Blog: Enviro Doublespeak Spoken Here

As if deciding to use tax revenues to hold their Anti-Science Fair at the end of October weren’t enough to provide plenty of material for the local funny pages, the Commissioners decided this week to double down and adopt an official Environmental Policy.

Oh yeah, never mind that the immediate previous Board of Commissioners barely squeaked out of office while approving a Sustainability Plan drafted by a credible committee of staff and individuals just in time to put it on the infamous Shelves to Nowhere in the County Office  Building. Now the most environmentally bankrupt Board of Commissioners to ever hold office here has decided it needs an Environmental Policy all of its own confection--no input from its Environmental Advisory Committee or even the Koch Brothers as far as the public can tell. Well, maybe Brian DiMaggio and Donald Dell got to whisper into a few of their ears during lunch one day and then there is the Leigh Cement Company connection that can yank its little pension-connection anytime it wants.

In the final discussion to adopt this policy, Richard Rothschild just had to load up the meeting, which was attended by four citizens and two other Commissioners, with some of his classic conjecture about PlanMaryland and overabuse of vocabulary that must impress his limp constituents but leaves me laughing as he invents words and terms to fit his purposes. This time he went on a tear to impress the audience that the Maryland Planners were torturing science to extract the conclusions they wanted from said Plan, not the conclusions that could be truthfully withdrawn. At least I think that’s what he said. There was also something about
there being some new indexes of success being used to support the Plan and the environment being used as an excuse instead as a reason. At least I think that is what he said but even if it is who knows what he meant by it. The man really does speak way over my head, or perhaps it’s that he’s speaking to someone else entirely.

The one comment that almost knocked me out of my seat is when he said that PlanMaryland avoids “inconvenient truths”. Shades of Al Gore!  What was the man smokin’ before he came in late to the meeting? Which inconvenient truth is it that he and the 4 other enviro-commissioners believe the Plan is ducking?  They seem to have not have had any problem thus far in finding fault with many of the elements of the Plan so it doesn’t look too cowardly to me and the State’s head Planner, Rich Hall has certainly taken his share of bashing here and elsewhere from disabused officials.

I love it when The Rothschild goes off and says things like about how he really wants a cleaner Chesapeake Bay and then doubles back and invents issues to build a case for avoidance of participating in that very thing. When bringing up nutrient loads into the Bay he just had to pull out the term “exfiltration”, whether this is one he made up or recently ran across in some “Stormwater Management Today” magazine he came across in the Public Works offices I know not but what he was trying to do with it was say that we shouldn’t be so concerned making developers and Carroll County spend fortunes on sewage treatment and advanced septic system installations when there are instances when modern wastewater treatment plants “leak” or that there are occasions when they spill over or that wells are pumped out or … huh? This guy is all wound up like a cheap Chinese toy over a calamity at a sewage plant just so he can divert the discussion away from the County having to enforce nutrient removal requirements that are coming its way from the EPA and MD Dept. of the Environment. Gawd, wait until he finds out about combined sewers and waste water outlets in old cities like Washington, DC and Richmond, it’ll really lift his lid.

Rothschild can do his doublespeak all he wants and the Commissioners can adopt as many bogus environment policies as they want because they are not going to flim flam anyone but themselves and the few weak minds that follow them around routinely believing that they have some semblance of knowing what they are doing. As time shall prove yet again, this Board of Commissioners is not only clueless; they are mentally and morally corrupt. We know the former; time will prove the later, sooner than later we can only hope. Doublespeak may impress a few citizens occasionally but it tells me the these Commish are still in search of a sound idea of their own to really own, all the while making a laughing stock of themselves and our County in the interim to those who can see through their nonsensical chatter throughout the rest of the State and Nation.