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THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 2006
he Supervisors say that the General Assembly and
courts have usurped local power by preventing the -L. Supervisors from regulating the land application of sludge at the county level. From County Administrator John McCarthy’s communication after their closed session discussion of the issue:
“IThe BOS} decries the sequence of events that have combined to deprive them of this right to protect its citizens.”
However, the events in that lamentable sequence include the Supervisors’ tabling of a perfectly good ordinance back in 2001. According to McCarthy, this was done gradually, as he and the Supervisors waited for the General Assembly or some Judge to make a ruling that would allow the county to preserve their ban on sludged lands. That never happened, and the Supervisors never voted on the ordinance. According to McCarthy himself, this ordinance is now so obsolete, that the county can’t update it in time to prevent the current sludge application from going through.
In essence, they allowed it to die without voting on it.
Why?
Was this a backhanded way of allowing sludge into the county? While attractively nefarious, and possibly supported by their current inaction, this seems unlikely. The predictable rising storm of public backlash against their latest indecision on the matter argues against this.
Did the Supervisors allow favorable public opinion of the ban lull them into keeping an untenable law? If so, that’s the kind of government shortsightedness we’ve come to unhappily expect in our national leaders, more f ocused on a pleasing soundbyte and a short term rise in their approval ratings than an actually favorable result. Local leaders, especially in a smaller government like Rappahannock County, are expected to be more focused on the long term and more in tune with the needs of their community. They are trusted more than their national counterparts, and they are expected to make tough decisions that will help their communities in the long term.
If everything is as McCarthy and the Supervisors say it is, that is not what happened here.
Our View
On sludge
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