Willamette Week fails to get the point: wweek/portland/article-21460-murmurs_portland_loses_an_urban_planning_leader.html The battle to end City Hall control of the Portland Water Bureau is now a divided front. A coalition of environmental activists affiliated with Occupy Mount Tabor filed a ballot initiative Oct. 28 to create a “people’s water trust.” The trust would tighten rules on how city water officials spend ratepayers’ money, and require a public vote before adding new chemicals to the city’s drinking water, including fluoride. Left-wing water activists and big businesses had both supported an initiative campaign to shift authority over Portland’s water and sewer utilities from the City Council to an independent, elected water district board. Enviros have now changed course. “The water district would essentially go backward,” says Green Party activist Seth Woolley. Kent Craford, leading the business effort, dismisses Woolley’s proposal. “He probably wrote this in his mom’s basement between rounds of Dungeons & Dragons,” Craford says. On a more serious note, there are a lot of supporters of the Peoples Public Trust, many who are quite conservative, too. The trust framework is millennia old and is in many was extremely conservative. Many evangelicals hold that we must manage the land as stewards: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evangelical_environmentalism as just one example. My own father, the source of my environmental culture in my native Cascadia, is a conservative conservationist who was raised on a farm and taught as an elementary educator water cycle science units with much appreciation for watersheds and protecting the environment. There are eco-libertarians who believe that damaging the environment negatively affects private property values, too, and many of those believe in property rights that can be held in association -- such as the public, to be managed for mutual benefit. A lot of conservative farmers in Oregon are acutely aware of water rights issues and the need to have available clean water to make agriculture possible in many places. I could go on and on. As the German greens say, this isnt a left issue, nor a right issue, but an issue of moving forward, thinking toward the future, a sustainable future where our future generations will thank us for valuing their health and wellness so highly that we chose not to take shortcuts that permanently damaged ability to right to thrive. What the Willamette Week has failed to emphasize (because they want to characterize this as a battle without noting positives) is that the trust affirms two classes of rights, a right to water for personal sustenance, and a right for the ecologys own sustenance regarding water. To ensure these rights, a trust to protect our water ecology is established that encodes duties to ensure transparency and accountability that the trust resources are protected and maintained -- true sustainability. The city talks a lot about sustainability, and many departments get it, but as with any large institution often the public trust doctrine is ignored due to other missions that are misinterpreted as in conflict with our mandate to conserve our environment. This proposal ensures that it is not an optional mission, and elevates the citys own language to the charter. To ensure this is enforceable, a provision is given for the residents to bring suit against the city in the name of the ecology to protect it -- guaranteeing natural and ecological rights real standing in the court of law. Duties for protection are enumerated and can be pointed to in court to specifically hold the city, acting as trustees, to account, if the trust resource is damaged.
Posted on: Wed, 30 Oct 2013 18:28:28 +0000
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