Contributors

Wednesday, April 18, 2018

Lake Elmo: a Case Study

Conservative ideology and stubbornness isn't limited to the Deep South. It can also be found in states like Minnesota.

Lake Elmo is a suburb of the Twin Cities, in what was formerly the boondocks. It's now becoming intensely developed as the population of the region continues to grow.

In the last few year residents of Lake Elmo, like my brother- and sister-in-law, have been bitching because the Metropolitan Council ordered the town to install a sanitary sewer system that will cost a lot of money.

Residents complain that they can't afford $14,000 per house for the sewers. They don't mention that these assessments are not lump payments: they are assessments paid over many years. They don't mention that the state gave the city a million bucks to defray the cost. And they don't mention that they'll no longer have to pay to pump out their septic systems multiple times a year.

Lake Elmo started out as a small town long ago, unlike most Twin Cities suburbs that were developed from farmland over the course of just a few years. New suburbs were planned out all at once with roads, water, sewage and so on.

But since Lake Elmo grew up over a century, homes and businesses drilled wells and used underground septic systems, in which sewage is collected under buildings, and allowed to seep into the groundwater.

This works fine in thinly populated rural areas. But once you hit a certain population density, it's no longer feasible. There's more waste than the aquifer can safely absorb and decontaminate: pretty soon urine and feces start leaching into your water supply.

And right on cue, to illustrate the problem of well water contamination, Lake Elmo is facing another problem: PFCs in their water supply. Recently the town was forced to shut down a well and a water tower.

PFCs cause cancer and a wide variety of other diseases; infants and fetuses are most vulnerable. For years 3M discharged chemical waste into nearby landfills, ultimately contaminating local wells.

Both these problems are the result of lax environmental regulation of businesses producing dangerous chemicals and a failure to plan for future population growth.

The conservative idea that everything should stay just the way it was 250 years ago simply does not work when the population exceeds a certain number.

For the economy to grow, the population has to grow. Growing cities and states that keep dumping excrement into aquifers, toxic industrial chemicals into landfills and car exhaust into the air will eventually kill their own people.

That's why Donald Trump's dismantling of the EPA is one of the biggest disasters of his presidency.

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