It’s one thing when a politician or bureaucrat stretches the facts a bit when they take a position on an issue. That seems to happens more and more in modern government.
But it’s another thing completely when a politician or bureaucrat flat-out makes up the existence of an issue, then buries the fact that there are no facts to back up the position, or any of the resulting decisions.
And yet that appears to be the case with the very recent release of the Ohio EPA’s water quality report on the Aurora Golf Club that led to the agency’s buyout of the property.
Jon Cassidy of Watchdog.org studied the recent “Biological and Water Quality Study” released by the Ohio EPA for the AGC, the facts that were supposed to support the reasons for the golf course purchase and why its closing was so important.
Problem is, the water quality in and around Aurora Golf Club was so good that the Ohio EPA couldn’t cite measurement statistics as a problem in their report.
From Cassidy’s story:
If you’re going to spend that much money on water cleanup, you should probably get a report showing it’s dirty in the first place. And there’s our first problem.
The Ohio EPA and the city of Aurora signed off on the $4.7 million plan to buy the Aurora Golf Club on Dec. 24. The corresponding water quality report is dated Dec. 31, and it wasn’t made public until this month.
It’s a bit like sentencing a man to hang a week before the jury finds him guilty. Wasn’t anyone worried the report would find no trace of pollution and embarrass them all?
So I picked up a copy and flipped to the page listing all the chemicals they found. Only it wasn’t there. The report was just a bunch of stuff about ecosystem health. That seemed strange for a “Biological and Water Quality Study” ““ you’d think there’d be something about water quality.
I checked every other water quality report the Ohio EPA published in 2012, and every last one had data on findings of metals, PCBs, volatile organic compounds and the like. We’re talking page after page of charts on the presence or absence of substances like dimethyl phthalate, hexachlorocyclopentadiene and nitrosodiphenylamine.
If you want support for a water project, just tell people it’ll get nitrosodiphenylamine out of their water ““ you don’t even have to tell “˜em what it is.
But the Aurora study is missing this entire section.
Read the entire OhioWatchdog.org story here. It’s mind-boggling.
The article by Cassidy begs another fairly obvious question: where is the Cleveland Plain Dealer reporting in all of this? How about the area news radio and TV stations? Last summer, I sent a letter to the PD editors and they tossed it on their blog. Then the PD did a tepid restatement of the Aurora Mayor’s position (print version only, not on Cleveland.com), and in December did a ‘Whatever happened with…’ story and followed that with a story about how the funding had been approved (as if that was ever in question given that the originator of the idea was deciding on the merit of the idea).
No hard questions from the PD, no followups with the Governor, no real investigation. Radio and TV? Non-existent. No wonder the taxpayer fleecing continues…
