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At Hearing, Science Will Reject Spin

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By TOM JACKSON

tjackson@tampatrib.com

Published: February 15, 2009

Regarding the bioreactor landfill proposed for the east Pasco wilderness, Thursday's announcement declaring the state's position - opposed - settled no issues save one: the seating arrangement at the inevitable administrative legal hearing.

Obviously, how each side spent the weekend was influenced by the Florida Department of Environmental Protection's (surprise?) rejection of the application. Opponents couldn't be blamed for popping champagne corks and laying out deli trays (hope they blue-bagged the empties - oh, wait; the incinerator needs that fuel) while the team at Angelo's Recycled Materials hunkered down.

Nonetheless, both sides, brandishing lawyers, will likely resume hostilities soon enough. And that next step may prove more difficult for the landfill's opponents, in that it will be less easily imbalanced by lobbyist muscle. Come the administrative legal hearing, science, not influence, should prevail.

This is not to suggest that all the science and engineering tilt Angelo's way, only that a hearing officer is better positioned to weigh the evidence than bureaucratic bottoms sensitive to political heat.

One Sickly Aroma

For proof, we need look no further than DEP's apparent flip - insiders leaked in December they were leaning toward giving its blessing - when Angelo's megaweight neighbors, water-peddlers Bill Blanchard and Robert Thomas, put their dollars and Tallahassee contacts to work. A close reading of DEP's rejection indicates a late-breaking revision of emphasis; worries long since dismissed by the engineering mitigations contained within Angelo's proposal gained new weight once introduced to the Blanchard & Thomas buffet line.

This is to be expected when political influence, feeding on dollars by the bagful, merges with public sentiment predisposed to horror and quick to render a permanent, if lightly informed, verdict. After all, in coverage that has been almost monolithically anti-Angelo's, dump-the-dump activists have been allowed to describe the proposed project as something it would never be - the suffocating, vermin-luring garbage heap of detective movies - to stir up public alarm.

Such an atmosphere made convenient the snatching of straws that, when waggled under the public's nose, promoted swooning (but lacked substance). The Green Swamp! (A mile or more, over hills, away.) The Floridan Aquifer! (The risk is a bone of contention between competing scientists.) The Hillsborough River, a major source of Tampa's drinking water, threatened! (Only if the rules against water flowing uphill are repealed.)

With folks like these in charge in 1937, they'd never have finished the Golden Gate Bridge. A roadway ... suspended by cables ... over some of the most treacherous water on the planet ... in an earthquake zone? How's that suppose to work? Are you mad? When it collapses - and you can bet it will - what's the plan? Fish all the people out of San Francisco Bay? Seems impractical.

Technological Triumph

No doubt, the Angelo's folks would have preferred going before a judge defending DEP's approval rather than prosecuting its denial. But once it gets in front of an impartial and, the process insists, beyond-influence pair of eyes, the technology should stand or succumb on its own merit.

That's a situation either side should be willing to live with, although the betting here is that only the Angelo's team meets the description.

Tom Jackson can be reached at (813) 948-4219.

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