07/16/2006

Editorial

Neighbors have the right to demand some fresh air

For a few days in the spring, Environmental Protection Agency workers taking air samples around Williamsburg Receiving and Storage looked — and probably felt — like locals.

The burning, watery eyes, the headaches, the sore throats. True Williamsburgians.

Hopefully, it was a watershed moment for the fruit processing plant's neighbors, who have put up with — as an EPA report described them — "pungent, putrid odors" from the plant for years with little or no relief from local, state and federal regulators.

They'll know for sure that the EPA is serious if and when it sends workers back to the plant later this year, when cherry processing is in full swing and neighbors near and far have to seal up their houses in the summer heat to avoid the stench.

The EPA's air quality tests did not indicate an imminent public health threat; and the follow-up may not, either.

But the testers' physical reactions to the odors validated long-standing complaints that the plant is a quality of life nightmare and a public nuisance no one should be forced to bear. That's in addition to its well-documented past environmental violations.

Neighbors and the Northern Michigan Environmental Action Council were recently allowed to join a state lawsuit that has already produced a 33-page consent judgment between WRS and the state attorney general's office.

Their inclusion in the suit was opposed by some area cherry growers (and the AG's office), who fretted in a local publication that letting the locals in on the talks could lead to WRS being shut down.

Losing WRS — one of only three finishing plants in the country for maraschino cherries — would also reduce local competition among processors and could result in higher prices and fewer options, they say.

There's one sure way to make sure that won't happen, of course — if WRS simply starts playing by the rules that everyone else follows and cleans up its act. Why is that so much to ask? Why has WRS consistently broken the rules everyone else lives by? Why should a serial polluter be given any more time or latitude to make its neighbors' lives miserable?

Growers would probably hum a different tune if WRS was upwind from their homes.

Already, NMEAC and the neighbors think the new agreement is a lot like past agreements — long on process but short on ways to immediately halt odor and other pollution problems.

They point to a 2002 agreement with the state — one area residents were not a party to — that not only didn't ease odor problems but also didn't prevent a spill last fall of more than 1 million gallons of waste water at the plant.

Growers have every right to be concerned about the future of WRS. But casting local environmentalists and neighbors as the bad guys here is ludicrous.

Put the blame — and the local political and social pressure — where it belongs, which is right at WRS's doorstep.