This morning’s Gristle online at the Cascadia Weekly is particularly good. It exposes how the Port of Bellingham and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers are secretly gaming the permit process to avoid cleaning our polluted and toxic Bellingham Bay.

If you are concerned, and want to speak to power that does not want to hear from you, the Department of Ecology is holding what they call a “Public Information Meeting” at the Bellingham Library this Thursday evening (June 5) from 6 to 8 p.m. in the basement lecture room. I attended these DOE Bellingham Bay cleanup meetings starting back in 1995 and have developed a bad attitude toward them. To DOE, “gathering info” seems to be their way of finding out our thoughts so they can counter them in their next newsletter. They pretty much have their plans all figured out.

How did these toxins get placed on Cornwall Park - the landfill on our waterfront? I don’t know. NWCitizen posts from May 15 and 19, 1999 expose the effort of DOE to override the state Department of Natural Resources and dump Whatcom Waterway toxins on the waterfront. But our state Senators Harriet Spanel and Georgia Gardner convinced Governor Gary Locke to veto that bill. Somehow DOE got around it.

The link will take you to Dec 1999, then scroll down a few months to Saturday, May 15, read May 19 as well. This was NWCitizen before 2008 when I was able to put it into a database.

What the Gristle misses is that DOE is at the table with the Army Engineers and the port in the game of duplicity on our waterfront. But we cannot abdicate our responsiblilty to comment and push for a clean waterfront. We must be vigorous in pushing DOE to not wreck it further.

- John Servais