I went to the Woods Cross City Truth in taxation meeting Aug. 14 and it was great that we citizens were able to ask questions of the Mayor and Council. Not enough Woods Cross citizens showed up but that is always the case – we expect the Mayor/Council to always operate in our best interest without us making hardly any effort ourselves.

I was pleased to learn that WX has joined a class action suit against the corporations for the harm that TCE, PCE, volatile dry cleaning solvents that ruined our four city wells. This is a step in the right direction as we all pay for the EPA cleanup of this in our city. The dry cleaning solvents are some of the “forever chemicals” and it will be 50 years before they are out of our groundwater.

Before WX put activated carbon filters on our drinking water the hope that they reiterated was that “dilution was the solution” – in other words diluting the carcinogens with cleaner water would reduce the dose that we were bathing, cooking and drinking. But research has shown that that was not the case for the unborn and the newborns. The dry cleaning solvents concentrate in fat, therefore they concentrate in breast milk. The nursing babies were getting bigger doses than adults.

The dry cleaning solvents cause cancer, miscarriages and Parkinson’s to name a few so we pay about $9 a month more on our water bill to filter it out. And it is likely that the class action suit will take a long time to get through our legal system. The chemical corporations and Wall Street have made their money from their lack of ethics and will use that money to see that we taxpayers are never compensated for their attack on our health.

Capitalism is not perfect as our institutions, our governments and citizens are not perfect. Although I know regulation is not popular with Republicans ours is a case where regulation and enforcement could have kept this out of our water and helped WX citizens.