All eyes (as it were) will be on Eastham June 22 as a special town meeting will once again try to decide the town’s water future.
Eastham, the last town on the Cape to get with the program and sign up for a p ublic water system–or so the proponents of such a system like to put it. They make the town’s longtime resistance to big water sound like a disgrace, hicksville, last-on-the-block.
Actually that’s not quite right. If Eastham were to go with a townwide system it would leapfrog its two neighbors to the north, Wellfleet and Truro, only small portions of which are covered by a town well. And now, Eastham has a similar choice of a small, prudent system. Going up against the board of selectmen’s two oversized $40 million and $115 million systems is a petitioned third option, $5.8 million to provide water for 220 houses near the landfill.
It’s David against the two Goliaths.
The board’s scheduling of this special town meeting just a few weeks after failing to get the result it wanted in the regular town meeting in early May strikes this spectator from next door as bordering on the abusive. Abusive of process, of citizens; of the spirit if not the letter of democracy. You will keep coming back, they seem to be saying, until you get this right.
The town powers called the June 22nd meeting encouraged by the close May vote that things are drifting in the direction of the $115 million system they’re pushing. They probably see it as townspeople coming to their senses, seeing the error of their obsolete ideas/ ways.
That’s one way to see it.
In reality this conflict is probably more accurately characterized as nothing more or less than class struggle, those who can afford it the $800. average yearly cost of the whole-town system (not including hookup fees) vs. those who can’t.
So how to explain the change from the 2-1 against in 2012 to the almost 2-1 for this year? One thing is clear, the ratio of haves to havenots hasn’t changed. A guess is that the town’s persistent fearmongering about inevitable decline in real estate prices is having its effect among the financially insecure, who until the petitioned option have found themselves between a rock and a hard place.
The facts remain clear: only a handful of houses have nitrate levels over the state level of 10 ppm. The great majority of houses test out at 5 ppm nitrates or lower, the level often considered “background.” Things are not getting worse as the town approaches buildout. There is no evidence there’s a crisis trajectory here.
The situation is much the same as in neighboring Wellfleet, with which it shares the same aquifer.
Given the choice between two expensive systems which will apparently work hardship on many and one tailored to take care of the known problem, the path of wisdom would seem to be to emulate Wellfleet (which started with a fix for houses around the landfill) and go one step at a time. Don’t out of unwarranted prejudice against the traditional well-and-septic technology fix what is not broken. Especially since, given the climate change future, it is not at all clear more steps will even be needed or if they are, what they will be.
Food for thought: at a recent conference at the Wellfleet Audubon Sanctuary on climate change and its likely effects on the Outer Cape, one of the strongly recommended tactics for coping with the predicted rising seas of climate change would be discarding Title 5 septic systems in favor of composting toilets. (This would have the added advantage of saving all the money needed to bury all that concrete in the ground.)
Once it has sensibly voted for the small water fix, Eastham could begin to consider the truly forward- looking move of putting a small amount of the money not wasted on over-sized water systems into financing a changeover to composting toilets in which nothing at all gets into the ground water.
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