By Joel Thurtell
I’ve got to hand it to Friends of the Rouge and the Detroit/Wayne County Port Authority.
When it comes to finding ways to waste money on high-gloss publicity stunts while ignoring the need for ongoing evaluation and remediation of the hugely-polluted Rouge River, they surely deserve some kind of prize.
But wait a minute.
They just took the prize — a $150,000 grant from the port authority — disbursing federal grant money — to haul the carcasses of dead boats away from Fordson Island.
That’s a significant amount of money — it would pay for almost two years of measuring dissolved oxygen and temperature levels in the unswimmable and mostly unfishable Rouge River.
But two years ago, the powers-that-be who control environmental policy in Detroit and Wayne County said they couldn’t afford the roughly $91,000-a-year it costs to test whether there’s enough oxygen in the Rouge to support life. For lack of money, those measurements ended two years ago.
Now they can afford to haul junk boats out of the Rouge.
A Friends of the Rouge official once told me there’s no reason to keep measuring the Rouge because we already know it’s bad and not getting better.
It was an amazing statement, coming from a person who likes to present Friends of the Rouge as an organization that fosters scientific inquiry about the Rouge.
On the other hand, if you’ve been promising for decades to make the Rouge “swimmable,” and the data show it’s not safe for human contact nearly 100 percent of the time, you might just want to trash the collection of numbers that expose your efforts as a waste.
How does yanking a bunch of rotting hulls improve water quality in the Rouge?
It doesn’t.
But it sure gives officials $150,000 of opportunities to grind out self-adulatory press releases that generate the photo ops that obscure the futility of the alleged cleanup effort.
Do you think these self-proclaimed “friends” are some kind of watchdog group?
Think again. Look at who serves on their board of directors: Industrialists and government contractors.
Here’s a little test: Try asking FOTR for documents related to their environmental efforts on the Rouge.
I did. What I got back was a denial on the grounds that Friends of the Rouge is a private, nonprofit organization and not subject to disclosure.
Because they are a nonprofit, they are not accountable to the public — despite their use of public money.
Let me ask this: What harm are those Fordson boats doing?
It is not the old wrecks that made the Rouge unswimmable and unfishable.
Talk to Ford Motor Co., Marathon Oil, United States Steel and the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department about that.
Talk to myriad dumpers of PCBs and trichloroethylene cadmium and heavy metals over the past century and more, up and down the Rouge and its tributaries.
Oh yes, please check the Michigan Department of Community Health website for fish advisories and tell me if you’d eat fish caught in the Rouge.
No, those boats are inert, unlike the factories and other commercial enterprises that line the Lower Rouge from the Turning Basin to Zug Island.
What are those floating booms doing at Severtal Steel and at the mouth of the O’Brien Drain? They are there to — supposedly — contain oils and other floating chemicals released from the plants that are customers of the Detroit sewer system, which releases oil and other chemicals when it overflows into the Rouge in a heavy rain.
Are they removing the old boats because they’re ugly?
That’s a quaint notion.
If ugly is the criterion, how about a grant to get rid of those blast furnaces and related industrial eyesores on Zug Island? Or how about removing the largest single-unit wastewater treatment plant in North America? Not only is it ugly, but it stinks to hell.
What about those piles of salt and heaps of gypsum alongside the river?
Ugly is too mild a word.
Try walking around the river on a breezy day and you’ll rub your eyes from the air pollution.
Can’t remove the industrial monsters because the furnaces belong to United States Steel and are an ongoing profit-making business?
Ditto the Severstal steel plant and the Detroit sewage plant itself, a stinking mess that is the largest single-unit wastewater plant in North America. Ugly as hell, but too important to get rid of.
Eyesores, literally, but they represent jobs and taxes.
The entire Lower Rouge from Zug Island to Michigan Avenue — nine miles of river — is lined with steel and concrete.
Ugly as sin, but no grant will remove it.
A hundred fifty thousand smackers to haul out dead boats.
Will the Lower Rouge look prettier with those old boats gone?
The boats are parked in out-of-the-way spots that make them invisible to anyone who is not consciously looking for them.
All you have to do is drive the I-75 bridge over the Rouge to see the manmade ugliness industry has spawned on the Lower Rouge.
Does removal of those boats fit into anybody’s plan for improving the Great Lakes’ water quality?
A first step towards a rational approach to water quality improvement would be to fashion a Great Lakes-wide plan for improving water quality with a key component being mitigation of the Rouge River.
Next would come reinstatement of measurement, both of dissolved oxygen/temperature and E. coli, followed by systematic measurement of toxic chemicals throughout the Rouge watershed.
Finally, and most important, no money should go to any entity that refuses to be accountable to the public. If their response to our Freedom of information Act request is to get lost, we should tell them to get lost.
Here is a simple acronym that captures the essence of such an approach:
MAP
M
A
P
Measurement
Accountability
Plan
I don’t see MAP in the removal of those old boats.
With friends like this, it sounds as if the Rouge doesn’t need enemies.
Giving groups money without knowing they’re going to spend it sensibly sounds like a prize-winning recipe for disaster. Hey, gang, that’s OUR money — the money that came from us, the taxpayers. No wonder the conservatives want to cut funding — the problem is they just don’t know which funding to cut. When grants are given, they should be given with sensible strings attached.
Maybe the problem is having more money than brains — and since we know we don’t have enough money, what does that tell us about the amount of brains we (don’t) have?
With friends like that, the Rouge doesn’t need enemies.
Joel,
As I’m sure you’re aware, an old friend of yours runs the Port Authority these days (he has about 20 years left on a 25 year concession that is renewable for up to 100 years). So it should be no surprise what kinds of projects he doles money out to. At least his shotgun toting goons didn’t use the boats for target practice before they were hauled away.