Honorable Mayor, City Administrator, and City Commissioners,
I am very disappointed with your decision to agree to the
Savoy proposal as you now all personally signed off to oil business as usual in
our city. In contrary to what several of you repeatedly stated over the last
weeks, Savoy needed this decision to be able to go ahead and build pipelines
from the current and all future drill sites in Heritage Park to Witt Farm. As
some of you are into common sense arguments: it is in fact common sense that a
corporation would not spend $80,000 for something that they already own. As a
matter of fact, the new drilling operation in Heritage Park that used the same
well head as the previous successful drilling could not be exploited and was on
hold until you agreed to their proposal yesterday night. Evidence for this is
the presence of a temporary overflow storage tank and a small flare-off
chimney.
Now the field is cleared to burry pipelines right across
sensitive wetlands and valuable recreational park land, crossing Beaver Creek
or the South Branch of River Raisin, run under farmland and Howell Hwy to Witt
Farm. The currently tiny, nevertheless smelly flare that emits cancerous vapors
will grow into a massive flare, gasing off large amounts of benzene and other
toxic substances. As I said before, this is by no means a better solution than
processing oil and transporting it off by tank trucks from each well site – but
it is certainly better and cheaper for Savoy!
Some decisions on oil exploitation in Adrian were made
before your time on the City Commission but you just sold the last corner stone
and put the last nail in the coffin of the city’s environmental health. And the
worst thing is that you did not even demand concessions from Savoy. It is true
that baseline testing of air, soil, and water should have been performed BEFORE
Savoy’s operations started. However, we were still in the beginnings, meaning
that baseline tests would have served some purpose as to the state of natural
resources now – compared to when Savoy is done. Again, you wound yourself out
of responsibility by a very weak and invalid argument. As it stands now, what
is the sense of Savoy’s promise to clean up the Witt Farm site after their
operations are complete? How will you proof to them that they caused the mess?
Will they also call back all the oil that seeped out of the pipelines
underground?
Finally, despite statements of some of you about the need to
have the public more involved in this topic, you failed again to organize a
city sponsored public forum about oil and gas exportation in and around Adrian
BEFORE making a crucial decision. How was the public meeting on the changes in
the recreation department and the city’s budget more important to justify such
an event? Not that that particular meeting served the purpose to screen the
opinions of the public but rather was a presentation of the excellent work of
the honorable City Administrator… As I stated before, and to connect to
ex-mayor Berryman’s statement about the city commission session of April 1st
being a teaching piece in democracy – real democracy would be to engage the
public to be more involved in city affairs, and to be really interested in the
public opinion beyond voting day – meaning organizing regular public assemblies
about important topics shaping the future of the city…
And a very last comment. For me and many other Adrian
citizens, Heritage Park was the one and only, still nearly pristine site in the
entire city, allowing for peace and tranquility in our troubled times. It is a
shame that such values do not count for you as it will now go down the tubes -
if Savoy is lucky to hit the jackpot and it becomes economically rewarding for
them to establish several more wells on park land.
Tom Wassmer
P.S. I will also post this open letter on
adrianoil.blogspot.com
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Thomas Wassmer, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of
Biology
Siena Heights University
1247 E. Siena Heights Dr.
Adrian, MI 49221
517-264-7637
