Greenwich’s toxic approach
Back in the day I worked for a large financial services company and within the organization there was an under the table policy employees referred to as “stop/do.” It went like this. A supervisor would drop a task on the desk of an underling, who after reviewing it might determine the task to be unnecessary, unpalatable or simply something they didn’t want to do. This would lead to the stop/do decision-making moment: ignore the task and hope someone else did it; ignore it and very likely it would just go away, or wait till a supervisor pressed for a resolution and then grudgingly get around to doing it.
Fast forward a few decades and if you look closely, you can see the same sort of stop/ do methods in the policies and processes adopted by Town of Greenwich politicians and bureaucrats. Longtime town political junkies know all too well the signature Greenwich move when it comes to big-ticket, labor intensive and/or potentially expensive projects is to try to run out the clock. Kick the can down the road, and maybe public sentiment will change. Stall, delay and authorize one more study and maybe a public/private white knight will come in swinging a big checkbook. Unfortunately, the problem with stop/do is that sometimes the thing you wish will just go away, literally cannot.
In 2016 the playing fields at Western Middle School were closed because, well, they’re poisonous. Arsenic, lead and PCBs were found in soil samples, and how did we learn this? Local residents were concerned when similar contaminants were found in nearby locations, leading those residents to ask the town to please test at the school. Test at a place where it was well known that the soil and fill came from other contaminated areas.
Staggeringly, the town declined. The Board of Education wasn’t interested, and neither was our Environmental Services Department. So, one resident took it into her own hands, and she went out and hired a professional who took and tested samples and the bad news was delivered. Except upon receipt, instead of jumping into action to protect our children, the town played defense and tried to discredit the tests because they weren’t “official.”
As I wrote in May of 2016, “Follow this logic. Local citizens are concerned that soil might be contaminated based on other nearby locations where soil is contaminated. Local government sees no indication of an issue and will not test, so a private test is done which confirms the problem. But because it wasn’t an official government-sanctioned test, the results are considered illegally obtained and therefore invalid. That sounds great for a ‘Law & Order’ episode, but in the real world the legality of the test does not actually invalidate the result. To paraphrase Bob Horton in this paper last week, it’s nuts to think the professionals doing the testing would risk losing their license over fabricating a result. There are elevated levels of arsenic and lead there. Maybe it’s a lot, maybe it’s a little. But it’s there, and what are we going to do about it?”
Well, what the town finally, grudgingly did was test. Then we shut the fields because they were, as mentioned earlier, poisonous. Seven years later, there’s now some movement toward resolution. Two entire generations of WMS students have matriculated, and finally something will be done beside hope it will just go away. Seven years for some town officials who attended a recent public hearing to sing “Kumbaya,” say how happy they are that we’re moving forward, and to hope we won’t remember they were originally part of the team that circled the wagons to protect … who? Contractors, land owners, townies, politicians? Maybe, but for seven years, the kids certainly weren’t priority No. 1.
The town tried ignoring the problem, then running out the clock, and finally has to do something because it won’t go away. So sometime this summer, it looks like the process of sort-of, partially cleaning up the fields will finally begin. Followed by the installation of a new artificial turf field. Yep, we’re likely replacing our contaminated dirt with the only other thing many parents and residents reflexively hate just as much. Cue the outrage.