Sewer Agenda

January 13, 2012.

By Norman Hopkins
published on page A13 of the Citrus County Chronicle, Friday 13 January 2012.

In all honesty, I did not know whether to criticize the reporter's placing of a lawyer's comment in prime position in her article or to praise her for not being so gullible as to report the "anecdote" he related to the commissioners. Of course, as the anecdote alleged, a chemical dye trace compound is not in any way analogous to the human waste which a septic system is designed to process and reduce its toxicity levels to environmentally acceptable ones.

The Agenda Item C4, was simply to allow the commissioners to vote to specify the official procedure by which the County would levy, collect and enforce non-ad valoram sewer charges upon property owners residing in unincorporated County areas. What was quite extraordinary and not reported was the gesture of a senior spokesperson for the County who invited delegates of the City of Crystal River to speak at length during consideration of the said agenda item C4, which apparently did not involve the City.

The under-lying issue involved charges upon the property owners amounting to millions of dollars to go to the City, when the state was under contract to pay the City with public money for the same thing.

What disturbs some property owners the most is that they are to suffer high City charges when the City itself has degraded the crystal waters of the river system which the City now alleges to remedy by replacing a few septic systems with their sewer service.

For the record, wetland forests which served to make the river waters crystal clear were stripped away with steam drag lines and burned to make way for the City's roads and buildings, canals were dredged to give homes water front status, the City's sewage treatment plant was discovered in 1991, to have illegally dredged a connection from its outfall to drain toxic waste into a stream conveying it into Kings Bay, which was officially determined to have contributed to excessive algae and degradation of the water quality - possibly for a very long time.