Righting Water Wrongs

Long post, about 2,275 words, with 6 graffics.

The Booker Administration is again trying to put over on the unwilling citizens of Newark a Municipal Utility Authority (MUA, which I think is said as separate letters, M-U-A). Almost two years ago we fought that madness to defeat, but Booker won't take NO(!) for an answer. Sometimes mayoral power turns men mad. Witness NYC's sad little man, Michael Bloomberg, who defied TWO referendums that imposed a two-term limit for mayor, and got the City Council to overrule the people to permit him to run for a third term. I imagine that when his third term is up, he will have the City Council allow him a fourth term — then a fifth, sixth, fourteenth! Here in Newark, Cory Booker won't get rid of the large number of hugely overpaid Deputy Mayors and such at the top of his administration, nor impose a residency requirement upon City employees so they spend their paychecks within City Limits, and thus boost business taxes. Nor seek a City income tax. Nor any other sensible measure. No, he'd rather steal our water system and turn it over to private control, with no oversight by the "Municipal" (City) Council to keep water rates from skyrocketing to support hugely overpaid functionaries in a quasi-private entity over which the people will have no control. So we have to fite again. A few weeks ago, the Newark Water Group ("NWG") issued this flyer. NWG says, in part:

Mayor Booker wants to borrow money guaranteed by our water bills only to balance his short-term budget resulting in sky-high water bills for the next 25 years. That is foolish. Balancing his budget on the backs of low and fixed income people who must have water is unjust. * * *

Mayor Booker tried to do-away with Newark’s Water/Sewer Dept and The Newark Watershed Conservation Development Corp to an outside Municipal Utility Authority (MUA). Newark Residents turned out in large numbers and stopped the plan. Now, the city administration is at it again. They are planning to turn our water over to a MUA run by political insiders. This MUA would be at the expense of Newark Residents:
■ The water and sewer system and watershed property will not be accountable to the voters of Newark.
■ Set up a completely new, expensive layer of bureaucracy to run the authority.
■ Provide for speedy contracts to outside corporations—with much less oversight, with huge potential for sweet-heart deals[.]
■ Hire whom they wanted, from anywhere.
■ Hire more lawyers and public relations people to “sell” us on water-rate increases.
■ Hand over the lion’s share of the profits o[f] our Water System to outside bondholders. * * *

An MUA would not do anything that the City Water Department could not do. This plan is an insult to all of our neighbors who get up every[ ]day and do the best they can working for the City of Newark to run the Department of Water and Sewer. City Water-Sewer workers are trying, yet, they STILL lack a full-time, permanent Director. We want effective management of our Water Department[,] full-time water-sewer professionals ... to make the Newark Water and Sewer Department into a top[-]notch agency. * * *

The residents of Newark deserve better ... If the department lags behind, hire a water[-]management professional to ... run the ... Department ... as a state-of-the-art facility serving the people of Newark.

The City still does not permit online or foned-in water-bill payments. Why the he...ck not? Every mom-and-pop shop accepts online or fone payments, but the City of Newark cannot? That is EXECRABLY bad management. I'd be willing to pay a $2 "convenience fee", as I do for online payment for my auto insurance and Motor Vehicles registration renewal. So would tens of thousands of other Newarkers. But Booker won't fix THAT.

We [must] hire people immediately to tap every source of federal funds that could be coming to the City of Newark right now to upgrade and maintain our Water-Sewer infrastructure. Save the Newark Water and Sewer Department [—] No MUA.

THE NEWARK WATER GROUP STATEMENT OF PURPOSE

The Newark Water Group is a nonpartisan group of Newark residents committed to keeping the city's water and sewer system and watershed property in direct control of our elected officials and accountable to the voters of Newark. ... We advocate for the best-managed water department in the United States and for the employment of Newark residents.
For more info: Newark Water Group: 973-973-623-6490. Email: bchappel1 AT verizon.net [Emfasis in original.]

Funny Business with Billing? Bill Chappel has set out the macro problem. There may, however, be micro problems with water and sewer billing for some Newarkers. I just spent almost three months trying to rectify massive overbilling. Was this an innocent error on the City's part, or an attempt to squeeze out undeserved lucre thru fictitious billing? If the latter, it was incredibly clumsy. If my bill had gone up by 10% or even 20%, I might not have realized I was being overcharged. That's not what happened.
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On February 2d, I sent a letter to point out the problem:

Re: Crazy recent bills

Ladies and Gentlemen:

Something has gone very wrong with my water and sewer bills in the last three months. They have gone from about $30 a month to $150 or $160 a month! This cannot be correct. I am one person, and have always had only one person living in this house, so have had no recent change in water use. I conserve water. I know of no leak of consequence, and when I have gone into my basement to listen for running water, I have heard nothing. So what has happened?

Did you change my properly working meter for one that is defective? Was a new meter installed incorrectly, as created a leak between the meter and my house, such that water is leaking into the ground outside my house, that I am not using?

I cannot and will not pay preposterous water and sewer bills that are 5 or 6 TIMES what I have been billed for since I bought my house in June 2000. Please advise as to what is going on and how it can be fixed. Thank you.

City agencies do not publicize email addresses, so I had to send postal mail.

While I waited for a reply, I arranged, as had recently been mandated, to have an MXU installed to ease the reading of my meter. "MXU" is not an abbreviation you could guess from the letters.

Automatic Meter Reading (AMR) equipment has now been installed to read nearly all of our customers’ accounts. The AMR technology is designed to collect water meter readings in a reliable and cost effective manner using a radio signal interface device called a Meter Transceiver Unit (MXU). This MXU is connected to your water meter and is activated by either a hand held device or a vehicle-transported unit. With the latter,[Water Dept] employees are able to drive past a property, send out a radio signal to the MXU, and receive back your meter reading directly to the computer in the vehicle. This enables the [Water Dept] to read meters much faster and without stopping at each customer’s property. It is more convenient for our customers because [Water Dept] employees do not have to enter customer homes or businesses to obtain a meter reading. Upon returning to the office, the information is downloaded for billing purposes. If for some reason a meter cannot be read, the estimated water usage bill will be generated using the best available historical records. In this case, all necessary billing adjustments will be made after an actual meter reading [I have supplied all the emfasis in this paragraf.]

I foned the Water Department when I got yet another crazy bill. It turns out that the bills I had been receiving were "estimated", but not on the basis of the 11-year historical record of my water usage. They just plucked numbers from the clear blue sky. When the installer took a reading from the MXU immediately upon completing the installation, it read 1180. When I looked at my bills, I found a figure like 1250. I don't know if that is hundreds of cubic feet, or some other measure, but in any case, I was right. The "estimates" were wildly high, and bore no relation to my historical usage. Despite that actual meter reading, the Water Department was still sending me "estimated" bills.
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Perhaps they thought my meter was broken because I was using very little water for several months, because last winter, when we had one nite that the temperature went down to about 0 degrees, both the hot- and cold-water pipes to the kitchen burst. (I think my kitchen was once a porch, because the basement doesn't extend under it, so the pipes were exposed to outside air in a low space under the kitchen connected to but not insulated by the basement.) Until I could get those pipes fixed, I had to keep the water to the entire house turned off during most hours of most days. Much later, my friend Joe from Belleville came by and capped the two pipes deep within the basement so I could turn water on to the rest of the house full-time. (He had apprenticed to a plumber in his youth.) I watched the procedure, and tho I could probably do it myself if I had the equipment and inclination, I had neither. So for months I was using almost no water except from a bunch of empty milk jugs that I would fill every couple of days. The Water Department may have felt that the starkly subnormal deviation from my historical usage indicated a broken meter. But why would they then turn around to vastly overcompensate, and "estimate" usage starkly over my historical usage?
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Three weeks after my letter I got this slitely snotty letter back, which made it sound as tho I had done something wrong and was trying to cheat the City.

The man who came out to check my meter March 6th took another MXU reading: 1181. So I was still not using much water, because I conserve water in general, and there's only one person in my household. He told me not to pay the "estimated" bill but to wait for a bill based on the actual reading. So I didn't.
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A couple of weeks later, in late March, however, I again got an "estimated" bill; the total of these crazy estimates was up to $697.26(!); and a note on the bill ominously said my service could be cut off without futher notice.
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So I foned the meter department, which said that I had to speak to the billing department, where an unpleasant woman with a thick West Indian or African accent said there is a note on the account to follow up in April on the two actual MXU readings, and if I didn't want to risk having my water turned off, I should pay the nearly $700! When I protested that I cannot and will not pay fabricated bills, she hung up on me. And that is one of the people whose jobs I and other people active in the anti-MUA movement are trying to save.
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Last Friday, April 27th, I finally got a corrected bill, which showed an actual reading of 1182, and a credit of $376.53.

Today, a mere three days later, a notice was placed on my porch saying that my water will be shut off in 3 days if I don't contact the Department to arrange to pay my bill! So now I have to see if they will accept a payment arrangement, since I can't afford to pay $330.40 for the entire period when the bill was in dispute.

Let me point out a couple of errors in that apparently professionally printed notice. First, "($500.00)" is NOT a repeat of "five", and "offence" is an offensive BRITISH spelling.

If your water/sewer bill — and why is the "Passaic Valley" (sewage treatment?) portion always higher than the water portion? — has been oddly higher than historically, you too might want to check for crazy "estimates" and fite for a corrected bill based on actual readings.

Dinosaur Day at NuMu, Sunday

The Newark Museum has one of its big special events tomorrow, in which an animated full-scale mechanized Tyrannosaurus Rex, 15 feet tall, is the centerpiece of a bunch of special programs oriented mainly to children. But I'd like to see the T. Rex too, to visualize it better than books or movies ever could.

I don't imagine NuMu would mind my using the graffic they sent out in email to help publicize this event.

I'll be getting in free, since I am a member. But I'd get in free anyway because I am a resident of Newark, and since the City provides significant funding to the Museum, the Museum lets in free all bona-fide residents of Newark. This is a benefit of living in Newark that all too few residents take advantage of.
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"Field Station: Dinosaurs" has a website, but links from the Home page to some subpages are not working. I don't know why, but the company needs to check all links from all pages and fix errors. On one of the pages that did work, I found this basic information:

Slated to open in May 2012, "Field Station: Dinosaurs" will be an outdoor science exhibition where visitors will be able to roam the grounds among 31 life-size robotic dinosaurs. The venue — fittingly complete with a 150 million-year-old rock formation — will also offer a petting zoo and educational programs about dinosaurs as well as the environment. Given its focus on the outdoors, the 24-acre park will naturally close during the winter months, from Thanksgiving on.

There is also a video that shows at least an early version of the T. Rex. The 'arms' look too small, and there is someone inside it to do the walking, because balancing the "puppet" on the dinosaur-shaped legs may have proved too difficult a technological task. But who knows? Maybe they've got those legs working by now. Here is a screen capture of part of that video.

The Field Station is next to Laurel Hill Park, a Hudson County Park around the rock outcrop in the Meadows alongside the Turnpike that is marked by Greek Letter Fraternity graffiti. This is the same hill that served as inspiration for the Prudential's Rock of Gibraltar logo. It was almost erased by stupid quarriers making gravel from its ancient rock, but a much-reduced remnant has been preserved. Next month, it becomes home to wandering animatronic dinosaurs.
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New Flite from EWR. Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer was on David Letterman's show Wednesday nite.

Schweitzer was in New York to promote the new direct flight between Newark, N.J., and Bozeman. United Airlines is offering the flight, beginning in June. United will offer a weekly flight every Saturday out of Newark Liberty International Airport to Bozeman Yellowstone International Airport from June 9 through Sept. 1.

Dave said, later in the show, "There are no return flites." Hm.
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Letterman has a ranch somewhere in Montana, and the Governor (a Democrat) has apparently been there, because he commented that Letterman's ranch is nicer than his theater. I've been to Montana twice, but not to Bozeman. Close, tho. I drove into Montana from Idaho at dawn, and was so struck by how beautiful it was that I actually sang "America the Beautiful" in the car. There were purple mountains ahead, but grasslands rather than "fruited plains" on both sides of the highway before I reached the mountains. I've been to the Custer National Cemetery in the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, to Glacier National Park, and to Billings, twice. Beautiful state, but, in winter, cold as a witch's, um, heart. (Lest anyone complain that "witch" should refer to practitioners of 'wicca', let me simply say, no it does not. Wiccans CHOSE to associate themselves with a pre-existing term — by centuries — for evil sorcerors, so cannot be heard to complain about the word "witch" being misused — because THEY are the ones misusing it.)

Wisteria Time in Newark

I have mentioned that if I were living in a rural area or small town, rather than a semi-suburban area of a major central city, I might call my house "Wisteria Cottage" — and even have the Post Office deliver to that address — because of all the wisteria vines and blossoms I have in the yards on all four sides of my house, and even growing up parts of the house itself. I have tried to control the vines, but if my house were in a more rural setting, I might let them cover much of my house and property, because for two weeks or more each spring, they produce masses of lavender flower clusters, each about a foot long. (By the way, Wikipedia's article about this glorious vine says the name is "also spelled Wistaria or Wysteria". We have put up with spelling insanity for centuries. It's time to put an end to this chaos, which produces a higher rate of functional illiteracy in English-speaking countries than in countries whose languages are spelled sensibly. Can we really afford to throw away vast numbers of educational hours on teaching insane inconsistencies in spelling?) I think the two tall vines up the north side of my house shown above twined around fone lines or coaxial cables. Wisteria doesn't have sucker-like roots to attach to brick or siding, as English ivy and Virginia creeper do. (Those other vines have climbed some trees in my yard, and parts of my house and fences. I also have to control vining poison ivy, except perhaps at my property line.)

Some wisteria has even infiltrated the large, horizontally spreading yew ("my yew", I sometimes say in a goofy Southern accent), which makes for a handsome contrast. I keep ripping out the yearly intrusions of wisteria into my yew, but have to think about that now. Here, you can see two little clumps of wisteria from above. And here you see one from the side. I've got wisteria rising high. But I've also got wisteria blossoms just inches off the ground. Here and in the next two fotos, the vine produces flowers in a largely useless side yard only about five feet wide. I also have some hostas and a daffodil that were planted in that little space by the prior owners of my house. In this next foto, the hostas peek out from the right. A very large branch that I hadn't known had fallen until I looked for wisteria blooms in that side yard (but which may have fallen in our pre-Halloween snowstorm), just fit(ted) within that yard, but I later dragged it down the neighbors' driveway, across my frontage, and up my driveway to a corner of my yard where it would fit, until I saw it up for wood for the barbecue this summer. It is at least 15' long, and maybe 20. These wisteria blooms in that slender yard are better seen by my neighbors than by me. Here, the lavender cluster is just above the neighbors' driveway, beneath a barberry bush that in autumn produces red berries for overwintering birds. Wikipedia indeed says that the berries of at least some barberry varieties are edible by people, but I wouldn't steal from the birds in cold weather. They need them much more than I do. Here, another cluster of wisteria blooms seen better by my neighbors than by me, in the back of that strip sideyard, spans from near the ground to near the roof of my kitchen. My wisteria has even spread into the yard of the neighboring four-family frame apartment house. Here, you see it beyond the empty seed pods of another flowering plant I have in profusion in my yard, rose of sharon, which produces bell-shaped, purple flowers over 3" across from about early July thru early October. I have over 100 rose of sharon saplings of varying heights growing in my back and side yards, plus one at the curb. I put out a second at the curb, but some malicious neighbors or passing kids broke its top off. I'm going to put out a replacement, in a location where neighbors parking on the street don't need that space to open their car doors. Rose of sharon can grow to over 12' tall, and bloom brilliantly in poor soil, as long as it gets plenty of lite and water. It would be an ideal curbside shrub for many of those largely useless 3-foot-wide strips between the sidewalk and street in many Newark neighborhoods, and I've got a minimum of 100 I could give, free, to people who'd like to have something flowering at their curb. You just put them where they won't block car doors swinging open, and trim back the lower branches that might intrude upon the sidewalk. My own yard is filled with flowers from March thru October, from crocuses and daffodils, to wisteria, tulips, and rose of sharon. I never had anything like that in Manhattan. So, I say again, and esp. to gay men stuck in crammed-jammed, overpriced little boxes in Manhattan, "Ollie, ollie, oxen free!" You don't have to live like that. You may have fled suburbs and small towns for the freedom to be yourself that Manhattan provides. But you may have traded away too much, and find yourself trapped in an apartment prison, with little space, lite, and fresh air. You can find a house, with yards in which to grow your own choice of greenery, flowering plants, veggies, even fruit-bearing trees, in the more suburban-like portions of Newark — cheap. Vailsburg, Forest Hill (pricier), and some other parts of Newark have the space of modest suburbs but the live-and-let-live tolerance of the big city, all within easy reach of Manhattan for commuters and people who work on the western side of the Hudson but want to be able to get to the best of Manhattan quickly at all hours of the day and nite. (See my discussion here yesterday of Newark-to-Manhattan public transportation.) If anyone would like a rooted chunk of wisteria for their own yard — free — just let me know. You can come by and I'll dig up a bit of it with rootlets. Be warned, however, as the people from 18th Avenue near Stuyvesant warned me before I took a rooted chunk of evergreen bamboo from them, that you need to take pains to prevent this from taking over more of your yard than you may have intended. My bamboo, which started as a couple of canes about 4 feet high, now fills most of a fenced-in area far beyond the confined space I intended to fill, and is at least 15 feet tall. I can give you some rooted evergreen bamboo too, if you like. It's of the type you may have seen along park drive in Branch Brook Park near the Adubato Sports Complex. Some leaves turn partly lite-brown over the winter, but the bulk of the plant, canes and leaves alike, stays green even in the coldest weather. Wisteria, however, is not evergreen. I do have a lot of evergreens in the four yards all around my house, tho: boxwood, yew, spruce, bamboo, azaleas, rhododendrons, and English ivy both spreading on the ground and climbing up the trunks and major side limbs of trees. So there is always greenery outside my windows, if a duller and darker green in mid-winter than is most cheerful. Even dull green foliage outside my windows is a big change from my 35 winters in Manhattan apartments on low floors, with their bleak, meager views mid-winter. And, once you move to your own house in Newark, if you'd like some wisteria, rose of sharon, evergreen bamboo, and/or English ivy, for your yards, I can help you out — free.

Newark-Manhattan Public Transit

I got an email last Thursday thru my TourismNewark.org website that caused me to do a little research that I can now share with readers.

Hello I will be visiting Newark the first week of May from Vancouver Canada. Can you recommend the best way for a single person to travel from Newark to Manhattan. Thank you.

I replied:

There are trains that go to Downtown Manhattan and separate trains that go to Midtown Manhattan, all from Newark Penn Station, which is also where the train from Newark Airport goes. New Jersey Transit trains (and Amtrak trains) go to NY Penn Station (Midtown), 33rd Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, about 22 1/2 hours a day, from 4:54am to 2:10am, for $5 per trip.

PATH trains (Port Authority Trans-Hudson) go from Newark Penn Station to 33rd Street and Avenue of the Americas ("Sixth Avenue", in Midtown) and 24 hours a day [transfer at the 33rd Street Station in Jersey City]. PATH's Downtown trains go to the World Trade Center station, which was under the WTC Twin Towers that were destroyed on 9/11 and is near 1 World Trade Center, still under construction. Trains to both destinations cost $2 per trip at most, with a discount for a card for multiple trips. There is also a bus (the #108) from a ground-level terminal at Newark Penn Station that goes to the Port Authority Bus Terminal, 41st Street and Eighth Avenue in Manhattan about 19 hours a day, for $5.50 per trip.

All these trips take around a half hour (less to Downtown Manhattan by the PATH in daytime, weekdays). Bus trips are subject to substantial delays at the bottleneck of the Lincoln Tunnel, depending on traffic.
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PATH is an interstate SUBWAY system, whose seats are molded fiberglass/plastic in subway-style arrangement, along the sides of the car's long axis. NJTransit trains are commuter-train style, with padded seats across the lengthwise axis.
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As you can see, it is very easy to get between Newark and Manhattan at almost all hours of the day and nite (weekend service is less frequent, and PATH trains go via Hoboken [weekends and overnite weekdays], which makes the trip somewhat longer; be sure not to get out at the Hoboken stop, unless, of course, you want to see Hoboken, Frank Sinatra's hometown).

Cordially, L. Craig Schoonmaker, TourismNewark.org and author of the "NewarkUSA" fotoblog

Tourists are not the only people who don't realize how easy it is to get between Newark and NY. People in Manhattan who would like to move elsewhere, from which they might commute to a job they retain in Manhattan, but have thought of Newark as too far away in distance and time, may not appreciate how easy it would be to live in Newark but work in Manhattan. There are parts of the Outer Boros that are harder to commute from than Newark.
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Unfortunately, Microsoft is closing its free Microsoft Office Live Small Business websites at the end of this month, so I have to move my Tourism Newark website elsewhere. This is complicated by the fact that I registered the domain name "TourismNewark.org" thru MS Office Live, so I have to find out how to redirect that domain name to a new webhost. I also don't know if I can find a free slideshow service to display the 50 fotos or so that are presently on the Home page of the TourismNewark.org website, because Slide.com has ceased operations. It was functioning fine until bought by Google for $228 million in August 2010, but for reasons beyond my ken, Google announced a year later that it was closing it down, and Google did indeed shut it down on March 6th of this year — despite having spent all that money to buy it. Some people have more dollars than sense.
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This is the third time I will have been seriously adversely affected by major corporations' withdrawing services. The first was when AOL — which I was paying for at the time — closed all its subscribers' online-storage spaces, which removed hundreds and hundreds of fotos from the early years of this blog. Then Slide.com shut down, so some slideshows I had put into this blog vanished. And now Microsoft is forcing me to move Tourism Newark elsewhere. Let's just hope Google doesn't shut down its Picasa online-foto-album service too, or another 8,000 fotos will disappear from this blog.

Azaleas

My azaleas are abloom. I'm very keen on perennials, and esp. evergreens. So I made sure that I put in a number of azalea and rhododendron (evergreen) shrubs within the first couple of years of moving to my own house after leaving apartments in Manhattan behind.

Not all of the azaleas, or rhododendrons, that I planted survived, but almost all did. I didn't always know in advance what color flowers they would produce, but I figured a rigid white-pink-red repeated order would seem contrived and arbitrary, so didn't care what color popped up next to what other color. As it turned out, I don't have any white azaleas, only pink and red.

I'm not really a fan of white blossoms unless there is stark contrast with surrounding flowers or foliage. Happily, part of my yard is covered in dark-green English ivy, which provides a dramatic backdrop to azalea and other blooms.

I have to trim back the ivy in some locations, because it is a powerful competitor for lite, water, and nutrients. Still, it does make for contrast that brings out the best in foreground flowers.

Late last spring, I saw a special offer on fairly large azaleas, two for one, in the East Orange ShopRite, and bought two of the last on offer. I put them into the ground and forgot about them (what Daniel Patrick Moynihan called "benign neglect", in regard to social policy). All too often, gardeners worry too much about their plants, and over-tend them, which can cause harm. It takes a while for plants to root and produce blooms or edibles. Fussing won't speed the process one bit. Too much neglect, however, can hurt.

I failed to make adequate note of the fact that we had an extended period of low precipitation and high temperatures last spring, and didn't think to water the two newly planted azaleas until I was out looking around the yard one day and saw the one farther north, badly wilted. I then watered both until normal rains returned, but it was too late for the more northerly one.

The other survived, but part of it died back. Above, you see it overarched by wisteria this season.

The lyter-colored, pink, azaleas seem to bloom sooner than the darker, red. I have noted the same phenomenon with tulips of lyter color as against darker. I don't know why that should be, only that it is what I have observed. That is science, when you observe something before you understand it.

I was concerned that another very dry and unusually warm spring might kill other azaleas or perennials, so was very pleased when we had substantial rain this weekend.

I was worried that the very heavy rains anticipated for Sunday might arrive too late, and I'd have to spend money I can't afford on hosing down specimen plants. But Friday nite's rain lifted that particular oppression off me, and Sunday's extended hours of rain let me relax completely.

As I was taking closeup pictures, a bumblebee arrived to collect nectar from the azalea I was fotograffing, and I got a picture of it, slitely fuzzy for movement.

Tho I permit my azaleas to grow to their natural extent and shape, a neighbor two doors down has trimmed two large azaleas flanking the stairway from the sidewalk, in a formal, squared shape. It would not have occurred to me to do that with my azaleas, but it looks good in that location.

If you are living in an apartment, bereft of the exuberant colors and forms of spring and summer flowers, you might consider buying a house in one of the semi-suburban areas of Newark, such as my leafy Vailsburg. Mortgages may be hard to get, but the rates are great, and there are many, many properties available cheap, and not just foreclosed houses, because the huge supply of foreclosed properties has driven down prices nearby. If you don't know how to begin the process of looking for a house and yard of your own, in which you can plant your own spring-flowering bulbs, perennial shrubs, evergreens, fruits, and veggies, I can help. I am a licensed real-estate salesperson, tho I have not yet actively worked in the industry. I do, however, have a referral arrangement with a broker familiar with Newark real-estate, and he can act as buyer's agent to steer you thru the process of finding a house, financing it, buying it, insuring it, and everything else involved in what can be a daunting process in which you dare not make a wrong move. (And if you buy thru my broker, I get a cut of the commission — which is all to the good.)

NIMBY Nonsense?

Long post, some 3,000 words, with 14 fotos. The changes Google has made to Blogger make it impossible for me to get the line-spacing right. I put in a line space; Blogger takes it out. I take out a line space in one place, Blogger puts in one, or FIVE line spaces elsewhere. I can revise this 20 times and it will still not be right, because Blogger undoes the spacing corrections I make. If vertical spacing is wrong, blame Google, not me.

I got an email alert today for action to stop a proposed generating station in eastern Newark to be powered by burning natural gas.

Subject: Re: Will Mayor Booker rescue us from this smoke?
[The hearing is] postponed until April 30th[.] 

Kim Gaddy,
Environmental Justice Organizer

Does anyone consider the cumulative effect of this new air pollution on top of what Newark has already been dumped into the lungs of our children? Answer NO!
If you expect to live a healthy life in Newark or if the only thing that you care about is value of your property

COME OUT TO THE PLANNING BOARD HEARING on MONDAY and BRING YOUR NEIGHBORS AND FRIENDS!!!

[signed] Bill Chappel

What alternatives do we realistically have in supplying the electrical power our area needs? PSE&G has various solar-energy programs you may know something about. The most noticeable is the "pole-attached solar project". I show some pictures today of some of those panels, and similar panels at some Newark Public Schools.

[The City] will be hearing an application from the Hess Corporation to build one of the largest natural gas power plants in the state
over 655 megawatts,
a 250 foot stack towering into the sky visible from our waterfront and beyond
emitting more than 1.7 million pounds/year of air pollutants
over 2 million TONS of CO2.
natural gas going to this plant derived from fracking in the region
While they claim net benefits to the region because they are cleaner than coal — Newark is already an environmental justice community that bears the brunt of so many polluting sources, and this facility promises to be another addition to an already burdened community without ANY guarantees about net benefits. The facility won't even bring jobs — only 26 full time employees at a facility that will rake in millions in profit every year and will spend close to a billion to build. The Newark Environmental Commission has voted to decline this application based on the serious environmental justice concerns related to the plant and the incomplete application which HESS has submitted before the Commission (Incomplete Environmental Impact Statement, no Emergency Preparedness Plan in case of explosions or accidents or Health Impacts Assessment, No Guarantee in writing about the net offsets from Coal, No offsets for toxic particulate matter, etc.) 

COME OUT TO THE PLANNING BOARD HEARING on MONDAY and BRING YOUR NEIGHBORS AND FRIENDS!!!

Ana I. Baptista, Ph.D.
Environmental & Planning Projects Director
Ironbound Community Corp
317 Elm Street
Newark, NJ 07105
973-817-7013 x217

Sorry, but I wholly disagree with this NIMBY crap. Particulates from natural gas? Trivial nonsense. Besides, raindrops form around such particles, as makes likely more rain that we need. Fracking? The one thing, a natural-gas-powered generating station, has NO necessary connection to the other, fracking (a stupid and hazardous technology that is NOT necessary to produce natural gas). Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant, but a natural substance that is PLANT FOOD. It is what forests and our gardens, lawns, and ornamental trees use to create biomass and liberate oxygen. The bigger the tree and more plant mass there is, the more genuine pollutants they can remove from the atmosphere.

Solar panels over a parking lot at the Camden Street School. Similar panels could blanket parking lots all over the state, at supermarkets, malls, train stations, etc., providing much-needed shade in hot weather and reducing the "heat island" phenomenon in cities, like Newark, and thus reducing demand for air-conditioning, a major energy drain and expense in NJ summers.

Prevailing winds in this area are from west to east, so would carry off these emissions high above our heads into the vastness of the Atlantic Ocean, where the carbon dioxide would supply food for the algae and other phytoplankton that sustain the life of the sea. There is more than a little dopy, antiscientific drivel in the hysterical opposition to this project, and I won't sign onto it. I wholly agree with Bill Chappel's agitation in the Newark Water Group to preserve our water system. But I wholly disagree on this electric generating station. Allies don't have to agree on everything to work together on the things they do agree on.

Let us talk about the supposed 'pollution' from burning natural gas. Here's what the Federal Environmental Protection Agency's website has to say. I make a couple of comments in italics within brackets.

the burning of natural gas produces nitrogen oxides and carbon dioxide, but in lower quantities than burning coal or oil. Methane, a primary component of natural gas and a greenhouse gas, can also be emitted into the air when natural gas is not burned completely [but it would be burned completely in a modern, billion-dollar facility!]. Similarly, methane can be emitted as the result of leaks and losses during transportation [more trivia, since almost no such leaks occur]. Emissions of sulfur dioxide and mercury compounds from burning natural gas are negligible.

The average emissions rates in the United States from natural gas-fired generation are: 1135 lbs/MWh of carbon dioxide, 0.1 lbs/MWh of sulfur dioxide, and 1.7 lbs/MWh of nitrogen oxides.1 Compared to the average air emissions from coal-fired generation, natural gas produces half as much carbon dioxide, less than a third as much nitrogen oxides, and one percent as much sulfur oxides at the power plant. In addition, the process of extraction, treatment, and transport of the natural gas to the power plant generates additional emissions.

Solar collectors on Science Park High School in the Central Ward, on a rainy day, of which Newark has many.

The last sentence is meaningless, because the "extraction, treatment, and transport" of any fossil fuel will produce "additional emissions". The meaningful statements from the U.S. EPA are "the burning of natural gas produces nitrogen oxides and carbon dioxide, but in lower quantities than burning coal or oil" and "Compared to the average air emissions from coal-fired generation, natural gas produces half as much carbon dioxide, less than a third as much nitrogen oxides, and one percent as much sulfur oxides at the power plant."



Would solar power, be it in the form of panels that convert sunshine directly into electricity or first into heat that is then turned into electricity, or in the form of winds produced by differential heating of the atmosfere by the sun, or hydropower from water lifted as vapor by the sun, be cleaner? Sure, once the solar arrays, windmills, and hydro generating stations are installed, tho there would be emissions in the production, transport, and installation of any such facilities — or anything else you create to generate electricity. NJ is not Arizona, so electric generation by solar panels is not an ideal fit. We do have a wide open ocean right nearby for windmills and wave generators, but some NIMBY people ("Not In My BackYard!") don't want windmills in their ocean views, so we'd have to put them beyond the horizon, which raises costs, first in building them, then in bringing the energy ashore. And windmills entail risks to migrating birds, so we'd have to be very sure of migration patterns. Wave generators might seem a good idea, but they would have to be very unobtrusive and out of sight of beachgoers in order not to hurt our enormously important tourism industry.

Why aren't there solar collectors on every part of the roof?

We don't have infinite choices, and a natural-gas-fired power plant seems a very good fit for easternmost Newark, our own Rub' al Khali ("Empty Quarter"), where NOBODY LIVES. There aren't even streets in much of the former industrial area of eastern Newark, as shown by this screenprint from the Official City Map.



Hess might not hire many people to run that plant, but it would pay taxes on the improved property it occupies. From what I know now, I cannot sign on to the opposition of this worthy project. Modern life requires electricity, which means that we have to generate electricity somehow, and somewhere. We can't build dams for hydropower anymore because of NIMBY agitators in rural areas, even where there are no migratory fish species at risk. We can't build coal-fired generation stations. NJ is gray, cold, and rainy a substantial part of the year. Is our electricity just supposed to drop into our houses from the sky?

Another way to harness the sun for electrical generation is thru hydropower. The sun evaporates water from the seas, lakes, and land, and lifts it high into the sky, from which it falls into rivers in elevated locations. If we intercept that flow before it reaches the ocean, we can use it to turn turbines to generate electricity. In this foto, we see the beauty and power of the sun at the Great Falls of the Passaic River, in Paterson (only 15 miles from Newark), which was the first place in the Americas to harness hydropower for industry. Other fotos today show the portion of the Falls that has been left to flow scenically apart from the generators. Clearly, we don't have to destroy scenic rivers to harness hydropower.

Well, yes, some of it can just drop from the sky via solar panels, or in the form of rainwater harnessed by hydroelectric generators. Tax-code economics are the main reason we don't have solar collectors on almost every house, office building, store, and mall, and over myriad parking lots, streets and major highways. But solar power has certain obvious disadvantages, including one very large problem called "nite", which in half the year is half the day or more.



I discussed the economics of fossil fuels as against solar, tidal, and geothermal energy in my political blog on April 16th. Here is the relevant passage:

Environment New Jersey sent email today to solicit my signature on an online petition demanding that Governor Christie stop raiding clean-energy funds to balance the State budget. Naturally, I not only signed that petition but also personalized it with these comments

Fossil fuels are for economic-policy fossils, people living in the past. Solar, tidal, and geothermal energy are the future. You must lead NJ into the future, not the past. And you don't do that by stealing from future generations — today's children and grandchildren — to fund the present. Solar includes wind, hydro, and wave generators, as well as biomass conversions thru ethanol production and even the burning of wood and agricultural wastes. These are endlessly sustainable and ultimately very inexpensive sources of energy for New Jersey. Why would you steal from our future?

The claim is made by the defenders of fossil fuels that alternative, "green" energy is not economically competitive. This is an outrageous lie. The only way fossil fuel can even begin to compete with FREE energy from the sun, tides, and the Earth's internal heat is by deducting all the costs of exploration, extraction, refining, and distribution as business expenses under the tax code. If NONE of those expenses were tax deductible, a gallon of gas might cost — oh, I don't know, since no one seems to have done this calculation — $20 a gallon.

Contrast that tax treatment with green energy. If a homeowner installs a solar water-heating array, electric-generating array, or backyard or rooftop windmill(s), s/he must come up with the entire expense of purchase and installation, often borrowing money from a bank, which demands not just repayment of the entire principal amount but also interest. A tax credit might be available to cover PART, but not ALL of the cost, as is the case with every gallon of gasoline. In future years, the homeowner might be able to take some depreciation on that equipment. Might. S/he might also be able to deduct the interest paid to the bank. Might. That is, if the financing were done by a second mortgage, or mortgage modification that merged that cost into the property's first mortgage, the interest would be deductible for Federal income-tax purposes. I'm not sure that all state taxing authorities also permit such a deduction.
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If green-energy equipment is not financed thru a mortgage, is any portion of the equipment purchase, installation, or loan repayment tax-deductible? I don't know. Nor does almost anyone else out there in the general population of homeowners who would like to install solar or wind equipment but believes the costs are prohibitive.
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What I as a homeowner do know is that I cannot afford to install any form of green energy generator on my house or in my yard, so I cannot contribute to the solution of our energy and pollution woes. But fossil-fuel companies can charge off every cost of producing fossil energy against their taxes. Which means that the taxpayer is SUBSIDIZING fossil fuel, but NOT subsidizing renewable energy. And THAT is why we don't have solar collectors and small windmills on every appropriately situated house in the Nation. So, which form of energy is it that is nonviable without subsidy?

My house is located on a north-south street, and my main roof slopes east and west, not north and south (solar panels are usually connected to a south-facing, sloping roof). So do those of most of my neighbors. Nobody ever heard of solar panels in 1930 when my house was built, and there are scores of millions of houses in this country comparably configured as would make attaching solar collectors for either hot water or electric generation difficult and ugly. Has anything changed in the way houses are designed and oriented to the sun? I rather doubt it. If we are serious about green energy, one thing we must do is make the orientation of house roofs to the sun a major consideration for architects, public-policy experts, planning boards, and writers of building codes, as well as make consumers aware that this is something they should keep in mind when looking for a pre-existing house or planning to build their own.



As regards overcoming nite with solar power, there are of course batteries for electricity, and passive structures like exposed stone and water tanks in 'green' homes that absorb sunlite all day long and release it as heat for hours after the sun has set. Molten-salt solar generators seem highly advisable, but I am not certain that any of these seemingly brilliant systems has actually been built. NJ is, alas, not a prime geograffic site for such a generator.

This statue of Alexander Hamilton should remind us that New Jersey has always been an innovator in energy, not just in the water-powered mills of Paterson but also in the electrical systems of Thomas Edison, the "Wizard of Menlo Park", whose first laboratory and workshop was in Newark.

Given the present limitations on how many sources of energy, from how many technologies, can be used to supply North Jersey's electrical needs, a natural-gas generating station in Newark seems a very good deal. Hess was founded in NJ, and some of its operations are still headquartered in NJ. If Hess is going to build a natural-gas-fired electric generation plant anywhere in NJ, and pay taxes to any NJ municipality, I'd like to see it build in a presently vacant area in easternmost Newark, and pay taxes to Newark's treasury.