Oct. 21, 2019 - Steve Pieczenik
06:12
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Hey, citizens of Bradford County, Clay County, Alachua, and Putnam County, Florida. | |
| This is Stasha here again, and I just wanted to give you a quick update on our Bradford County Commission meeting last Thursday. | |
| Well, let's start with the agenda itself. | |
| Number 10 on the agenda, the meeting started at 630. | |
| Number 10 on the agenda was the Comores Expansion Mining Plan. | |
| So, a lot of people that work for a living Planned on getting there a little bit later because the whole agenda was about other stuff until you got to page 2. | |
| And I circled it. | |
| Can you see that? | |
| Number 10 is the mining hearing. | |
| Well, Will Sexton, county attorney, decides at around 6 o'clock that he's going to switch the published agenda around and Camorre's mining will go first. | |
| Hmm, it's kind of tricky for the county attorney to do. | |
| We do call him Tricky Sexton. | |
| Okay, so that's that. | |
| I'm running to get to the meeting and my friend calls me and said, wow, they put mining up to the front. | |
| I said, can they even do that? | |
| This is public hearing. | |
| Okay, so we get to the meeting on time. | |
| We fill out our comment cards. | |
| Then we notice through the front door of the meeting, everyone has to go around the back door, but to the front door of the meeting, all these people, mostly men, with Camors shirts on, come in and they have special privileges. | |
| They're sort of marched in behind the dais and they all get to stay right there, kind of behind the dais. | |
| Meanwhile, the poor citizens in the audience have to wait their turn and Camors begins the meeting with their attorney. | |
| Not their environmental specialist. | |
| Not their workers. | |
| No! | |
| The attorney. | |
| How interesting is that? | |
| That Comores starts their beautiful slideshow presentation to tell us how good the mine is going to be with their attorney. | |
| Okay, so he does his thing. | |
| Then the environmental project manager makes her presentation. | |
| Lots of pictures. | |
| Very nice. | |
| Not one mention. | |
| About the consent order. | |
| Now, I didn't really know what a consent order was, but you better believe I started checking into it. | |
| The consent order issued in February of 2019 to the Comores facility in question, and there are at least four facilities in the greater Bradford area. | |
| One is in Clay, a couple in Bradford, and one is in Baker County. | |
| Anyway, The consent order is basically a list of violations from the EPA and DEP for the facility. | |
| And let me just tell you a few of their violations from the 2019 consent order. | |
| Failure to properly operate their facility. | |
| That's a biggie. | |
| Impact wetlands without a permit. | |
| Poor recording. | |
| Or record keeping. | |
| Poor record keeping. | |
| No best practice update since 2013. | |
| Limits of radium exceeded the permit limits. | |
| Sounds scary to me. | |
| No legal wastewater permit at one of their facilities. | |
| Then they have things like the silt fence was broken. | |
| A bunch of stuff. | |
| Now, in this beautiful presentation about how Comores is going to be so good and it's so great for the environment and they plant trees, Not one mention about the consent order. | |
| So, hmm, all right, there's that. | |
| And then Will Sexton says it's a quasi-judicial part of the meeting. | |
| He's famous for this. | |
| And so no one can ask any questions, no Q&A, just we can say our piece for three minutes if we fill out a comment card before the meeting starts. | |
| But Camorras gets to talk as much as they want to. | |
| Okay, so can you imagine how irritated we were when most of the citizens couldn't even enter the meeting room because it was blocked. | |
| It was filled. | |
| No more seats. | |
| Hmm. | |
| Does this sound tricky to you? | |
| And I think tricky Will Sexton, the county commissioner, is kind of up to something. | |
| Well, I called DEP today and wanted to find out where they were in the permit process. | |
| DEP is Department of Environmental Protection for the State of Florida. | |
| And Comores has filed one permit with Tallahassee for mining operations, and they have not yet filed their wastewater permit. | |
| So that's the update. | |
| We were all sent home saying, oh, the commissioner said three to two, and the two commissioners that voted against authorizing the expansion were Danny Riddick, congratulations Danny, and Ross Chandler, who always votes the way I think an honest man would. | |
| Anyway, that's the update. | |
| So according to the commissioners, It's a go for this mining. | |
| Now wait till you hear some updates on the financial health of Chemours. | |
| We love job creators and we don't want anyone in Stark to lose their job. | |
| God knows because Stark is Stark already. | |
| But we really want to make sure if Chemours expands that we're not left holding a bunch of poison water, poison land like North Carolina, West Virginia, etc. | |
| So that's an update from Bradford County, and I did post a picture of, I call him Tricky Will Sexton, our county attorney. | |
| More on him later. | |
| Thank you very much. | |
| And please send me any feedback, any articles. | |
| I've gotten a lot of good information from other states. | |
| And please pass this on to your citizens in Bradford County, Clay County, Alachua County, because this isn't going away soon. | |
| And the more citizens that know about this, the more we can ask good, honest questions and demand accountability from our county commissioners and our county attorney. |
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