“WELL, I LOVE THAT DIRTY WATER…”

5/15/11

I have mixed thoughts on this latest federal EPA demand that the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District clean up the Chicago River to a point at which that formerly open sewer would be sufficiently pristine for swimming. On the one hand, the cost of the clean-up project, estimated at $7 per month for an average Cook County homeowner, seems awfully steep. EPA officials console us with their observation that, in the past, most of the District’s large sewer projects have been funded with federal money. This is the type of thinking engaged in with a straight face only by political types and their constituents and potential constituents who think of “democracy” as a system that somehow entitles them to other people’s money, and it is the type of thinking that has contributed so mightily to the accumulation of the fiscal sewage in which we are now swimming. Who do those who engage in such argumentation think pays the federal government’s bills? Do people think that federal money comes from some disembodied money machine? (Well, of late, that might be true, but to delve into Mr. Bernanke and his fabulous money machine would be a digression within a digression.) Do they think that the people of Cook County do not pay federal taxes? Further, to the extent that some of the “federal” money that would finance such a project comes from sources other than Cook County and the downstream communities that would benefit from a scouring of the Chicago River, why is it somehow just for the taxpayers of, say, Arizona or Oregon to pay to clean up the Chicago River? But I digress. $84 per year per household seems like a lot of money to clean up a river that few people yearn to use for swimming and other such forms of recreation. That the Chicago River has been dirty (and a lot dirtier than it has been in recent years) has been an accepted fact for most of the city’s history, and few have felt put out by this reality.

On the other hand, why should Chicago be the only city that doesn’t clean up its river, or, as the Tribune put it today, “…skips an important germ killing step before pumping partially treated human and industrial waste into the (river)…”? Chicago’s not being required to engage in the river cleansing steps other cities are required to perform is doubtless testimony to the enormous clout that Chicago mayors since the implementation of the relevant EPA rules in 1972 have had in Washington. There is little indication that such clout is going to diminish any time soon, but, still, if other cities are made to clean up their rivers, why shouldn’t Chicago do the same?

What really amazes me about the whole issue of sanitizing the Chicago River is that it hasn’t been done yet, i.e., why have the mayors of Chicago, especially the outgoing one, resisted this massive public works project? Think if the projects, think of the jobs, think of the federal money. (Rich Daley, like his father, was an enthusiastic acolyte of the “federal money as manna from heaven” school of public finance.) Surely, Richard II had plenty of friends in the river sanitation business, or who could easily enter that business, if only as “consultants” or silent, and, when necessary, nowhere listed or named, partners. Just as surely, such friends would, as has always been their practice, been willing to fulsomely express their gratitude in monetary ways for yet another opportunity to perform public service.

Given that the incoming Mayor made his bones in fundraising and fundraising is greatly facilitated when there are plenty of grateful contractors around to shake down, one can anticipate that this Mayor will use his clout with Messrs. Obama, Axelrod, et. al. to complete, rather than avoid, the massive clean-up project for the Chicago River.