Toxic Park for Free Speech?

grounds for protest by Adrienne Anderson

In August, thousands of youth plan to converge in Denver during the Democratic National Convention to engage in peaceful protest and activities to educate others about all that’s gone so very wrong during the Bush years that most of our elected officials in Congress – whether Republicans or complicit Democrats - have refused to address. Organized by a group called Tent State, they seek positive change for the betterment of us all, and deserve our support.

The list of legitimate grievances is long: from years of illegal wars in the Middle East involving unspeakable crimes against humanity to abysmal domestic policies gutting our rights, basic services and our economy. Growing numbers of U.S. citizens are now unable to stay afloat, yet profits soar for the corporate elitists who now have a stranglehold over our government and public resources. Unprecedented abuses of the public trust are being virtually ignored by the majority of our elected officials, willing to look the other way so they may too become beneficiaries of the globalist war without end agenda while our hard-won rights are trampled and world stability and security is threatened.

Yet Tent State’s civic-minded youth will find they have plenty of grounds for protest while camping in Denver without ever leaving their tents, given the location city officials has designated for their gatherings: Denver’s City Park.

Once the crown jewel in Denver’s network of inner city parks – the city’s conditional use permit fails to mention that the park itself is now a microcosm of all that’s gone wrong in government the youth plan to protest, where our elected officials have allowed public rights to be trampled, public spaces to be despoiled for private gain, and public coffers raided so favored corporations financing their political careers can violate the public’s interests and abuse the public trust.

In City Park, one of the most macabre environmental experiments ever launched is now in its fifth year, though few are allowed a peek into the details of the scheme, in violation of public information laws. It’s a dirty deal where evidence of some of the nastiest environmental crimes by a number of the Rocky Mountain region’s worst corporate and military polluters is literally being flushed onto the public, including highly toxic and even radioactive wastes including plutonium from one of the worst Superfund sites in the country, Lowry Landfill, in a very risky game of pollution liability. The scheme involves diversion and dispersal of contaminated water saturating the site and percolating to aquifers below, at the southeast edge of metro Denver. There, Coors and this region’s other top polluters – from Rocky Flats and area refineries to Martin Marietta and Denver’s two daily newspapers - for decades dumped their toxic and dangerous wastes. While under Superfund laws, the polluters were to be held responsible for the costs of clean-up to protect the public health and the environment, here, our government agencies are allowing them to divert millions of gallons of this dangerous water back into the public domain, and using our public systems and unprotected public employees to handle it, at public expense. This way, the polluters are off the hook for the more responsible and protective solution that the public had approved, treating the mess at the source. It’s all being done with a wink and a nod by the very local, state and federal agencies that are supposed to be protecting us, but who instead are serving this region’s worst polluters, some who are also chief architects and financiers of the neoconservative right whose policies have gotten us to the sad state of affairs we now are in, and that are prompting the plans for protest.

The evidence is getting harder to hide.

Despite years of protest to prevent this deal from going forward by the sewage plant workers’ union, environmental groups and others, the government agencies and our elected officials let the polluters have their way and the fetid flush continues, putting our parks, wildlife and our health at risk. In recent weeks, the crime involving City Park has gotten harder to hide as its lake has been taken over by a big green glob. After spending millions from our taxpayer and ratepayer-financed funds at Metro Wastewater, Denver Water, and various other city agencies to flush it, pipe it around, dilute it, and hide the effects of it, the effects cannot be hidden, despite park rangers told to pick up dead ducks and firefighters tasked with trying to sink the green globs to the lake’s bottom where officials hope it will die, along with the associated controversy, before the eye of the world soon turns to Denver.

Coors, now touting itself as an eco-friendly corporation, has announced it will provide ethanol fuels for buses carrying conventioneers around the city. No doubt, it’s hoped their long list of environmental crimes will be forgotten as politicians meet to craft their platforms, including ones affecting environmental regulations and worker safety. Thanks, Coors, for the ethanol, but if you really want to become an environmentally responsible corporate citizen, let’s revoke the permit you sought now flushing a radioactive Superfund site back into the public domain and treat it properly at the source, paid for by the polluters, not the public. In the future, let’s implement policies that prevent such catastrophes through protective policies and practices on the front end.

The Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center has alerted Tent State organizers and nearby neighborhoods with the disturbing facts behind City Park’s woes. While dead ducks, dying grass, and dying lakes are all being minimized by dead-panning officials who claim not to know anything about it, we hope the youth don’t roll around in the toxic sewage effluent-irrigated grass, skip through the sprinklers or take a dip in the Superfund-site tainted lake.

Surely, in the world Tent State youth hope to grow up in, ducks can swim happily in city-owned lakes and kids need not fear what they might be exposed to if they run barefoot through the park or dip their toes into the water. Are such times really gone? Democrat or Republican, no one should want such a world for their children.

Long after Tent State’s youth pull up stakes from the polluted grounds their tents will be on, we’ll be left to deal with this. We must heed the warning of the ducks, lest we all become sitting ducks for more of the same. The stakes couldn’t be higher.

Adrienne Anderson is Coordinator of the Nuclear Nexus and Safe Water projects for the Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center. She served on the CU Environmental Studies faculty for 11 years. Many of her student research groups also researched this deal and worked to alert the public to its hazards and risks.