: how can the fuel for ADAGE be waste, as determined by our Prosecuting Attorney, Mr. Dorcy, and the fuel for Simpson/Solomon not be? Solomon must submit to an Environmental Impact Study, only then can the citizens of Shelton and their rural neighbors, feel confident that their health, the health of Oakland Bay, and the environment are not being exploited for corporate profits.

Finally, this community needs to come together with their vision for healthy, sustainable economic development. People retire here, people move here to raise families, and people from far away come to enjoy the natural beauty of our home. More pollution, more trucks in town, more smoke stacks will neither attract nor support those people.

Tell your city and county government what you want. And, when the scarce energy scare tactics are dropped on you, tell them there ARE sustainable energy sources, but the best gift you can give your fellow humans and the planet is to conserve.