Perhaps it's the weather...

In a perhaps vain attempt to get myself out of the end-of-summer, change-to-grey-and -cold funk, I forward the following in the spirit of "Let's find something constructive to do."

The Washington State Department of Ecology has a new video posted to its YouTube site.

You can check it out at http://www.youtube.com/ecologywa

The message is using alternatives to toxic household cleaners. The format is an infomercial spoof.

Enjoy!

Outside the Box - 2

As promised, here is the next chapter in the story of blindered thinking and greed to follow up on "Outside the Box - 1."

To sum, my previous post presented the City of Bend's position on proposals by citizens or developers, or in this case, public entities, trying to make their dollars work for the general good. The City is opposed to having individual systems within reach of their sewer system because then they don't get their new cash cow. In this particular case we have a public entity that found out how much the city would charge to connect to sewer and is opting to do an individual system because they are actually in a location that allows them to avoid the duplicative fees the city would charge if they were in the city limits/service area. End of story, right?

Nope, this is just where it starts to get interesting because the state representative of the Oregon DEQ's Onsite Program (this is the program that issues permits and oversees individual wastewater treatment systems) is putting the heat on the public entity to connect to sewer.

What's wrong with this picture? DEQ is a state agency facing potentially significant budget cuts, along with all the other state agencies in Oregon, that is telling another public entity to pay permit fees and service fees (forever) to the city of Bend. I wish my budget were so healthy that I have the luxury to send business away. But I must say that I have a healthier belief in my own capabilities than this DEQ person. If this person is working in a job in which they so little belief in that program's capability to (in DEQ's case) protect public health and the environment, then that person is taking the public's money for doing work they either don't have the expertise to do or that they believe is work is not worth doing. In the first case, this person should be reassigned to a position for which they are qualified (perhaps this is the Peter Principle at work?), in the second case, they should be fired for ethics violations for taking public money under false pretenses.

Permeable Pavement Webinar

I had the good fortune to tune in to a webinar sponsored by the Center for Watershed Protection and the Chesapeake Stormwater Network. The webinar contained lots of practical information about performance, installation and maintenance of permeable pavement systems that can be used either on the homeowner or huge commercial scale. While I see many potential applications for the city surrounding me, my overwhelming feeling upon leaving the gathering place for the webinar was to break up concrete and invest in creeping thyme.