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EPA To Buy Small Town In Kansas
Ponca City, We love you writes "The Wichita Eagle reports that Congress has approved funds to relocate the population of the southeast Kansas town of Treece, which is plagued with lead, zinc and other chemical contamination left by a century of mining. Estimates say it will cost about $3 million to $3.5 million to buy out the town, which is surrounded by huge piles of mining waste called 'chat' and dotted with uncapped shafts and cave-ins filled with brackish, polluted water. 'It's been a long, dusty, chat-covered road, but for the citizens of Treece, finally, help will be on the way,' said Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas who has been pushing for a buyout of Treece for two years. The population of Treece has dwindled to about 100 people, almost all of whom want to move but say they can't because the pollution and an ongoing EPA cleanup project makes it impossible to sell a house. The EPA has already bought out the neighboring town of Picher, Oklahoma, stripping Treece of quick access to jobs, shopping, recreation and services, including fire protection and cable TV. Both cities were once prosperous mining communities but the ore ran out and the mines were abandoned by the early 1970s. Of 16 children tested for lead levels in Treece, two had levels between 5 and 10 micrograms per deciliter of blood and one had a level of more than 10 times the threshold for lead poisoning."
The goods manufactured there are cheaper for us because they export the true cost onto the Chinese population and the environment. Those costs will catch up to them, just as they've caught up to us.
It was not a free market system. A faulty accounting system allowed the mines to extract profits without being responsible for the damages.
Now the tax paying public is cleaning up. So the "free market" now has tax payers paying while the company exits with its profits.
A proper market accounting system would have made the mining corporations pay for the cleanup.
So what happened here was a broken market system where the costs of the mines was not properly applied.
Well, in all seriousness, it is worth noting that Pat Roberts is a Republican pushing for government intervention in an environmental problem. It's not so controversial when it's something an tangible as lead-poisoned children.
And the government required they poison the locals?
Was that to show those damn japs we meant business?
The reality is these folks chose to do it that way so they could sell more product at lower prices thereby increasing their profit. We cannot go after them for breaking rules that did not exist, but we could require companies going out of business to restore land to salable levels. If they fail to do that, pierce the veil and take the owners money to do it.
Prior to starting the mining, the company should have to commit
to paying, say, 25% of top-line revenue into a fund to be held in escrow
by the government.
If the company cleans up adequately, and operates cleanly all along,
then at termination of mining operations, they get the funds back with interest.
If the government has to clean up, it uses the fund. There should be a penalty
catch, something like: If the government has to spend more than 25% of the
fund cleaning up, then the government fines the company the rest, and
such money is made available to an R&D pool that companies and universities
can access only for purposes of R&D into more environmentally responsible
methods and technologies for extracting resources.
This is probably an appropriate place to state that my signature line is ironic,
being a listing of two oxymorons.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
From my point view, this was nothing more than an elaborate scam to convert our tax dollars into their personal assets (and a grossly inefficient method at that.)
Not to worry: nowadays we have much more efficient methods to convert tax dollars into personal assets: no-bid military contracts, bank bailouts, tax breaks nestled into unrelated bills, and bridges to nowhere, to name a few.
I am officially gone from