The Clean Rivers Campaign needs your help this Wednesday the 9th at at 5pm at the IBEW Hall on Hot Metal Street in the South Side.

Do you want a say in the largest infrastructure project this area has ever seen?

Do want to create GREEN, family-sustaining jobs?

The Clean Rivers Campaign needs your help this Wednesday the 9^th at at 5pm at the IBEW Hall on Hot Metal Street in the Southside.

 

The campaign is organizing citizens into our project but we need to show larger community interest in the issue at this event this Wednesday.

 

We plan to have 100 people at press event at 5pm in the hall (since rain is predicted that day.) Folloing the press event starting at 6:00pm is an ALCOSAN Town Hall meeting where they will lay out the plan they have to fix the sewers.

The KEY POINTS of this issue:

1-      Federal law and Federal court enforcement requires us to fix the sewers that put raw sewage into our rivers;

2-      ALCOSAN has spent years developing a plan for this fix that the clean rivers campaign believes creates the least number of jobs (both construction and permanent maintenance) and does nothing to make our communities more livable. They want to dig deep tunnels to store the sewage when stormwater comes and treat it in expanded facilities.

3-      The plan that ALCOSAN has is not affordable by the standards set by the Federal EPA. The tunnels would cost at least $4 billion and the EPA says we can afford about $2 billion. In earlier meetings (tho not in the series of Town Hall meetings already held in the last 2 weeks) ALCOSAN has said this means their plan will be rejected in January 2013 when it is submitted and that years more will be required to renegotiate the deal with the EPA.

4-      At our press conference Wednesday the 9^th at 5pm the Clean Rivers Campaign will announce that we want to help ALCOSAN get a new deal with the EPA that reduces the sewer overflows significantly but also prioritizes getting the most number of construction and permanent maintenance jobs as well as the using the most green infrastructure as we can to both reduce the amount of stormwater that goes into the sewers as well as significantly improving the communities with trees, permeable parking lots and roads, green roofs and things that have proven to raise property values and bring business districts back to life.

 

We believe that unless the public sees us getting the most jobs and community improvements, there will be an outraged negative reaction to this whole deal that will make moving forward on fixing the sewers impossible.